Kayseri

For two centuries after the Mongols, Kayseri lay on the fault line between the Turkish states of Anatolia and changed hands again and again. When Ilkhanid rule collapsed it became the second city, after Sivas, of the Eretnid beylik; it then fell to Kadi Burhan al-Din, and passed to the Ottomans around 1398, only to be lost after Bayezid I's defeat at Ankara in 1402. Karamanids and Dulkadirids fought over it until the Ottomans returned in 1474, and even then the Mamluks laid siege to it and Shah Ismail of Persia marched in in 1508 before withdrawing. Only after Selim I annexed it for good in 1515 did the old frontier city settle into three centuries of quiet as the seat of one of the seven sanjaks of the Ottoman province of Karaman.