Middle Ages

Panorama view of Sis (c.1855)

Panorama view of town and fortress (c.1870)

In 704, Sis was besieged by the Arabs, but relieved by the Byzantines. The Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil took it and refortified it, but it soon returned to Byzantine hands. It was rebuilt in 1186 by Leo II, king of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, one of the Rupenide dynasty who made the city the capital of the Kingdom of Lesser Armenia (from 1186 till 1375). During the Crusade the catholicate returned to Sis in 1294, and remained there 150 years.^[8]

In 1266 Sis, the capital of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, was captured and damaged by the Egyptian Mamluks led by Baibars. al-Said Barakah sent Qalawun to attack the city in 1277, but in 1375, Sis was taken and demolished by the Ramadanids, under the flag of the Mamluke Sultan of Egypt. The town never recovered its prosperity, not even when it passed into the power of the Ottomans in 1516.

Ecclesiastical history

Sis had an important place in ecclesiastical history both the Armenian Apostolic Church and as a Roman Catholic titular see. It is first mentioned in Theodoret's life of St. Simeon Stylites.

In the Middle Ages, Sis was the religious center of Christian Armenians, until the Armenians moved the seat of Catholicos back to Vagharshapat (Echmiadzin), in Armenia. Lequien (II, 899) gives the names of several bishops of Sis, before and after Gregory IX.

Even prior to the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, Sis was an episcopal see and several names of bishops and patriarchs can be found in the literature:

• Alexander, later Bishop of Jerusalem and founder of the famous library of the Holy Sepulchre in the third century
• Nicetas, present at the First Council of Nicaea in 325
• John, who lived in 451;
• Andrew in the sixth century
• George (681)
• Eustratus, Patriarch of Antioch about 868

In 1441, Sis having fallen from its high estate, the Armenian clergy proposed to remove the see, and on the refusal of the Catholicos of the day, Gregory IX, installed a rival, namely Kirakos I Virapetsi (Kirakos of Armenia) at Echmiadzin, who, as soon as Selim I had conquered Greater Armenia, became the more widely accepted of the two by the Armenian church in the Ottoman Empire.^[8]

The Catholicos of Sis (of the Holy See of Cilicia) maintained himself nevertheless, with under his jurisdiction several bishops, numerous villages and convents, and was supported in his views by the Catholic Pope up to the middle of the 19th century, when the patriarch Nerses, declaring finally for Echmiadzin, carried the government with him. In 1885, Sis tried to declare Echmiadzin schismatic, and in 1895 its clergy took it on themselves to elect a Catholicos; but the Porte annulled the election, and only allowed it six years later upon Sis renouncing its pretensions to independence. That Catholicos had the right to prepare the sacred myron (oil) and to preside over a synod, but was in fact not more than a metropolitan, and regarded by many Armenians as schismatic.^[8]

Ottoman period

In the Ottoman period, Kozan was in the sanjak of Adana, and the seat of the kaza of Kozan.^[9] Ottoman archives show that Devşirme system was implemented in Kozan. However there is evidence that the locals resisted the practise. In 1564, for example, villagers from Sis came to the Ottoman capital Istanbul and kidnapped their children back.^[10] From 1689 to 1865,^[7] the region was under the control of Kozanoğulları, a family of feudal lords. While there are various theories about their history and origin,^[11] they claimed descent from Turkmen tribes,^[12] and Ahmed Cevdet Pasha wrote that they were descended from the Arık tribe of Warsaks.^[7]

Modern

At the turn of the twentieth century, the town's population was 8,000, about 5,600 of which were Armenians.^[13] They were all deported during the course of the Armenian genocide. Kozan was occupied by France between March 8, 1919 - June 2, 1920 during the Turkish War of Independence. After Turkey was declared a republic, Kozan was a province, compromising the districts of Kozan, Kadirli, Feke and Saimbeyli between 1923 and 1926.