Sinan entered Ottoman service as a conscripted Christian levy, trained as a military engineer, and built bridges and siege works on campaign before Süleyman I appointed him chief court architect in 1538. He held the post for half a century, running a state architectural office that produced hundreds of mosques, madrasas, bridges, aqueducts and baths across the empire. The argument of his life was structural: how to carry a single great dome on the fewest possible supports, and how to open the walls that remain to daylight. He worked the problem in public, calling the Şehzade Mosque in Istanbul his apprentice work, the Süleymaniye his journeyman work, and the Selimiye at Edirne, finished in his eighties, his masterpiece. Ottoman mosque design after him is largely a set of variations on solutions he had already tested.
