city, south-central Turkey; it lies at an elevation of 4,100 feet (1,250 metres) below a hill crowned by a ruined 11th-century Seljuq fortress on the road between Kayseri and the Cilician Gates, north-northwest of Adana. The city is thought by some historians to be on the site of Nakida, mentioned in Hittite texts. After the decline of ancient Tyana (10th century), Niğde and nearby Bor emerged as the towns controlling the mountain pass, a vital link on the northern trade route from Cilicia to inner Anatolia and Sinope (modern Sinop) on the Black Sea coast. A prosperous and important city of the Seljuq Sultanate of Rūm, Niğde by 1333 was, nevertheless, in ruins (probably because of the wars between the Mongols and Karaman, a Turkmen principality that succeeded the Sultanate of Rūm) when the North African traveler Ibn Baṭṭūṭah visited there. Thereafter it changed hands among the Turkmen principalities of Eretna, Karaman, and Burhanettin before its absorption into the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the 15th century.