by Alan Mikhail
Finally, in the centuries during which Europe persisted in bloodying its hands with the Inquisition while the Ottoman Empire fostered a pluralistic society, the Ottomans increasingly came to dominate the Mediterranean. Over the course of the fifteenth century, but especially after 1453, Europe recognized its own weakness and feared not just Ottoman power, but all Muslims everywhere. This sobering development would shape European literature, religious thought, and propaganda for centuries. Given the global balance of power around 1500, the Ottomans did not perceive Christianity, and certainly not all Christians everywhere, as their enemy. European fragmentation meant that the Ottomans faced only a variety of small Christian enemies—the kingdom of Hungary, Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain, Venice, Genoa, and so on—rather than a unified, territorially gargantuan, foe. Moreover, being a Muslim numerical minority in a sea of Christians, the Ottomans had no fifth-column anxieties about their own Christian subjects, since they had to cooperate with Christians to maintain their rule. Given these realities, the Ottomans did not think in civilizational terms about a clash between Islam and Christianity; they did not see Europe as an existential threat; and, therefore, they did not demonize their religious minorities as Spain and other European powers did.
Still, the historical record cautions against exaggerating interfaith harmony in the Ottoman Empire. The experience of both the Sephardim and older communities of Jews in Selim’s Trabzon bears this out. The small number of Spanish Jews who made it that far east arrived in a period of both political stability and demographic change. In the globally precarious decade of the 1490s, Selim’s governorship bestowed relative calm on the port city as it began its steady transformation from being a majority Orthodox city to a majority Muslim one. During Selim’s reign, more than 80 percent of Trabzon’s population was Christian; Islam did not become the city’s majority religion until decades after his time there. For centuries before and after 1492, Jews remained a tiny minority in Trabzon—a few dozen highly skilled doctors, artisans, and merchants among a total urban population of around 1,500—and were generally unmolested. However, violence periodically interrupted the tranquility. According to one account, both Christians and Muslims in the city regularly “kill them [Jews] if they see them.” Indeed, such was Trabzon’s reputation in some circles that, “if someone suggests to a Jew that he go to Trabzon, the Jew tells him to go to hell.” This same account goes on to relate a specific instance, most likely fictionalized, of anti-Jewish violence during Selim’s governorship.
The story begins when two young Muslim brothers went missing in the city. Despite a thorough search, neither the boys’ family nor city officials could determine their fate. One day in the market, years later, a dervish examining two pieces of fine leather, one red and the other yellow, noticed some strange writing deep in the skins. With difficulty, he deciphered the message: “You who wish to learn of our condition should know that we have been held captive under ground for the past twenty years by Jewish tanners. Rescue us, for God’s sake and for the sake of God’s messenger, and you will see wondrous things.” The dervish went directly to the governor’s court, and Selim dispatched soldiers to the Jewish tanneries on the outskirts of the city. They found the missing boys deep in a cave used by the tanners for storing dyes. “The backs of the two young victims,” the story continues, “had been flayed, then the two brothers had been attached back to back and put to work tanning. When one stood up to work, the other was left helpless loaded onto his back.” Although the story does not state this specifically, the two pieces of leather were presumably the sections of skin that had been removed from the boys in order to fuse them together. When Selim’s men further inspected the tanneries, they found “several hundred other young boys named Muhammed.” Word spread through the city that Jews were enslaving and flaying Muslim boys. A riot ensued and several Jews were killed.
Trafficking as it does in tropes that were commonplace in medieval and early modern Europe—the capture of Gentile children and the emphasis on bloodletting—this almost certainly apocryphal story demonstrates that anti-Semitism existed in the Ottoman Empire and often led to anti-Jewish violence, in narrative form and in reality. Unlike in Europe, however, Jews in the Ottoman Empire did not represent a threat so dire that they needed to be excised from the realm. Hyperbolic phantom fears about blood purity, corruption, and deceit—not the real-world politics of military strategy and global territorial conquest—ultimately led to Europe’s expulsion of the Jews. Although occasional outbursts of anti-Jewish violence did occur, the 1490s witnessed a Jewish renaissance in the Ottoman Empire, and, for centuries afterward, the empire remained the center of global Jewish culture.
