TURKOMANS BETWEEN TWO EMPIRES: THE ... - Bilkent University

glories of the Ottoman army. Towards the end of his reign, Sultan Bayezid II and his
statesmen were seriously favoring Prince Ahmed, who was once even officially invited
to Istanbul to take over the throne. Ahmed’s ambiguous attitude against the qizilbashes
turned into a powerful tool of legitimization in Selim’s hands and rapidly finished
Ahmed’s advantage for the throne.
The seventh chapter focuses on the climax of the struggle between the Ottomans
and Qizilbashes. Upon capturing the throne in 1512, in a way unprecedented in the
Ottoman history, Selim I immediately started preparing to fully fulfill his pledge. His
ultimate aim was not only to extirpate the sympathizers of Shah Ismail in Anatolia but
also to bring a complete solution to the problem by finishing the Shah himself.
Nevertheless, launching war on a Muslim country was not easy according to the Islamic
law or shari’a. They needed religiously legitimate grounds to declare such a thing.
Selim’s heavy pressure on the ulemā produced one of the most controversial ordinances
(fetvā) of the Ottoman history. At this stage the contest between the Ottoman imperial
regime and the Qizilbash Turkomans, which was political in essence, gained an
overwhelmingly religious skin: the qizilbashes were declared as ‘heretics’ deviated from
the true path of the religion. On his way to Çaldıran, Selim persecuted and executed a
great number of his subjects claming they had adhered to the qizilbash movement.
Ultimately, the plane of Çaldıran witnessed the last duel of the bureaucratic state and
tribal federacy in the Middle East. After Çaldıran the latter would never attain an enough
power to contest the former, neither in the Ottoman Empire nor in Safavids, nor any
other place in the Middle East.
On the other hand, the fierce political and military struggle between these two
systems, now represented by the Ottoman Empire and the Safavid-Qizilbash state, was
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