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

was the Persian bureaucracy running the administrative and fiscal affairs of the state.
The latter was usually called ‘Tācik’ by the formers in a despising manner, while the
word ‘Qizilbash’ connoted ‘single-minded, uneducated and uncultured rough men’
among the bureaucratic elite. As it had been in the Ottoman case, the tribal mode of the
polity here also lost the struggle against the bureaucratic imperial state. The sixteenth-
century Safavid history, in essence, was indeed nothing other than the history of the
tragic decline of the tribal politics, as well as the religious mentality and the way of
practice accompanied, against the rising literacy based on the bureaucratic organization
and religious proliferation. 1948
The Safavid historians seem to agree upon the idea that until 1508, when Husayn
Beg Lala was dismissed from the posts of vekālat and āmir al-umerā, the absolute
qizilbash domination in the Safavid politics continued. From then on, the balance of
power began to shift towards the Persian bureaucracy. However, the main turning point,
in many aspects, was arguably the defeat of Çaldıran, which resulted in a sequence of
fundamental changes in both international and domestic affairs of the Safavid State. As
Savory states, “as a result of their defeat at Chāldirān, the Safavids were thrown on to
the defensive in their long-drawn-out struggle with the Ottomans, and did not regain the
initiative for the three-quarters of a century, until the reign of Shah ‘Abbās the
Great.” 1949 The consequences of battle of Çaldıran for the Safavid state, however, were
to be far beyond the military defeat or territorial loss. Although it marked a turning point
in the rivalry of the two powers for the leadership in the Islamic world, perhaps a more
1948 The analysis of the tribe-bureaucracy contest in the Safavid state is far beyond the scope of the present
study. For a recent study of several aspects of the issue, see Kathryn Babayan, Mystics, Monarchs, and
Messiahs. Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: Harvard
University Press, 2002.
1949 Savory, Iran under the Safavids, p. 45.
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