VIOLENCE, EXPULSIONS, FORCED MIGRATIONS, the expansion of religious war, the annihiliation of New World peoples, and increased slavery dominated the early modern world in the decades around the paroxysmal year of 1492. In the middle of this cyclone of conflict, conquest, and mass death, the Ottoman Empire stood like the eye of the storm—its central axis, and yet a place of surprising calm and refuge.
Still, its leaders were mobilizing for war. For Bayezit, Selim, and their empire, the most potent civilizational threat came not from Jews or Christians, but from other Muslims—the Shiites of Iran. Islam’s greatest challenge at the beginning of the sixteenth century emanated not from outside but from within its abode.
PART FOUR
ENEMIES NEAR AND FAR
(1500–12)
IMAGE ON PREVIOUS PAGE:
Selim
CHAPTER
12
HERESY FROM THE EAST
The Prophet Muhammad visits Safi in a dream
AS EUROPE CHASED THE SPECTER OF ISLAM IN THE CARIBBEAN and scattered Muslims and Jews like pollen across the Mediterranean, a new Muslim power was stirring in the east. In eastern Anatolia, the immediate hinterland of Selim’s Trabzon, chaos reigned throughout the 1490s, following the breakdown of the Ak Koyunlu Confederacy. In the Caucasus and northern Iran, tribal warlords, religious upstarts, and political pretenders all saw their chance to capture territory, soldiers, and money. Selim grew increasingly anxious as these forces intensified their violence against one another and encroached ever deeper on his territories, raiding for resources and preparing the way for rebellion wherever their horses trampled. Nonetheless, he waited, seeking the perfect moment to strike.
One of the strongest factions to emerge was a religious order that had been founded by Shaykh Safi al-Din in the 1320s as a collection of wandering ascetics in and around the town of Ardabil, near the western shore of the Caspian Sea. Members of this order would, by 1501, become the Ottomans’ major rivals in the east: the Safavid Empire. Safi and his successors evangelized about the power of intense devotional prayer and the mystical elements of God; they believed in holy men, jinns, and the charisma of their inspired leaders. Not surprisingly, political upheaval and social uncertainty tend to spur the growth of heterodox religious communities whose adherents come from the disenfranchised, maligned, and otherwise marginalized. Thus, in the fractured landscapes of eastern Anatolia, the Caucasus, and northern Iran, Safi’s order found fertile ground for its message and expanded steadily over the course of the fifteenth century and into the sixteenth.
As they accumulated territory and followers, the budding Safavids developed a robust ideological foundation from which to challenge the most dominant force in their immediate zone of operations, the Ottomans. Shiism formed the groundwork for this ideological program. The rupture within Islam between Sunnism and Shiism had first emerged in the seventh century, over the question of who should lead the early Muslim community. While Shiites held that the political and religious leader of Islam should be a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, Sunnis considered that the leader should be the person deemed most capable of ruling, regardless of his lineage. From the origins of Islam to the present day, Sunnis have always claimed more adherents than Shiites, yet both have coalesced into various political states battling for territory and ideolo
gical preeminence. Much of Selim’s time as governor of Trabzon, like much of his later reign as sultan, was focused on facing down the threat of Shiite rebels in eastern Anatolia and the growth of the early modern world’s major Shiite power in Iran and the Caucasus.
Shiism came slowly to the Safavids. Safi and his descendants initially practiced the kind of “frontier Islam” that thrived in areas beyond the control of empires. Around the year 1300, when they were still merely a tribal principality, the early Ottomans similarly developed a kind of flexible frontier Islam that reconciled distinct religious ideas and cultures, allowing them to thrive in an atmosphere of rival beliefs and intermittent war. As the Safavids’ growing clout brought them into more regular and sustained contact and confrontation with the Ottomans and the Ak Koyunlu Confederacy, their Shiism strengthened as an oppositional counterweight to both empires’ Sunni orthodoxy. The Shiism of Safi’s followers eventually solidified as a source of political legitimacy and stability in the face of the turmoil that followed the disintegration of the Ak Koyunlu. For Selim, Shiism put up a target for the arrow of his violent ambitions.
