Mimar Koca Sinan (1489-1588), the 'Great Architect Sinan', was appointed chief royal architect to the Ottoman court by Sultan Suleyman I in 1538. During his fifty-year career Sinan designed and constructed hundreds of buildings including mosques, palaces, harems, chapels, tombs, schools, almshouses, madrassahs, caravan serais, granaries, fountains, aqueducts and hospitals. His distinctive architectural idiom left its imprint over the terrains of a vast empire extending from the Danube to the Tigris, and he became the most celebrated of all Ottoman architects. Sinan's most influential buildings were his mosques, where his inventive experimention with light-filled centralized domes, often compared with parallel developments in Renaissance Italy, produced spaces in which the central dome appeared weightless and the interior surfaces bathed in light. His innovations reached their height in grand mosque complexes comprising schools, baths, guesthouses and hospitals, commissioned by distinguished members of the Ottoman ruling elite. In this major study, Gulru Necipoglu argues that Sinan's rich variety of mosque designs defy the chronological, single-path model of stylistic development described by most scholars. These complexes were not a result of restless, unrestrained formal experimentation: their construction, negotiated between Sinan and his patrons, were shaped by ideas of identity, memory, and decorum. The author shows how Sinan created a layered system of mosque types, reflecting social status and territorial rank. Seen from this perspective, Sinan's monuments, with their highly standardized pattern of forms, used in ingeniously varied combinations, acquire dimensions of meaning that have not been previously recognised.