by Alan Mikhail
Ismail’s poetry proved one of his empire’s principal means of attracting adherents. The Turkic tribal peoples of northern Iran, the Caucasus, and eastern Anatolia were mostly illiterate, so rhythmic, easily remembered verses served to draw them in. In small towns and on the plains, Safavid officials would gather among the shepherds, riveting their attention with the shah’s verses. One poem goes as follows:
I am the faith of the Shah [‘Ali].
In flying I am a parakeet, I am the leader of a mighty army, a companion of Sufis.
Wherever you sow me, I will grow; whenever you call me,
I will come up. I shall catch the Sufis by the hand.
I was on the gibbet with Mansur; with Abraham in the fire and with Moses on Sinai.
Come from the eve, celebrate the New Year [Nau Ruz], join the King.
In just a few short lines, Ismail managed to invoke prophets from the Middle East’s monotheistic religions (Abraham and Moses), Persian cultural traditions (New Year), Shiism (‘Ali), and Sufism (Mansur and the parakeet). It was a heady mix. Ismail’s target audience was varied, inchoate, and complicated, and the poetry he used as the vehicle for his message proved similarly complex, fusing messianic Sufism, Turkic cultural forms, and militancy.
As the Safavids grew more confident in their Shiism, potent and sometimes eccentric Shiite themes came to dominate the shah’s poetic propaganda. Instead of claiming that he merely represented the faith of ‘Ali, or that he somehow knew the prophets, Ismail asserted that he was God himself:
I am Very God, Very God, Very God!
Come now, O blind man who has lost the path, behold the Truth!
To further distinguish his new adherents from the Ak Koyunlu, the Ottomans, and everyone else, Ismail awarded a bright red hat to military recruits who pledged their allegiance to the Safavids. The helmet had twelve points sticking straight up, signifying the Twelve Imams of Shiism. As a result, Ismail’s forces came to be known as Red-hats (Kızılbaş), a term the Ottomans would soon adopt to refer pejoratively to all Shiites, their own subjects included, whether or not they were linked to the Safavids.
SAFAVID CLAIMS TO SOVEREIGN adversarial power sent an unambiguous challenge first and foremost to the world’s greatest Sunni power, the Ottoman Empire. In sizing up their enemy neighbors to the west, the Safavids undertook a strategy similar to that which had proved so successful against the Ak Koyunlu—they made overtures of alliance to Shiite, Sufi, and other non-Sunni populations in Ottoman eastern Anatolia in an attempt to weaken the empire from within. These forays brought them into direct confrontation with Selim. Looking south and east from Trabzon, Selim saw the eastern Anatolian theater of ideological and military battle as his sphere of authority, and he would let no threat stand.
In 1505, Shah Ismail’s brother Ebrahim set off with an army of three thousand to pillage Selim’s province. Selim and his motley army of mercenaries, disgruntled Janissary contingents, minority fighters, and tribal warriors chased these Red-hats for about a hundred miles from south of Trabzon as far as Erzincan, just north of the Euphrates, massacring many and seizing their arms and munitions. He then sent a separate retaliatory force to raid the western territories of the Safavids in the Caucasus.
In doing all this, Selim demonstrated clearly to both foreign adversaries and domestic onlookers that not only would he defend Ottoman soil, but he would also fight to capture new territory for the empire. He overwhelmed force with superior force, seizing every opportunity to strike preemptively or retaliate against the Safavids. He also raided Shiite villages within the empire’s borders. As the Ottomans and the Safavids increasingly adopted the role of defender of their own branch of Islam, Selim saw it as his right, indeed his duty, to subjugate Shiites no matter where they were. He and Ismail waged a lively propaganda war as well—Ismail through his poetry, Selim through proclamations that were read aloud before battle. The “infidel dog” Ismail, as one of these missives read, deserved the beating his master Selim gave him.