BORN IN THE CITY of Ardabil in 1252, Safi grew up in a wealthy family with large landholdings. Ardabil, which is today located in Iran, close to the border with Azerbaijan, was during Safi’s youth a sleepy town nestled in a mountain valley. Winter was harsh there, but spring arrived with radiant yellow buttercups, delicate red poppies, and vibrant pink roses. One of Safi’s cherished pastimes was visiting the shrines of local saints; this pampered son wandered in search of something beyond this world—something deeper, more meaningful, transcendent. He spent hours in meditation, experiencing visions of angels and departed saints, and sought a spiritual guide to interpret his visions and offer him direction.
From among the Sufis who gathered around the holy shrines of Ardabil, the mystic who proved most adept at interpreting Safi’s visions was a charismatic sixty-year-old named Zahid, founder of an order that took his name, the Zahidiyya. Distinguishing himself as a curious and perceptive interlocutor and loyal follower, Safi soon became Zahid’s star pupil and the order’s most trusted disciple. As the scion of a wealthy family, Safi also supported the order financially, which of course only served to ingratiate him further. Zahid loved his pious and munificent acolyte so much that he married his daughter to him. After Zahid died in 1301, Safi—a short, stocky man nearing fifty—was his obvious successor. On his deathbed, the Sufi master whispered to his son-in-law, “Ṣafī, God has shown you to the people, and His command is that you obey His call. . . . I have broken the polo-stick of all your adversaries, and cast the ball before you. Strike it where you will; the field is yours. I have been able to live the life of a recluse, but you cannot. Wherever you are bidden, you must go, to make converts and give instruction. It is God who has given you this task.” Having received this worldly and otherworldly charge—elegantly couched in the language of a sport that had originated in Iran—Safi set out to proselytize, to reveal to others the truth he had found for himself. He forswore being a recluse, and utilized his family’s resources to advance the order’s political and economic influence in and around Ardabil. With the polo-stick of power firmly in his grasp, Safi whipped his horse forward to chase and then strike the ball Zahid had thrown before him. He married prominent members of his order into influential families across northern Iran, thus increasing the number of his followers and solidifying his political clout. He also bought land in order to raise revenue. Expanding its reach beyond Ardabil, Safi’s order forged alliances with local powers, built new devotional sanctuaries, and worked to increase its resource base—all with the express aim of supporting its religious mission. The order soon adopted Safi’s name as its own, becoming the Safaviyya instead of the Zahidiyya—and, eventually, the Safavid Empire.
Safi died in 1334, by which time his mystical sect found itself on very solid footing. For the next century, his followers built on the gains he had made. They focused on maintaining their shrines, winning adherents, and carrying out daily exercises of prayer and ritual. By the 1450s, their numbers had swollen, making them a formidable force in northern Iran and the Caucasus. During this decade, the Safaviyya made two fateful, if seemingly contradictory, political moves, the second necessitated by the first: they intermarried with the Sunni Ak Koyunlu Confederacy, and they made a deliberate, though very gradual, transition toward the formal adoption of Shiism.
As they grew in numbers and influence, the Safaviyya came into closer contact, and sometimes direct conflict, with the Ak Koyunlu, which was still the region’s most dominant force. Since it was in neither group’s interest to pitch battle against the other, the most expedient means of defusing that possibility was for the two groups to ally by intermarrying, even as each sought to maintain its independence from the other. As the weaker of the two groups, the Safaviyya felt this need especially acutely. Since the more powerful and more heavily militarized Ak Koyunlu were Sunnis, like the Ottomans, the Safaviyya embrace of Shiism served as an assertion of difference, autonomous identity, and sovereignty over its internal affairs, even after the marriages of convenience were accomplished. Despite their best efforts to maintain this precarious balance, however, the Safaviyya adoption of Shiism eventually led to a split with the Ak Koyunlu.
