by Alan Mikhail
Thus, Selim turned to the empire’s religious establishment to sanctify his plans for war against the Safavids. In early 1514, he succeeded in securing fatwas (rulings on religious law) from two of the empire’s most prominent muftis—Hamza Saru Görez and Kemalpaşazade—who deemed Shiites to be infidels and endorsed their slaughter. Hamza Saru Görez stated unequivocally in his Ottoman Turkish fatwa that Shiites were indeed “unbelievers” and “heretics” who should be killed; all their possessions, including their women and children, could be seized as booty for the Ottoman Empire. As an indication of just how much of an abomination Shiites were, he added that even a Shiite who “converted” to Sunni Islam should be killed. In short, Shiites should be considered as worse than Jews and Christians; they did not enjoy the safeguards to which members of those communities were entitled. The other mufti, Kemalpaşazade, later grand mufti, continued in the same vein in his Arabic-language fatwa, asserting that Shiites were not just non-Muslims but anti-Muslims. As sultan, Selim had the right and, what is more, the duty to destroy the Safavid unbelievers. Kemalpaşazade invoked a Qur’anic verse in his fatwa: “Strive hard against the unbelievers and hypocrites, and be firm against them. Their abode is hell, an evil refuge indeed” (9:73). With his simmering anti-Shiite fury now reaching a boil, a political justification on offer, and religious sanction secured, Selim girded himself to make a conclusive move against the Safavids.
He set out from Edirne on March 20, 1514. Like the change of seasons, Selim’s plans for war represented a complete, if temporary, transformation of his state. This would be total war—a cataclysmic clash of exclusionary visions of universal sovereignty and of militarily committed states with diametrically opposed political agendas. Selim’s preparations thus moved simultaneously on several fronts. Foremost, of course, were his battle plans and strategies of engagement. A military man for decades, he devoted himself to every logistical detail and committed every possible resource to the enterprise. His forces would far outmatch Ismail’s, both in number and in armament technology. In fact, he had what most historians consider the largest army assembled in the Middle East up to that point—as many as two hundred thousand soldiers at its peak. Alongside these vital military considerations, Selim also moved to squeeze the Safavids economically by curtailing their main source of revenue, the silk trade.
As indicated by the fatwas he secured, Selim viewed this conflict as an epic confrontation between two rival ideologies, a test of who should lead the Muslim world—a war that would leave only one survivor. Both sides, however, knew that God was on their side. Thus, this first Ottoman–Safavid war was set to become one of the fiercest and most important battles in the history of the Middle East—indeed, in all of Islamic history. It was the first time a Sunni empire fought a Shiite empire for regional hegemony of the Middle East.
Selim reached Istanbul on March 29. In Topkapı Palace, he checked up on his daughters and consorts, who had stayed behind while he was in Edirne, and met with his military commanders and other advisers under the great dome of the imperial council room to discuss strategy and the mobilization of resources from across the empire. For Selim, in this first major military test of his sultanate, the only acceptable outcome was—of course—a crushing victory.
Selim also worked with his administrative council on the details of the economic blockade. By outlawing the export of Iranian silk from the Ottoman Empire, he could directly manipulate the trade that drove the Safavid economy and supported nearly every facet of the state, because Iranian silk merchants had to pass through Ottoman territory to access the Mediterranean and the lucrative European market. Selim established checkpoints on the major roads between the two empires, dispatched teams of inspectors to Ottoman markets to ferret out Iranian silk, and monitored all ships passing through Ottoman ports and using Ottoman sea-lanes. Denying the Safavids access to Trabzon, Bursa, Istanbul, and Antakya would sap them economically and eventually militarily. The blockade, which was up and running by the early summer of 1514, proved so effective—save for a few smugglers—that Selim maintained it throughout his reign.
