While some Muslim saints were born into prominent family lineages and attracted historical attention from their earliest years, Şacbân-ı Veli was not among this group and only rose to prominence in a later era. Therefore, the picture we receive of his early life and his eventual incorporation into the following of the Halveti order is among the most ill-documented parts of his life. Nevertheless, these events are not without value for the historian if they are placed within the political, religious, and social context of early tenth/sixteenth-century Asia Minor under a recently ascendant Ottoman state.

ANTECEDENTS OF ISLAMIC AND SUFI CULTURE IN KASTAMONU BEFORE THE ARRIVAL OF ŞAcBÂN-I VELİ

By the time Şacbân-ı Veli made his home in Kastamonu in the first half of the tenth/sixteenth century, the city had already been integrated into the Islamic world for several centuries. After the invasions of the Seljuks, various Turcoman tribes, and Latin Crusaders following the defeat of the Byzantines by the Seljuk ruler Alp Arslan at Manzikert in 463/1071, a Turcoman dynasty known as the Danishmendids established themselves in north-central Anatolia. They appear to have first taken control of Kastamonu in 498/1105. Although the city passed briefly back into Byzantine hands periodically over the subsequent three decades in conjunction with campaigns of various Byzantine rulers and generals into the Anatolian plateau, a nominally Muslim sovereign ruled over the city until the Ottoman absorption of the province following the conquest of Constantinople in 857/1453.