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| Blue Mosque History |
After the Peace of Zsitvatorok (1606) and the unfavorable result of the wars with Persia, Sultan Ahmed I determined to construct a big mosque in Istanbul as recompense. This would be the first imperial mosque to be built in more than forty classes. Whereas his predecessors had paid for their mosques with their state of war loot, Sultan Ahmed I had to take away the investment trusts from the Treasury obligations, because he had not gained any famed triumphs. This elicited the choler of the ulama, the Moslem legal scholars.The mosque was to be built on the situation of the palace of the Byzantine emperors, confronting the Hagia Sophia (at that time the most venerated mosque in Istanbul) and the hippodrome, a land site of not bad symbolical import. Big parts of the southern side of the mosque rest on the foundation and bank vaults of the Great Palace. Several palaces had already worked up there, most notably the palace of Sokollu Mehmet Paa, so these first had to be bought at a considerable cost and pulled down.