Having choked Iran economically, Selim worked to win the support of other major powers for his impending war. His biggest concern was the Mamluk Empire, to the south—the third of the Middle East’s major states at the time. Ottomans and Mamluks shared a long history of both cooperation and enmity. On the positive side, the two Muslim powers had partnered in the realm of commerce, working together to erect a powerful trade wall against European merchants seeking to go east from the Mediterranean. On the negative side, the Ottomans clashed with the Sunni Mamluks—as they did with the Shiite Safavids—over claims of universal sovereignty in the Muslim world. The Mamluk sultanate had arisen about fifty years before the Ottomans, and they were the protectors of Mecca and Medina, the holiest places in Islam. Also within their empire were several other historic centers of Islamic thought, such as Damascus and Cairo, giving them an ideological edge in the rivalry over leadership of the global Muslim community. Moreover, the Mamluks regularly harbored domestic rivals for the Ottoman throne, including Cem and Korkud. The Mamluks, ever fickle, could tip the balance in an Ottoman–Safavid war, so Selim had to carefully consider the Mamluk position in his looming conflict.
The Mamluks had previously favored the Safavids in order to check the rapid expansion of the Ottomans. To stave off another Mamluk–Safavid alliance, and to avoid fighting two empires on two fronts, Selim sent an envoy to Cairo in 1514 to inform the Mamluk sultan Ashraf Qansuh al-Ghawri, who was in his mid-seventies, of his plans to invade Iran and to invite him to join the war on the Ottoman side. Selim knew the Mamluks would refuse, so his message, composed in the flowery language of deference and fraternity, served as a thinly veiled threat—namely, that if the Mamluks would not support the Ottomans, they should stay out of the conflict altogether. If they chose to ally with the Safavids, the message intimated, Selim would unleash his impressive military against them. In a calculated demonstration of Ottoman power, Selim also dispatched one of his most trusted naval commanders to the Red Sea to support the Mamluk navy against the encroaching Portuguese.
Selim reached out to other regional powers too, widening the scope of the impending war. The Uzbeks of Central Asia controlled territory to the east of the Safavids, so Selim sent a letter to the leader of this enemy of his enemies, ‘Ubayd Allah Khan, suggesting that they might join forces to attack the Safavids simultaneously, in a pincer movement. ‘Ubayd Allah expressed interest, but he was too involved with fractures within his own empire, including a war against Babur, the eventual Mughal emperor, to be able to mount an effective offensive. Closer to home, remnants of the Ak Koyunlu still held territory in remote areas of the Caucasus between the Safavids and the Ottomans. Since it was mostly the Safavids who had displaced the Ak Koyunlu, Selim easily won their allegiance. He also recruited other tribal groups and principalities in eastern Anatolia. Foremost among these were the Kurds, whom he had cultivated as supporters during his governorship of Trabzon, defending their right to their ancestral lands and offering them some degree of local autonomy in exchange for troops and their recognition of Ottoman sovereignty.
IN APRIL 1514, WITH an economic embargo in place, the Mamluks more or less sidelined, and other powerful interests at his back, Selim marched out of Istanbul at the head of a 140,000-man army, setting up his first camp at Yenişehir, the town where he had killed Ahmed a year earlier. Eastern Anatolia had forged Selim as an administrator and military commander, providing him with the tools he needed to win the throne. It was both logical and symmetrical that Selim would head east on the first campaign of his sultanate.
As protocol dictated—but other rulers routinely ignored—en route to the battlefield Selim sent Shah Ismail an official declaration of war. The letter was written in Persian, so that Ismail would have no uncertainty about his feelings. Styling himself the “slayer of the wicked and the infidel, guardian of the noble and the pious; the warrior in the Path, the def
ender of the Faith; the champion, the conqueror; the lion, son and grandson of the lion; standard-bearer of justice and righteousness,” Selim addressed Ismail as “the possessor of the land of tyranny and perversion, the captain of the vicious, the chief of the malicious.” He went on to enumerate the abominations Ismail and his Shiite coreligionists had carried out against Islam: their destruction of mosques, the Shiite practice of temporary marriage, their contradictions of the Qur’an, and, worst of all, their massacres of Sunnis, the world’s true Muslims. In the face of this loathsome tyranny, and with the sanction of his two fatwas, Sultan Selim was fulfilling his duty to defend the one true faith against Shiite depravity: “The ancient obligation of extirpation, extermination, and expulsion of evil innovation must be the aim of our exalted aspiration. . . . [T]he lightning of our conquering sword shall uproot the untamed bramble grown to great heights in the path of the refulgent Divine Law and shall cast them down upon the dust of abjectness to be trampled under the hooves of our legions.”
