Sarukhan, Bey of Magnesia

"Saruhan" redirects here. For the region in Turkey formerly an Ottoman sanjak, see Manisa Province.

Sarukhan (1300/01–1345/46) was a Turkish Bey of Magnesia (present-day Manisa, Turkey).^[1]

Silver gigliato of Sarukhan Beg bin Alpagi, 1313-1348, ruler of Lydia, western Turkey. This is an imitation of a coin of Robert I of Anjou, king of Naples (1309-1343).

Sarukhan was a Turkish Bey who is remembered for his conquests in the western Anatolian Peninsula. In 1313, he occupied Thyatira (present-day Akhisar, Manisa Province), and then left his name "Saruhan" to the region he had occupied, becoming an independent ruler and transmitting the region to his descendants.^[2]

At one point in 1336, Sarukhan formed an alliance with the Byzantine Emperor Andronikos III Palaiologos, and supported him militarily in two sieges against the Genoese, in Mytilene and Phocaea.^[3] In 1341 however he attacked Constantinople with a fleet, but was repulsed around the Gallipoli peninsula by a Byzantine fleet in 1341.^[3]

Notes

1. Clifford Edmund Bosworth, The new Islamic dynasties: a chronological and genealogical manual (Edinburgh: University Press, 2004), p.220
2. A History of the Ottoman Empire to 1730, edited by M.A. Cook (Cambridge: University Press, 1976), p.16
3. Samuel Jacob, History of the Ottoman Empire, (London, 1854), p.308