by Alan Mikhail
The increasingly bellicose Ottoman–Mamluk competition for the caliphate manifested itself, perhaps oddly at first glance, through gift-giving, one of the primary tools of early modern diplomacy. Around the world, sovereigns used gifts not only as markers of alliance between states but, even more so, as missives of one-upmanship in a politics of rivalry and threat. Two gifts from the middle of the fifteenth century reflect how the unmatched prestige of the caliphate figured prominently in the increasingly acrimonious relations between the Mamluks and the Ottomans. In 1440, the Mamluk sultan sent to Istanbul a Qur’an purported to have belonged to ‘Uthman, the third leader of the early Muslim community after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632. ‘Uthman is a figure of monumental stature in Islamic history. Not only is he one of the four leaders known as the Rightly Guided Caliphs, who personally knew and immediately succeeded the Prophet, but he also produced the first canonical written text of the Qur’an. Because the revelations Muhammad received from the angel Gabriel and then taught to his followers remained an oral tradition for several decades, a number of divergent versions emerged. ‘Uthman reconciled these into a standard edition, destroyed all of the previous ones, and then distributed this text, known as the ‘Uthmanic codex, as the only sanctioned version of the Qur’an. In sending such an obviously precious and sacred object to their rival, the Mamluks sought to impress upon the Ottomans their wealth and power as the caliphs of the Muslim world and possessors of the heritage of Islam. Clearly, the price of gifting this object was well worth making the ideological point that something as valuable even as the ‘Uthmanic codex was an object with which they could part, given their vast collection of treasures.
A few years later, after the Ottoman seizure of Constantinople in 1453, Mehmet II retorted with a gift of his own. As part of his imperial embassy to the Mamluks to relate the news of his glorious conquest, he sent an emissary directly to Mecca with a personal message to the custodians of that city’s holy sites. Mehmet wrote, “We have sent to you personally two thousand florins of pure gold, taken as booty from the conquest, and another seven thousand florins for the poor . . . in Mecca and Medina.” In bypassing, and thus disrespecting, the authority of the Mamluk sultan to engage directly with the rulers of Mecca, Mehmet hoped to win over these important leaders by impressing upon them the Ottomans’ wealth and grandeur. Having defeated Byzantium, one of history’s most powerful empires, a descendant of Rome, the Ottomans now uniquely combined the legacy of Rome with Islam and hoped soon to solidify their Islamic credentials by adding to their state the most important places in the Muslim world.
The ideological antagonisms that shaped this diplomacy of gift-giving stood alongside more mundane modes of imperial interaction. For more than two hundred years, the Mamluk and Ottoman empires had shaped each other. While the Safavids had only recently emerged in the region—and after Chaldiran seemed to have a questionable future—the Mamluks and the Ottomans had risen to power with and against each other, their conflict and collaboration in part determining their military structures, regional politics, and economic policies. Founded within fifty years of each other, the Mamluk and Ottoman empires, as that era’s most powerful Muslim states, essentially divided up the eastern Mediterranean. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—depending on the period, the geographic location, and the issue at hand—the two powers toggled back and forth between enmity and alliance, relentlessly vying for and sometimes sharing authority and territory.
In a teetering world of rapidly shifting geopolitics and rival claims to universal sovereignty, it often proved of enormous mutual benefit for the two empires to work together. They held the Middle East, Balkans, and North Africa as two Sunni Muslim empires fending off Christian polities to the west and the descendants of the Mongols and other Central Asian powers to the east. Together they controlled trade between East and West, and cooperated in their regulation of commerce, security, and transportation. The Ottomans supplied the Mamluks, in forest-free Egypt, with wood from Anatolia; in return, Mamluk merchants carried spices and textiles from the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea north to Bursa, Izmir, and other major Ottoman trading cities. The Ottomans furnished the Mamluks with slaves from the Caucasus, many of whom eventually became the elite of Mamluk society, much as the Janissaries did in the Ottoman Empire. The Mamluks, for their part, delivered to the Ottomans slaves from their holdings in Sudan. The two empires’ common objective of maintaining the free flow of commodities, cash, slaves, and agricultural products between their markets created a shared interest in preventing the encroachment of Europeans in the eastern Mediterranean, and, as we will see, in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean.