Selim offered Ismail one final chance to save himself: surrender; turn over the entire Safavid Empire—its territories, resources, and peoples—to the Ottomans; confess the glory of Sunnism and convert; and profess allegiance to the majesty and wonder of Selim. In an age of eradications—the Jews from Spain and the Taino from Hispaniola, for example—Selim’s letter echoed some of the same language the Spanish used against their enemies. In all these cases, neither expulsion nor extermination was ever completed, of course. Selim included a verse of his own poetry in his letter to Ismail:
He whose face touches the dust of my threshold in submission
Will be enveloped in the shadow of my favor and my justice.
Thus, should Ismail choose the wicked blindness of his own bright light over the gloriously stark clarity of contrasts effected by Selim’s shadow, the Ottoman sultan promised to “crown the head of every gallows tree with the head of a crown-wearing Sûfî [Shiite] and clear that faction from the face of the earth.”
As the messenger carrying his letter raced ahead of the Ottoman army to Ismail’s court, Selim embarked on his slow march out from Yenişehir, deliberately snaking through all the major towns of north-central Anatolia, including Bolu, Ankara, Kastamonu, and his birthplace, Amasya. The march provided a prime opportunity for him to impress upon his subjects the stability inaugurated by his reign, to demonstrate the power and majesty of their new sovereign and his army, and to quash any possible thoughts of sedition. Before they saw anything, people would hear the pulsating booms of the drummers beating out a cadence. Then, thousands of troops would begin streaming into view and march past, instilling awe at the empire’s military might. Finally, Selim himself, cloaked in his finest silks and wearing a tall white turban, would appear, surrounded by his military entourage. Such a procession could easily last an entire day. For most in Anatolia, this was the first and only time they saw their sultan. Thus, still only two years into his reign, Selim’s war against the Safavids not only advanced his foreign policy, but also furthered his efforts to win over the people of his empire.
Selim’s foreign and domestic programs intertwined in an even bloodier way during his march, when he led one of the largest domestic massacres in Ottoman history, killing as many as forty thousand of the empire’s Shiite subjects. Early in his reign as sultan, he had created a register of all Shiites “age seven to seventy” living in the towns of Tokat, Samsun, Sivas, Amasya, and Yozgat. Now, as his army passed through these cities, they rounded up and executed every Shiite they could find—an echo of other military ventures such as the medieval Crusades, when Christian soldiers regularly killed Jews as they marched east from Europe to the Middle East. Most of the Ottoman Shiites were beheaded, although some were stoned or drowned to further terrorize the communities. Even though as governor of Trabzon Selim had murdered Shiites during the Şahkulu Rebellion, and at other times too, now as sultan he possessed military resources of exceptionally violent capacities. Of the vastly diverse populace he ruled—the majority of whom, we should remember, remained Christians—Ottoman Shiites were the most politically suspect and potentially dangerous. Unlike Christians, Jews, Kurds, or any other group in the empire, Ottoman Shiites had a foreign state actively claiming their allegiance and encouraging them to turn against their overlords. Driven by his passion to destroy the Safavids, Selim strove to eliminate the threat of what he saw as a Shiite fifth column arising in his army’s wake. He had learned this lesson from previous Shiite rebellions in the east and from his father’s failed efforts to relocate the Ottoman Shiites—which, rather than diluting their resistance, made the Şahkulu Rebellion only the more wide-ranging and hence potent. Selim’s massacre of the Shiites stood until the end of the nineteenth century as the largest domestic population purge in Ottoman history, and it is remembered and mourned to this day.
THE EASTERN ANATOLIAN TOWN of Sivas on the Red River boasted a thriving cotton economy and several Armenian monasteries and churches. At an elevation of over 4,000 feet, its winters were cruel. Selim and his troops arrived there on July 1, after three months of marching through central Anatolia, the summer’s beating sun making winter seem like a mere rumor. In Sivas, Selim rested, reviewed his battalions, restocked and reprovisioned, and met with his advisers to discuss the war plans. After a few days, the army started toward Erzincan, 150 miles to the east. Almost directly south of Trabzon, Erzincan represented the easternmost extremity of full Ottoman sovereignty in Anatolia. Although the city was squarely Ottoman, the territories to its east were rather fuzzier in their sovereignty, falling in a zone of overlapping Ottoman and Safavid control. Safavid dominion was more pronounced—the Safavid capital, Tabriz, was much closer than Istanbul—with the balance tipping more firmly toward the Safavids the farther east one went.
