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

ground for the enthronement of Selim I, the most merciless and harsh Ottoman sultan
against qizilbashes, will be evaluated in the following chapter.
The development of Şahkulu rebellion is well-documented in TSA. Çağatay
Uluçay extensively used these documents in his series of articles on how Selim I became
the sultan. 1140 In the first of these three articles, Uluçay explained the phases of the
rebellion from the beginning to the end. After Uluçay, Şahabettin Tekindağ published an
article exclusively devoted to the rebellion. 1141 His article however hardly adds
something new – neither in terms of archival evidence nor in terms of interpretation – to
the article of Uluçay. Apart from them, Selāhattin Tansel devotes some pages to the
rebellion in his book Sultan II. Bāyezit’in Siyasī Hayatı. 1142 Although the itinerary and
military development of the rebellion is more or less delineated in these works, none of
them pay enough attention to the ideological and socio-religious content of the rebellion.
The scholar who briefly touched upon the ideological content of the rebellion was Hanna
Sohrweide, who studied the repercussion of the rise of Safavids among Anatolian
qizilbashs in the sixteenth century. 1143 Although meriting to be deemed among classics
in the field, Sohrweide’s analysis on the Şahkulu rebellion is mainly based on the
articles of Uluçay. Furthermore she pays much more attention to the political and
military development of the rebellion than its ideological and social dimensions. Thus
her discussions on the ideologico-religious content of the rebellion and its socio-cultural
basis are rather limited.
1140
See ULCY1; ULCY2; ULCY3.
1141
This article is published in two parts. See Şahabettin Tekindağ, “Şah Kulu Baba Tekeli Đsyanı”,
Belgelerle Türk Tarihi Dergisi, 3-4, 1959, 34-39; 54-59.
1142
See Selahattin Tansel, Sultan II. Bayezid’in Siyasi Hayatı, Đstanbul: Milli Eğitim Basımevi, 1966, pp.
248-256.
1143
Hanna Sohrweide, “Der Sieg der Safaviden in Persien und scine Rückwirkungen auf die Schiiten
Anatoliens im 16. Jahrhundert”, Der Islam, 41, 1965, 95-221. See especially pp. 145-156.
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