In addition to their shared political strategies and fraternal ideological worldviews, the two Sunni empires had soldered their relations with several intermarriages. For instance, the Mamluk sultan Barsbay, who ruled the empire between 1422 and 1438, married an Ottoman princess related to the Ottoman sultan Murad II, Mehmet II’s father.
AFTER HIS DEFEAT OF the Safavids at Chaldiran, Selim redirected his military focus southward. He became convinced that full control of the Ottomans’ eastern holdings could come only with the elimination of the Mamluks, who now posed the greatest territorial and ideological challenge to his empire. As long as they ruled in the Middle East, he would never be able to claim leadership of the global Muslim community. His confidence surging, Selim shifted the established Ottoman policy of uneasy coexistence with the Mamluks to one of direct military confrontation.
Beyond his generally warlike character, several factors motivated Selim to move on the Mamluks. First, of course, he viewed the Mamluks’ protection of his rivals during the succession crisis—Korkud, and one of Ahmed’s sons—as a personal and political betrayal. Because Selim’s succession battle was bloodier and more complicated than his father’s had been, he took the Mamluks’ support of his half-brothers much more seriously than Bayezit had taken their support of Cem. Any friend of Selim’s enemy became his enemy, too.
Additionally, in the realm of global geopolitics, Selim presumed that the Mamluks and the Safavids would always align against him, since they had a common interest in checking the Ottomans’ exploding power throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East. The Mamluks mourned the outcome of the Battle of Chaldiran, for, were it not for Ismail’s wretched condition after 1514, the two empires might have led a joint military campaign against Selim. Breaking with established practice, the Mamluks sent no embassy of congratulation to Istanbul after Chaldiran, and the Mamluk sultan banned celebrations of the Ottoman military victory (by contrast, the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople had led to days of festivities in Mamluk Cairo). And a few years later, when the Ottomans invaded Mamluk territory, the Safavids planned to send troops.
The joint Mamluk–Safavid interest against the Ottomans was particularly pronounced in southeastern Anatolia, the three empires’ only point of territorial contiguity, which made it effectively the region’s landlocked navel. Ever since the Ottomans first emerged as an empire in mid-fourteenth-century Anatolia, a string of buffer states along the Mamluk–Ottoman border in northern Syria and southern Anatolia had helped to sustain the long peace. Along the west–east line that included the cities of Adana, Aintab, Urfa, Diyarbakir, and Mardin, large tribal principalities had managed to remain largely independent by skillfully playing the Ottomans and Mamluks against each other, raiding and trading, cutting deals, switching allegiance easily and often, but always maintaining the balance of peace. Because this buffer zone was far from both the Ottomans’ and the Mamluks’ loci of power, neither had invested the colossal resources that would have been needed to exercise direct sovereign control over the region. In all likelihood, such an effort would have been a spark for confrontation.
In 1466, nearly fifty years before Selim won control of Diyarbakir (however shaky that control was immediately after Chaldiran), the Ottoman–Mamluk buffer zone had begun to erode. In that year, Mehmet moved to annex part of the region around the town of Aintab. In respo
nse, the Mamluk sultan Qaitbay seized an old Byzantine hilltop castle far to the north, near the town of Kayseri. As both powers chipped away at their territorial buffer, they raised the imperial stakes. After Mehmet died on campaign in 1481—a campaign, it was rumored, intended to face down the Mamluks in northern Syria—Qaitbay took advantage of the temporary chaos that the Ottoman succession struggle caused to extend Mamluk power further into the rapidly shrinking buffer zone. Then, in 1485, after he had secured the sultanate, Bayezit struck back, sponsoring an invasion of the territory the Mamluks had just seized in the now increasingly militarized region between the two empires. He sent arms and other resources to the Dulkadir dynasty, one of the local tribal principalities, who seized the opportunity to push southward and conquer land in northern Syria, before the Mamluks retook it. Thus began a period of indeterminate border wars between the Ottomans and Mamluks. In the years between 1485 and 1491, both empires led raids against the other—directly and through proxies—gaining and then losing territory, killing and capturing each other’s soldiers.