In 1478, when the formidable Ak Koyunlu leader Uzun Hasan died after nearly twenty-five years in power, his son and successor struck out at the rising power of the Safaviyya, whom he saw as both an easy target and a threat to his young reign. Seeking to purge what he regarded as their infiltration of his family and especially their disgraceful Shiism, he seized several of their shrines and much of their landholdings and imprisoned many of the order’s leaders far to the south, near the Persian Gulf. In one of their major victories during a decade of many setbacks, the Ak Koyunlu captured Ardabil from the Safaviyya in 1494, forcing most of its ranks to flee. A group headed south along the western coast of the Caspian Sea—including a seven-year-old boy, a direct descendant of Safi named Ismail.
By 1499, the exiled Safaviyya had begun plotting their return northward. Over the course of the 1490s, two parallel processes had enabled the Safaviyya to recapture areas of northern Iran in the valley between Tabriz and Ardabil. First, instability gripped the Ak Koyunlu when a series of succession crises broke out, spreading violence throughout the region, even as far west as Selim’s Trabzon. At the same time, the expulsion of the Safaviyya from Ardabil in 1494 actually proved advantageous, as they were able to develop relationships and alliances all along the southern Caspian coast. Seizing upon the dissatisfaction of local populations with Ak Koyunlu raids and violence, the Safaviyya galvanized men willing to fight to oust the Ak Koyunlu from their villages and towns. The Safaviyya promised to lead them north to fight the Ak Koyunlu and then to let the villagers enjoy autonomous rule. The Safaviyya wanted Ardabil and its surrounding territories, not the whole of Iran or even the southern Caspian coast.
By late 1500, the Safaviyya were ready to deliver a deathblow to the Ak Koyunlu. With some seven thousand men drawn from tribes throughout northern Iran, villages on the southern Caspian coast, the Caucasus, and even eastern Anatolia, the Safaviyya moved on the strategic Ak Koyunlu stronghold of Sharur, sited northwest of Ardabil at the crossroads of multiple trade routes. Despite being considerably outmanned, the Safaviyya and their allies fought with inspiration and abandon. Within a few days, they had killed eight thousand Ak Koyunlu soldiers and pushed the remnants back toward Tabriz, where they slaughtered everyone they could find, subduing this historic Silk Road city that had seen both Marco Polo and Tamerlane enter its gates. By the summer of 1501, the Safaviyya had captured Tabriz.
In Tabriz, the triumphant Safaviyya military leaders gathered to decide their next moves. Out of that meeting came the decision to crown fourteen-year-old Ismail as the first shah of the Safavid Empire. A left-handed redhead with a sonorous singing voice, Ismail represented both continuity with the line of Safi and a new beginning for a new state. As a
direct descendant of the Safaviyya’s revered founder—who, more than a century after his death, had achieved mythic status—Ismail perfectly combined oppositional Shiism and a Sufi lineage. The Safavid leadership invested their hopes in him as both political ruler and spiritual guide.
The newly crowned Ismail hears the Friday sermon said in his name in Tabriz
Although it is difficult to separate myth from truth, tales of the new shah’s legendary strength circulated widely. On one occasion, Ismail supposedly directed that a ram be killed and the fresh carcass be buried with only the horns showing above the dirt. He then set off on horseback at full gallop, reached down to grab the horns with one hand, and pulled the ram out of the ground. He then lifted it over his head, swung it around three times, and tossed it forward.
As they had done all along, the Safaviyya order-turned-empire strategized about how to harness their oppositional spiritual message—now embodied in the young, strapping Ismail—to win people to their cause. Infinitely more significant than everything else, they declared that the official religion of the Safavid Empire would forever be Shiism, making the Safavids the most potent Shiite power in the early modern world.
In the Safavids’ early years, their Shiism seemed questionable (much like the Sunnism of the Ottomans centuries earlier), with its mélange of ancient Persian notions of kingship, Sufism, Sunni Islam, and frontier tribal heterodoxy. However, in an early modern world in which religion stood as the foremost marker of identity, the proclamation of the Safavid Empire as a specifically Shiite state was a means of projecting independence, sovereignty, distinction, and opposition to the powers surrounding them. Moreover, when Ismail claimed leadership of the global Shiite community after 1501, he would count the Shiites of the Ottoman Empire as his subjects.
