The town owes its name to Karaman Bey who was one of the rulers of the Karamanid dynasty. The former name Laranda which in turn comes from the Luwian languageLarawanda, literally "sandy, a sandy place".
History
In ancient times Karaman was known as Laranda. In the 6th century BC it came under Achaemenid rule until 322 BC, when it was destroyed by Perdiccas, a former general of Alexander the Great, after he had defeated Ariarathes, king ofCappadocia. It later became a seat of Isaurian pirates. At some point it was possessed by Antipater of Derbe. It belonged to the Roman and later Byzantine Empire until it was captured by the Seljuks in the early 12th century. Karaman was occupied by Frederick Barbarossa in 1190 and by Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia between 1211 and 1216. In 1256, the town was taken by Karamanoğlu Mehmet Bey and was renamed Karaman in his honour. From 1275, Karaman was the capital of the Karamanidbeylik. In 1468 the Karamanids were conquered by the Ottomans and in 1483 the capital of the province was moved to Konya. Karaman has retained ruins of a Karamanid castle and some walls, two mosques and a Koran school from that age. An exquisite mihrab from a mosque from Karaman can now be found in the Çinili Pavilion near the Archeology Museum in Istanbul. The Karamans were Cappadocian Turkomans who fought the Ottomans on the side of the Comnenes, became Christian and migrated westwards. There was a Roman Catholic titular see for the city. The poet Yunus Emre resided in Karaman during his later years and is believed to lie buried beside the Yunus Emre Mosque. A small adjacent park is adorned with quotations from his verse, many of them unfortunately graffiti-splattered. In 1222, the Sufi preacher Bahaeddin Veled arrived in town with his family, and the Karamanoğlu emir built a medrese to accommodate them. Veled's son was the famous MevlanaJelaluddin Rumi, who married his wife, Gevher Hatun, while his family was living in Karaman. It was here, too, that Rumi's mother died in 1224. She was buried, along with other family members, in the Aktekke Mosque, which Alaeddin Ali Bey had built to replace the original medrese in 1370. The Greek name Karamanlis as well as other surnames beginning with Karaman refer to this town. When Jefferson fought Libya's Barbary Pirates, he replaced one member of the al-Qaramanli dynasty with another as Pasha.