That this region was the point of greatest distance from the Mamluk, Ottoman, and later Safavid capitals suited its dominant pastoral groups. That said, whichever empire could dominate the rocky landscape of southeastern Anatolia would achieve a distinct tactical advantage. The Mamluks and the Safavids rightly saw the region as the Ottomans’ most vulnerable point of attack, its largely undefended soft underbelly. Although the area was almost as distant from the Mamluks’ capital, Cairo, as it was from Istanbul, they already held the region’s major city, Aleppo, giving them a military staging point. As for the Safavids, the general lawlessness in southeastern Anatolia offered them opportunities, even after Chaldiran, to move both Shiite propaganda and Shiite troops into the region.
Selim understood his vulnerability in the Middle East’s “navel,” especially the opportunity it presented for the Mamluks and the Safavids to launch a joint military operation against him. This explains in large measure why he made Diyarbakir a focus of attention during the Chaldiran campaign. Diyarbakir functioned as the gateway southward from Anatolia into Syria, and controlling it allowed Selim to contemplate the possibility of other strategic victories. Solidifying Ottoman sovereignty over Diyarbakir, along with much of the Kurdish territory around it, fortified his frontier against the pacified Safavids and extended his border with the Mamluks to the south and east. As was the case with earlier raids into this buffer region, the 1514 annexation of Diyarbakir shrank the space between the empires, drawing them closer to direct contact and thus vastly increasing the potential for military confrontation.
Selim’s determination to invade and destroy the colossal Mamluk Empire and take over all of its territories in the Middle East, in North Africa, and on the Red Sea would be the largest military venture any Ottoman sultan had ever attempted. But Selim, the eternal underdog, knew what it meant to face a much more powerful opponent—one more lavishly resourced and historically advantaged. Far beyond the plotting, intrigue, and violence of his succession battle, Selim’s war against his Sunni sibling would demand that he overcome earth-rattling odds.
AS HE HAD DEMONSTRATED before, Selim understood the virtue of patience and the need for exceptional reconnaissance before war. To secure information about the Mamluks’ on-the-ground resources, troop numbers, and positions, he enlisted a veritable army of spies from within the Mamluk Empire. The use of spies and double agents was, as we have seen, nothing new in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, but increasing geopolitical tensions made covert intelligence gathering a vital component of early sixteenth-century imperial politics. Venice led the way, with the world’s most extensive and robust network of spies. The espionage agents Selim had inherited as sultan kept him constantly abreast of the current state of rivals’ and enemies’ military circumstances, preparedness, and supply chains. He knew when the Mamluks repositioned armaments, when infighting occurred among their military commanders, and when they maneuvered funds to free up cash for war. The Mamluks—and of course the Ottomans too—always worried about spies in their midst, and as the two empires lurched closer to war, both sides did all they could to ferret out and purge those they suspected of being in the pay of the other side.
One of the most prominent, and most useful, of the Ottomans’ spies in the Mamluk Empire was Khayr Bey, the Mamluk governor of Aleppo and the highest official in this enormously important city, which had been repeatedly pummeled over the past decade. Like all the Mamluk elite and much of the Ottoman elite, he had begun his career as a slave. Given his origins in Abkhazia on the Black Sea, Khayr as a youngster was likely funneled via Ottoman slave markets to Mamluk territory. He had worked his way up through the imperial bureaucracy and was by all accounts a gifted representative of Cairo—efficiently collecting taxes, ensuring the protection of foreign merchants, and maintaining order throughout the city.