Selim’s confrontations with the Safavids exposed the vast gulf between his military philosophy and that of his father. For some time, Selim had been requesting military reinforcements from Istanbul to defend the empire’s eastern flank, but had received nothing. After the battles of 1505, Ismail sent an envoy to Bayezit’s court to complain about Selim’s overly aggressive raids and to demand the return of his captured soldiers’ weapons. Not surprisingly, Bayezit refused to return the armaments, but he did receive the envoy with full diplomatic pomp and circumstance and sent him back to Tabriz with gifts and promises of friendship. Seeing his son as a hothead, and viewing his empire holistically, he preferred to pursue a path of nonaggression and reconciliation with the Safavids. He anticipated imminent challenges from west and south, and had no interest in doing battle on the eastern front—which would require the transport of massive numbers of troops and supplies over vast distances and difficult terrain. Selim, naturally, saw things differently. So far from the Mediterranean, he did not regard the Venetians, Spanish, or Genoese as threatening. For him, the Safavids were the Ottomans’ paramount enemy.
The Safavids loomed as a threat not simply because of their growing military capabilities, but because they offered an existentially devastating alternative vision of Muslim power. More than Christianity or Judaism, the ideological challenge of Shiism struck the Ottomans’ Sunnism close to the bone. The Ottoman–Safavid confrontations in these years were far from the full-blown inferno of Islamic civil war they would soon become, yet they smoldered. Watching the Safavids chip away at the ideological and territorial base of the empire he hoped to rule, Selim seethed with anger. For him, violence was the most effective—perhaps the only possible—form of diplomacy.
This divergence in outlook led to internal strife and outright political conflict in the House of Osman. Selim chased and killed Safavids; Bayezit gave them gifts and made overtures toward peace. Selim favored attack; his father advocated restraint. Selim believed that a weak response to the Safavid threat would only encourage them; Bayezit feared that his son’s actions and rhetoric would exacerbate tensions between the empire and its thousands of Shiite subjects. When the sultan rebuked his son and ordered him to relinquish the territories and prisoners he had captured, Selim refused. Already resentful of his father for privileging his older half-brothers and relegating him to the farthest reaches of the empire, Selim saw his father’s policy toward the Safavids as a sign of incompetence. He resolved to stand up to the empire’s enemies and ruthlessly defend Ottoman territory. In 1510, Shah Ismail sent a military contingent to the same area that Selim had successfully defended in 1505. Once again, Selim beat back Ismail’s soldiers and then made inroads into Safavid territory, launching a miniwar to the east of Erzincan. Much to Selim’s chagrin, Bayezit intervened to settle the confrontation through a conciliatory diplomatic process with the shah.
THE GROWING FAMILIAL RIFT over the Safavid problem—a difference in visions of imperial power and how it should be exercised militarily—would prove to be one of the major features of the succession battle between Selim and his two half-brothers, Ahmed and Korkud. Bayezit had given Ahmed, his favored son, the plum provincial governorship, in the family’s old stronghold of Amasya, was helping him develop relationships with the top administrators and military commanders of the empire, and included him in all the important decisions of his sultanate around the turn of the sixteenth century. Ahmed thus represented continuity with his father’s reign—including Bayezit’s conservative, nonconfrontational stance toward the Safavids.
Selim set himself up in the east as the militarily aggressive option to succeed his father. He was adamant that enemies like the Safavids had to be faced down with force, not diplomacy, and was thus able to win supporters in the military, who distrusted Bayezit’s reliance on restraint and patience. As son increasingly opposed father, the empire tilted toward war.
CHAPTER
13
ENEMIES EVERYWHERE
Selim
battles the Safavids while governor of Trabzon
AT THE TURN OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY, AS EUROPEANS TOOK the first West Africans—Muslims and non-Muslims—to the New World as slaves, the importance of the Caucasus for the Ottoman slave trade increased markedly. The Ottomans’ peculiar brand of slavery had long encouraged the connections between the Ottoman east and the Caucasus—where many of its slaves originated—but as the empire’s western borders momentarily solidified in this period, the Caucasus replaced the Balkans as the empire’s major frontier zone, a porous boundary that enabled regular military raids, thus yielding large numbers of Christian boys for the Janissary Corps. With Trabzon serving as the primary conduit of these slaves into the empire, Selim held a privileged position over most other governors as a champion of the imperial military, winning him further support among the empire’s soldiering classes. He exploited this advantage by exacerbating what he saw as the widening gap between the rank-and-file Janissaries and their top commanders. The latter, he felt, had grown increasingly distant from the battlefield in favor of comfortable posts in the Ottoman administration, leaving average soldiers as the staunch guardians of the empire.