Just before Selim reached Erzincan at the end of July 1514, he received an envoy from Ismail’s court with the Safavid ruler’s response to his declaration of war. Striking a tone of mocking irony and insult, Ismail began his message by nostalgically longing for the days of Selim’s father, when the Ottomans and Safavids lived in peace and harmony (which they rarely ever had). In another insult couched as praise, Ismail lauded Selim’s remarkable accomplishments as governor of Trabzon. Then, relentless in his braggadocio, the Safavid shah wrote that he could easily have invaded eastern Anatolia long before, but he thought it unnecessary since most of the people in the region were for all intents and purposes already his subjects. In fact, he even found this response to Selim’s letter an enormous waste of his time, an annoyance that he had postponed until after a hunting trip. The bellicose tone of Selim’s letter, Ismail added, clearly indicated just how ill-prepared and unworthy he was to be the leader of a state; perhaps the letter was, he suggested, “the mere fabrications of the opium-clouded minds of certain secretaries and scribes.” Taunting Selim—indeed, daring him to invade—Ismail ended his message with a threat couched in verse:
Bitter experience has taught that in this world of trial
He who falls upon the house of ‘Alî [the Shiites] always falls.
Furious, Selim ordered Ismail’s envoy to be slain on the spot.
Selim’s response to Ismail’s churlish letter, written in Erzincan in early August 1514, offered fresh insults and threats. With this message, Selim also sent Ismail a few “gifts”—a rag, a staff, a toothbrush, prayer beads, and a begging bowl: the accoutrements of a Sufi—implying that Ismail was no better than the mendicant mystics who were his ancestors. Ismail answered the challenge of Selim’s obnoxious gifts with a present of his own—a box of opium, insinuating again that the leaders of the Ottoman Empire were drug addicts whose reason was clouded by hallucinations.
After this pas de deux, Selim and his soldiers marched out of Erzincan. Before leaving, he ordered forty thousand of his troops to retreat west to secure the area between Kayseri and Sivas, where a Shiite uprising had broken out in response to his massacres—exactly the type of internal rebellion he had hoped to avoid. He co
ntinued eastward with his main force toward Erzurum, where he dispatched to Ismail yet another barbed, aggressive message. Selim’s innovation this time was to dub Ismail a woman, recommending that on the battlefield he wear a chador (veil) instead of armor.
Near Erzurum, far from the Ottoman heartland, Selim’s army entered territories only recently deserted by the Safavids, who had sacked and burned everything before making their retreat. This scorched-earth policy succeeded in weakening the Ottoman army and drawing it farther east, into regions of Safavid strength. By the late summer of 1514, Selim’s troops had thinned from 140,000 to around 120,000, and they were running low on supplies. His soldiers were weary from almost six months of marching through the blasting heat of a long summer, unsure of what lay before them.
To boost their spirits and reinforce the supply lines, Selim ordered a fleet of provisioning ships—which he had organized before he left—to sail from Istanbul to Trabzon. From there, pack mules transported the supplies 150 miles to Erzincan and then another 150 miles to Erzurum. But the routes challenged the burdened mules and their handlers, as the terrain was roadless, mountainous, and slow. Ultimately, it proved impossible to supply so many soldiers this way. The men grew increasingly disgruntled. Selim, realizing that he could not sustain his soldiers’ bodies or spirits much longer, wanted—indeed, needed—war. Moreover, if he failed to deliver his men to the battlefield quickly, the season’s window for war would close.
Word reached Selim in Erzurum that the Safavid army had encamped on the plains of a high valley named Chaldiran, another 250 miles to the east (in what is now northwestern Iran). Chaldiran floated in the mountains between the two empires at an elevation of 6,000 feet, an island of green in the rugged territory between the Sunni and Shiite states. Selim assumed that this camp served as Ismail’s frontier headquarters, a way-station through which to funnel men and matériel to the west. Thus, instead of waiting for their two armies to meet somewhere between Chaldiran and Erzurum, Selim resolved to march his forces as quickly as possible to strike the Safavids at Chaldiran itself. He rallied his troops to prepare for this one last push to begin the war they all craved. It took a week—longer than Selim would have liked—to collect the military supplies and food the army needed to carry to the battlefield.
