The old post station of Dakibyza on the road east from Constantinople, where Mehmed II died in his camp on 3 May 1481 at the start of a campaign whose target nobody has been able to name.
Gebze lay in the corridor between Constantinople and the Anatolian interior. In the later fifteenth century that made the town and its surroundings part of the Ottoman strategic landscape around the Marmara region.
It sits on the northern shore of the Gulf of İzmit, roughly sixty-five kilometres from the city. Every army marching from the capital into Anatolia came this way, and the place has always been defined by the traffic rather than by itself.
The Greek name of the settlement was Dakibyza, and the modern name descends from it through forms such as Gekbuze. It appears in the Roman road books — the Tabula Peutingeriana and the Antonine Itinerary — as a station on the route from Chalcedon to Nicomedia, which was the imperial capital of Bithynia and later a Byzantine provincial centre of the first rank.
A mansio of that kind existed to change horses, lodge couriers and feed officials on government business. For a thousand years that was Gebze’s function: a place where people on the way to somewhere else stopped for the night.
A short way along the same shore lay Libyssa, where the exiled Hannibal took poison rather than be surrendered to Rome, traditionally in 183 BC. Ancient writers knew the place chiefly for his tomb, and Pliny mentions it for that reason rather than as a town of any size.
The tomb has never been identified on the ground. A memorial was raised near the traditional site in 1934 on the orders of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and an inscription added in 1981; it commemorates the story rather than marking a grave.
The district passed into Ottoman hands in the fourteenth century as the early sultans took Bithynia and the Byzantine towns around the Sea of Marmara. Its importance stayed logistical: the Anatolian road, the crossing points on the gulf, and the anchorages below the ridge.
The most substantial Ottoman building there is later than the Codex era — the complex of Çoban Mustafa Pasha, built in 1523 — and the medieval fabric that survives in the district is the castle of Eskihisar above the water, a Byzantine foundation later held by the Genoese.
Mehmed II died near Gebze in 1481 while on campaign. The exact purpose of the campaign is debated, but his death immediately triggered Ottoman succession politics between Bayezid II and Cem.
He had left the capital with the army and fell ill on the march, dying on 3 May 1481 at a place afterwards called Hünkar Çayırı, the Sultan’s Meadow, about twenty-five kilometres from Constantinople. He had suffered from gout for years and was in his fiftieth year. Poisoning was suspected at the time and has been argued over since, without proof either way. Where the army was going has never been established: he had landed a force at Otranto in Italy the year before, which points west, while the march itself was heading into Anatolia, which points at the Mamluks.
The death was concealed for days while messengers rode for the sultan’s sons, and the succession went to Bayezid II, who reached the capital first. His brother Cem raised an army, was beaten, and spent the rest of his life as a prisoner of European powers who found an Ottoman claimant useful.
For a place whose whole history is a road, it was a fitting end: the conqueror of Constantinople died in a tent at a staging post, on his way to a war nobody could afterwards name.