Selim regularly led the raids that brought Caucasian slaves—mostly Christian, mostly white—into the empire. From Trabzon’s markets, slaves were dispatched all over the empire and even well beyond. Venetian and Genoese merchants, for example, regularly bought slaves in Trabzon, along with silks and spices. Taxes from the slave trade represented as much as 30 percent of the annual income of some Black Sea cities. Thus, Selim spent a hefty portion of his time managing the slave trade—sourcing slaves, collecting taxes on sales of slaves, rooting out corruption in the marketplace, and keeping the flow of bodies moving through his city.
Selim’s evolving relationship with the Janissaries shaped his decision to undertake one of his most aggressive military ventures as governor of Trabzon. In 1508, he marched a fighting force northeast into the Caucasus and attacked Georgia. This invasion opened a decade of expansionist military ventures. Christian Georgia, with its ancient churches and soaring peaks, had become an ally and sometime vassal of the new Shiite empire to its south. It was an easy target: small, no match for Ottoman might. Selim’s forces were familiar with the mountainous terrain, thanks to their many raids for slaves and booty, and his call to arms promised a lightning-fast, nearly cost-free victory: “I am making a raid against the Georgian infidels who are in my vicinity; let those young men and brave fellows who delight in plunder come.” In an indication of how successful Selim’s coalition-building over the years had been, thousands heeded his summons and trekked to Trabzon, “from the cities, towns and villages which lay in the Divinely-protected dominions, and from among the nomadic tent-dwellers, brave and lion-like men of battle, who delighted in cihād and ġazā [holy war].”
It took less than a week to cover the 150 miles into southern Georgia, where Selim’s composite force decimated a disorganized, stunned foe, “the people of unbelief and hatred,” as the Selimname described them. According to the embellished prose of this nearly hagiographic account of the Georgia expedition, Selim “caused a vast area, throughout its length and breadth, to be trodden underfoot by horses swift as the wind, and trampled over by speed-increasing chargers; he made its inhabited places waste and desolate, and its prosperous regions the home and nest of the owl whose power is death.”
The text goes on to relate that Selim’s forces captured an estimated ten thousand Georgian women and children destined for slavery. The description of these raids emphasizes the riches and pleasure Ottoman soldiers derived from their foray into Georgia; they were “spoil-laden and satiated through looting and plundering all its riches, goods, chattels and farms.” Their mission accomplished, Selim’s forces turned their military encampment of discipline and decorum into an orgiastic scene of coerced sex with their piteous and defenseless Georgian captives:
Into the possession of the ġāzīs [soldiers], the guides of the ġazā [war], the army of mail-clad warriors, came gratuitously
Beautiful, graceful and rosebud-mouthed creatures, and elegantly-walking, cypress-statured, rose-scented idols.
Many jasmine-complexioned girls were taken, girls who imparted gladness and whose beauty was a delight.
[They were] fairy-faced and houri-featured [a houri is a virgin of paradise], with curling locks and with ambergris-fragrant ringlets.
The inside of the camp became full of [these] fairies, like a sky full of moons, suns and Jupiters.
Such flowery language cannot mask the reality. Rape nearly always accompanies war.
As a military leader, Selim gave his loyal fighters what they most wanted: a fierce battle, plunder, and a license to sexual violence. This time, soldiers kept more of the spoils than was usual, as Selim relinquished the quota of a fifth of all slaves and booty that was his personal right as commander. As portrayed in the Selimname, Selim was motivated by purity of thought and action, ambition and resolve. We would say he was single-minded, focused on his goal. He did not want money or pleasure or slaves or even territory. His rewards would be coming.
