Kayqubad I

Kayqubad I took the Seljuq throne in 1220 and spent seventeen years redrawing the map. He carved territory from the Mengujek Beylik and the Ayyubids, pushed the sultanate to the Mediterranean by seizing the port of Kalon Oros, and renamed it Ala'iyya after himself. His court became a magnet for architects and artists; the buildings commissioned under his rule still stand. By his death in 1237, Seljuq power in Anatolia had peaked. When the Mongols tore through a decade later, survivors remembered Kayqubad's years as the last good ones, and the warlords who came after scrambled to invent bloodli…