Islamic Fortifications and Palaces: A Historical Architectural Journey

Posted on May 22, 2025 in History

The Evolution of Islamic Military and Urban Architecture

A formalized system of defense was established in the eighth century when the frontiers of the Muslim world became established. From that period to the time of the Ottomans, every Caliph seems to have been involved in fortifying and garrisoning their towns.

Whether on the Central Asian frontier or in Spain, in new frontier areas or traditional ones, it is reasonable to assume that early Muslims simply followed older, prevailing types of military architecture.

Key Components of Islamic Defensive Architecture

Cities like Diyarbakir (the ancient Amida on the upper Euphrates) and Merv in Khurasan allow us to identify three consistent components of Islamic military and defensive architecture early in Islamic history:

Walls and Towers
Gates
Citadels

Initially, these features were almost exclusively characteristic of frontier areas and only appeared in the center of the empire in rare instances, such as Baghdad, where their importance was symbolic rather than practical. However, from the late 9th or 10th century onwards, as central authority weakened and political power was taken over by numerous local dynasties frequently fighting with each other, military architecture spread to almost every urban center. In many ways, it established itself as a consistent component of Islamic cities.

After the 10th century, hardly a town of any significance existed without fortified walls, mighty towers, and elaborate gates. From a purely architectural point of view, not much can be said about these walls and towers. Mostly, they are massive constructions built in materials characteristic of the region in which they are found: unbaked brick or packed earth in eastern Iran, stone in Syria and Palestine, and various mixtures of brick and stone in Spain.

Walls and Towers: Design and Function

Round, square, or elongated towers served as buttresses, lodgings, arsenals, or whatever other military purpose may have been required.
Crenellations, walkways, machicolations, and occasionally, small protective cupolas at key intersections of walls were probably major elements in the construction of most of these walls and towers.
There are instances of major changes in wall construction, such as the switch from brick to stone in 11th-century Egypt or the bewildering masonry types found on the walls of Jerusalem.

Islamic City Gates: Types and Significance

Traces of two types of gates are found:

The straight gate, which was primarily a passageway even when provided with massive doors.
The bent entrance, which has obvious defensive uses (e.g., the Gate of Justice in the Alhambra has a double bent gate).

Both types of gates have a long pre-Islamic history. Although the bent gate became more common in obviously military architecture and in the western parts of the Muslim world, more interesting aspects of gates are their construction, their decoration, and the names given to them.

Most of the names of the gates are topographical, involving either the local characteristics of a city or its suburbs. Many cities had a bab al-sirr, literally meaning “a secret gate,” by which an army could easily leave or enter a city.

A consistent name for gates is the “Gate of the Lion.” Indeed, on city gates in Derbend in the Caucasus or in Hamdan in Iran, ancient sculptures of lions seem to have been reused.

Citadels: Fortified Cores of Islamic Cities

A citadel is the core fortified area of a town or city – a fortress typically on high ground above a city, that commands a city and is used in the control of the inhabitants and in defense during attack or siege.

A more original development of Islamic military architecture is the citadel. Almost every ancient Islamic urban center was dominated by its citadel, a “city within a city.”

Citadels were not a new development, as they were found in ancient Assyrian cities like Khorsabad. Probably from that time onwards, they became the typical landmark of most Near Eastern cities. Arabs took over existing citadels in northeastern Iran because citadels were more common there in pre-Islamic times than elsewhere in the Middle East.

Evolution and Function of Citadels

As the authority of the Caliphate declined and the Turkish military became the main ruling force in most of the Muslim world, old citadels were refurbished (e.g., in Jerusalem or Aleppo), and new ones were built (e.g., in Cairo and probably Damascus).
These took the form of a forbidding, fortified area, usually built on either side of the city’s walls, but sometimes tucked away in a commanding corner of the city or, much more rarely, situated outside the city.
Initially, citadels were strictly military, serving to accommodate alien soldiery away from the city’s population.
As local dynasties were founded, some amenities of life were introduced into citadels, as well as official reception halls, religious worship areas, and other symbols of power such as fancy inscriptions on walls and gates.
Example: The spectacular monumental inscriptions on the 15th-century citadel of Herat, and the sculptures of lions and snakes on Aleppo’s citadel.
Eventually, the citadel became the palace of local rulers or of governors appointed from elsewhere.

The Aleppo Citadel: A Prime Example

The most spectacular and best-preserved of these citadels is the one in Aleppo, located on a partly natural and partly artificial mound overlooking the whole town. A superb stone glacis emphasizes the height of the monument, which can only be reached through a handsome bridge over a moat. Inside, formal audience halls adjoin mosques, baths, living quarters, cisterns, granaries, and prisons.

There is something very haphazard about the internal arrangements of Aleppo’s citadel, possibly because of the rugged requirements of the terrain, but also because there was no set plan for citadels—nothing comparable to the formal order of Roman camps, for instance. Aleppo’s citadel grew according to the whims of individual local rulers.

Few citadels are as impressive as Aleppo’s, but most of them were located in such a fashion that both practically and symbolically they dominated the urban centers they controlled. Interior organization varied enormously.

Other Notable Citadels

The Alhambra, in addition to its celebrated palaces, was originally a whole city with houses, a mosque, baths, and other amenities normally required by an urban system.
The Cairo Citadel included several palaces and mosques.
The Citadel of the Shirvan-Shahs in Baku contained a unique open pavilion more typical of garden palaces than of defense monuments.
Other citadels, such as the Citadel of Damascus, were more exclusively military, with barracks, arsenals, granaries, jails, a small oratory, and occasionally a slightly more formal apartment or reception area.

