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

As already mentioned, the primary purpose of Selim-nāme writers was to explain
how Selim I was rightful in overthrowing his father and killing all the males of the royal
line. In other words, their stimulus was to create and propagate a ground of legitimacy
for the unlawful acts of Selim I rather then recording the contemporary events. In his
fight against both his father and his brother Prince Ahmed, Selim’s most powerful tool
of legitimacy was, without doubt, the qizilbash issue. Skillfully treating the qizilbash
menace pointed towards the Ottoman rule, Prince Selim masterfully developed a policy
against his father, the living legitimate sultan, and his brother, then the heir in line to the
throne. At the end, this policy brought him the Ottoman throne. Selim’s employment of
the qizilbash affairs as a tool of legitimacy in the Ottoman domestic - and later foreign -
politics was further cultivated by Selim-nāme authors. Therefore the issue of qizilbash
became the major subject of the Selim-nāme literature.
However, in this literature one can barely find the definition or depiction of
qizilbashes as they were. Rather Shah Ismail and his followers were given the role of
‘evil’, which would devastate not only the Ottoman Empire but the whole Islamic world
if the great savior Selim had not eliminated them. From this point of view, Selim-nāme
writers might be regarded rather as ideology-makers than historians. Hence, in their
works the historical facts, especially concerning qizilbashes, are severely overshadowed
by ideological treatments. As J. R. Walsh has already discussed, our contemporary
sources pertaining to the Ottoman-Safavid relations in the late fifteenth- and sixteenth
century are much inflected with ideological discourses and usually provide little
information on what actually happened. In these sources, both Ottoman and Safavid, the
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