The conclusion of the Truce of Adrianople in 1547 has brought Sultan Suleiman's struggle against the Habsburgs to a temporary halt.
Ottoman princess Mihrimah Sultana, the only daughter of Süleyman and wife of the Grand Vizier Rüstem Pasha, had awarded Turkish architect, engineer, and town planner Mimar Sinan the commission to build a mosque with medrese (college), an imaret (soup kitchen) and a sibyan mekteb (Koran school) in Üsküdar.
This Iskele Mosque (or Jetty mosque), completed in 1548, already shows several hallmarks of Sinan's mature style: a spacious, high-vaulted basement, slender minarets, single-domed baldacchino, flanked by three semi-domes ending in three exedrae and a broad double portico.
The construction of a double portico is not a first in Ottoman architecture, but it sets a trend for country mosques and mosques of viziers in particular.
After Süleyman returned from another Balkan campaign, he had received news that his heir to the throne, Shehzade Mehmet, had died at the age of twenty-two.
Not long after Sinan had started the construction of the Iskele Mosque, the sultan had in November 1543 ordered him to build a new major mosque with an adjoining complex in memory of his favorite son.
Architectural historians consider Constantinople’s Shehzade Mehmet Mosque, built between 1543 and 1548, as Sinan's first masterpiece of classical Ottoman architecture.