Islamic Palaces: Royal Residences and Design

The official palaces of the great age of Islamic civilization are poorly preserved and known mostly through literary sources. Even these sources are far from easy to interpret, and information is more adequate about the terminology used for parts of the palaces than for the buildings as a whole. For example, we know of the existence of Iwan and majlis hall (reception hall) through these narrations.

The Umayyad palaces in Jordan and Syria were desert palaces, and their fortress-like appearance was derived from Roman forts built in Syria.
In Baghdad and early Merv, there was an impressive cupola over the place of the throne. In all likelihood, this domed room was preceded by a long hall and by a court in which visitors and attendants gathered.
Somewhat more precise information exists about the several large palaces of Samarra, Madinat al-Zahra’ near Cordoba, and the Fatimid palaces of Cairo.
All of them seem to have been sprawling mixtures of many separate units, ranging from very functional and specific elements, such as baths and dwellings, to formal audience halls (cruciform in Samarra, basilical in Spain), gardens, and vast areas with no concretely identifiable purpose.
In the 9th-century palaces of Samarra, there were compositional axes in the main parts of the buildings. Such axes do not appear in Cairo or Madinat al-Zahra’.

Later Palaces and Urban Planning

After the Mongol conquests, new influences came from China and Mongolia, especially in India and Iran. New rulers emphasized reviving the imperial power of the cities. Such was Soltaniyeh, developed by the Mongol ruler Oljeytu in the early 14th century. Only his spectacular mausoleum remains, along with ruins of Samarqand that Timur and his immediate successors rebuilt. Their ruins do not provide detailed plans of these cities.
Two later and better-preserved examples illustrate the continuity of the tradition, even though they are stylistically and functionally very different from each other:
- One is the Isfahan of Shah ‘Abbas, where a commercial center, royal mosque, personal sanctuary, and palace entrance meet around a huge open space, the maydan, used for ceremonies, games, parades, executions, and common urban activities.
- The other example is Fatehpur Sikri in India, created in the early 17th century by the Mughal king Akbar. Its triumphal arch, sanctuaries, houses, offices, and especially its private and public audience halls, all served to make the power of the emperor permanently visible.

The Topkapi Palace: An Ottoman Masterpiece

Not before the 15th century does enough information remain to reconstruct the life and setting of the wealthy and powerful individuals of the Muslim world. It is only from Ottoman times that the whole range of their physical setting begins to appear, exemplified by the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, still in use at the end of the 19th century.

Surrounded by high walls, entered through one major formal gate, and impressively located on a hill over the Bosphorus, it consists of a large number of pavilions, formal as well as private dwellings, reception halls, treasuries, and practical establishments such as kitchens.

It was built over the centuries, without formal compositional order but according to a subtler order of ceremonial and practical use. Almost every one of the palace’s parts must be considered as a separate monument, and some, for example, the Baghdad kiosks, are exquisite works of art. The quality and excitement of the Topkapi, just as in earlier palaces, can only be appreciated from within, from living there and participating in palace activities, not from its forceful impact on the surrounding world, like Versailles or the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.

Symbolic Monuments in Islamic Art

Official and formally impressive monuments such as the Taj Mahal, the Alhambra, African religious complexes, or the palaces of Isfahan are, in varying degrees, filled with details and meanings that reflect the taste of a patron, his unique personality and habits, or are a tribute to memories that are only remotely related to power.

A number of monuments exist whose primary purpose was for personal satisfaction or expression, although some of them also have more official and formal associations with power.

In reality, of course, no continuous culture with a long history and a complicated past can avoid expressing its collective and individual successes, or its glory. Islamic civilization was no exception, even though it did not develop the coherent system of architectural forms of power found in Imperial Rome.

The earliest remaining major monument of Islamic art, the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, was meant initially to be a visual proclamation of the new Faith in the city of Judaism and Christianity.
In Cairo, the so-called Juyushi Mosque, located on top of the cliffs overlooking the city, was built in the latter part of the 11th century to celebrate the end of a period of internal revolts and disagreements.
The exact meaning of magnificent towers such as the 12th-century minaret in Jam (Afghanistan) or the 13th-century Qutb Minar is still the subject of some uncertainty. They were not really places for the call to prayer, but stunning proclamations of the power of the Faith in the wilderness of an Afghan valley or a crowded Indian urban center.
Even the complex of the Court of the Lions in the Alhambra, and the so-called Puerto del Vino, outside the main palace complex, can be explained in part as architectural symbols of a rare Muslim victory over Christians in 1369.

Interpreting Architectural Meaning Through Inscriptions

In these examples, and in all of them, it is inscriptions that provide the clue to the building’s interpretation. Most frequently, they are Qur’anic passages, suggesting directly or symbolically the meaning of the monument; at other times, they are poems written for the occasion. It is therefore the applied decoration, rather than the architectural forms, that actually defines the building’s initial purpose.

With the passing of time, this purpose was either simply forgotten or its associations were modified. This is what happened to the Dome of the Rock, where pious meanings took over after the original motivation for the monument was gone. The Juyushi Mosque in Cairo also became a mausoleum and a sanctuary.