Selim’s Georgian foray was a calculated political move—a war he could manipulate for his larger personal, political, and strategic goals. First, he was sending an unambiguous message to the Safavids that he was the strongman of the region. More importantly, he was establishing a stark distinction between himself and his father—and by extension his father’s favorite, Ahmed; this preemptive attack would serve as evidence to the empire’s military elite that he was the most aggressive of Bayezit’s sons, and should therefore be their favored choice to succeed him. The speech Selim delivered to his soldiers made his intentions clear. On a Georgian battlefield, far off in enemy territory, Selim was speaking to listeners far beyond those present: his father, his fraternal rivals, and all the empire’s power brokers. He offered a diagnosis of the ills that plagued the empire along with his proposed remedies, and threw down a challenge to his domestic enemies for the throne:
The incompetent people, the purse-snatchers, the men greedy for wealth and possessions, who are at my father’s court, make gifts and presents their gods, and worship them; they are suffering from an affliction. They have given up advancing the freemen, the capable and distinguished champion warriors and the renowned young heroes, who have constantly served our court since the times of my great ancestors. Their promotions and beneficence are always confined to the slave class, and, because they do not give office to anyone other than slaves, the capable men among the people of our country and realm are, I have heard, inclining towards the Kızılbaş [Shiites].
The Ottoman Empire was thus, in Selim’s rendition, directionless and morally bankrupt, a condition which, he asserted, led inevitably to political and military weakness. The ruling elite had deviated from the pious path set down by his and Bayezit’s “great ancestors,” to the point that the Ottomans could no longer defend their state. (This was misleading, if not an outright lie; the empire was, arguably, stronger than it had ever been.) The slave classes that made up the Ottoman military and administrative establishment—those young Christian boys captured from the Balkans and the Caucasus, converted to Islam, and raised with every advantage—now cared more about monopolizing power, worldly authority, and wealth than the well-being and defense of the empire. Instead of becoming warriors, they had become petty, self-serving bureaucrats. In contrast, Selim presented the men who had fought with him in Georgia as the empire’s true defenders. Passed over, as freeborn Muslims, and denied the countless allowances given to the elite slave classes, his armed mercenaries, peasants, and nomads, and some disaffected Janissaries too, had volunteered to risk their lives against the Ottomans’ existential foes, and fought valiantly against the empire’s real enemies: the nepotism, cronyism, selfishness, and greed that had decayed the state from within.
Selim thus offered an alternative to his father’s rule. He proposed to return the empire to its lost moral uprightness and military secu
rity via the sanctification of pure struggle—an impassioned defense of the empire motivated not by greed for riches or worldly power but by a love for the House of Osman and respect for its luminous history. Selim pressed his case that only he could wake the empire from its slumbering demise, speaking now directly to his fighting men:
It was for that reason that I chose to make a raid on the Georgian[s], and my aim in bringing you here was this. My regard, the effect of which is auspicious, is towards your class. Since the times of our forefathers, the counsels [given] to us have been to this effect, that our true slaves at our court are those who, in loyal devotion, risk life and head in our cause, and who give us companionship and service. If God (praise be to Him, He is Exalted) bestows upon me, His slave, sovereign power, my beneficent regard is towards freemen, and my good favour is towards capable and distinguished, sword-wielding champion warriors. . . . To make good-for-nothing people one’s [trusted] servants, merely because they are slaves, is not a mark of sovereignty. It is never right to turn one’s face away from freemen. If God, Who is Exalted, so wills, I am firm in this resolution.
Selim’s “firm” resolution now pivots to winning the throne of “sovereign power” for himself. “Go, each one of you to your own place,” he continued, “and, in your [own] district, proclaim and make known to the capable and brave men that I have this pure conviction.” Charging his soldiers with the dissemination of his political message, Selim sought to build an alternative power base distinct from and indeed diametrically opposed to what he called the “good-for-nothing” power elite—his father, the palace, and the top brass of the Ottoman military. From among the “freemen,” the “capable and distinguished, sword-wielding champion warriors”—those his father had ignored and derided for far too long—Selim would resurrect what he regarded as the real Ottoman Empire.
