Prior to its fall, the city had evaded the fate of other Greek cities by its remote location up in the Lydian hills, its strong fortifications and its paying of tribute to the numerous Muslim ghazis, whose bands robbed and pillaged any Christians in Anatolia who did not pay protection money (jizya).

Although the city was not officially under Islamic law and was in theory under the Byzantine Empire, it was away from the sea and in the middle of a vast, hostile Ottoman-occupied territory, which made it virtually independent and, at the time of its capture, more under the influence of the state of the Knights of Rhodes.

In 1390, Sultan Bayezid summoned the co-emperors of Byzantium, John VII and Manuel II and ordered them to accompany the besieging Turkish force to Philadelphia.

The co-emperors submitted to the degradation, and Philadelphia surrendered when it saw the imperial banner hoisted among the horse-tails of the Turkish pashas above the camp of the besiegers.

The humiliation of the empire could go no further than when a Roman emperor took the field at the behest of a Turkish Emir, in order to extinguish the last relics of freedom in his own country.