How did a Janissary engineer become the Ottomans' chief architect?

Mimar Sinan was the chief architect of three sultans, Suleiman the Magnificent, Selim II and Murad III, and he was responsible for more than 300 major structures. What is stranger is where he came from: he was not trained in a studio. He was conscripted in 1512 under the devshirme and trained as a Janissary officer.

That army life was his school. On campaign he became expert at building fortifications, roads, bridges and aqueducts, and in Persia he even built ships so that the army and its artillery could cross Lake Van. At about the age of fifty he was appointed chief royal architect, applying those technical skills to religious and civic buildings, and he held the post for almost fifty years.

His army training gave him an empirical approach, learning by building, similar to Europe's Brunelleschi and Michelangelo. Sinan himself described three stages in his career, with the Şehzade Mosque as his apprenticeship, the Süleymaniye as his qualification and the Selimiye in Edirne as his master work.

There was a challenge hanging over all of it: Hagia Sophia, the great Byzantine church completed in 537, once the world's largest interior space. At the Selimiye Sinan was said to boast that he had built a dome higher and wider than Hagia Sophia's. His own origins stayed uncertain: scholars still argue whether he was of Armenian or Cappadocian Greek birth.