After Istanbul and Cairo, Aleppo, with its iconic hilltop citadel, was the third largest international trading center in the Middle East. At the crossroads of all overland trade routes to and from the Mediterranean, it was effectively a landlocked port city. Aleppo’s exquisite covered bazaar, the largest in the world, with more than thirteen kilometers of internal streets, offered wares from China, Spain, and all points in between. Holes in its vaulted stone roof allowed light to flood into the market and provided air circulation as customers and traders haggled over furs, leather, metalwork, shoes, textiles, and endless foodstuffs. Abutting the buffer zone between the Ottomans and the Mamluks, Aleppo was a frontier city between the empires, a Mamluk bulwark against their enemies to the north. Well aware that he would have to seize this walled entrepôt in order to achieve any success against the Mamluks, Selim did whatever he could to make inroads into Aleppo and the surrounding region. He had the perfect mole in Khayr Bey.
Because of Aleppo’s relative proximity to Istanbul, in September 1497 Khayr was tasked with journeying to the Ottoman capital as the Mamluks’ official representative to inform Sultan Bayezit of the death of Sultan Qaitbay and the accession to the throne of his young son, Muhammad al-Nasir. Khayr ended up staying in Istanbul for more than a year, during which time he was awed by the city’s riches and pleasures and deeply impressed by the effluence of imperial soldiers returning from raids or battles with seemingly endless spoils. On just one day in late 1498, for instance, Bayezit received two high-ranking military men. The former privateer and now imperial admiral Kemal Reis was reporting on a mission to Khayr’s very own Mamluk court. On his return voyage from Egypt, Kemal had been attacked by a flotilla of the Knights Hospitaller of St. John from Rhodes, but he successfully defended his ship against them, even taking five of their vessels. From these ships came vast treasures and hundreds of captives that Kemal delivered to Bayezit in Khayr’s presence. Later that day, one of Bayezit’s most trusted frontier warlords, Malkoçoğlu Bali Bey, returned to Istanbul from a campaign in the Balkans, where he too had seized vast amounts of cash, property, and slaves. Khayr Bey, overwhelmed by all this wealth, the lavishness of the Ottoman court, and the hegemonic power of the sultan, was easily bribed with cash, slaves, and promises of further wealth and power to flip his allegiance.
While there is no information on the details of the deal, what is clear is that once Khayr returned to Aleppo, he began a secret correspondence with Bayezit’s court, conveying useful information about Mamluk affairs. This crucial reconnaissance continued when Selim assumed the throne. Both Ottoman sovereigns sent Khayr a steady stream of gifts and money in exchange for the espionage he provided. Khayr’s treason would eventually be revealed, and he would forever be known derisively in Mamluk historical sources as Khain Bey instead of Khayr Bey—a play on words, as khain means traitor.
IN THE SPRING OF 1515, having wintered in Amasya after their retreat from Tabriz, Selim and his soldiers arrived back in Istanbul just as his palace gardeners began planting that year’s tulips: magenta and blush, canary and garnet. Joyous news came of the birth of his second gran
dchild, a boy named Mustafa, who was described, even in his youth, as possessing “extraordinary talent.” Born in Manisa, where Suleyman now served as governor, Mustafa and his father would eventually partake of the well-worn Ottoman tradition of filial animosity. After fathering several more sons, Suleyman would have Mustafa, his most potent rival, strangled in 1553.
In order to ramp up for war against the Mamluks, Selim had to rebuild morale and support among the Janissaries after their yearlong campaign on the eastern frontier. To achieve this, he deployed the power of pomp and a martial esprit de corps, lavishing riches and ceremonial honors on his soldiers as rewards for their victory at Chaldiran. They were celebrated with royal processions and banquets extolling their bravery and strength against the Safavid enemy. At the same time, Selim ordered the rearming of his forces: bullets and armor were stockpiled, new cannons were cast, new swords were forged. Even more important, he worked to retool the forces who would wield these weapons. As he had done throughout his career, Selim expanded the ranks of the army beyond the elite of the Janissaries, seeking out irregular fighters who would be loyal to him alone. He had always despised soldiers who spent their lives rising through the ranks, men who excelled more at administrative bickering than they did on the battlefield. He cleared the imperial forces of many of these men—executing some, discharging others—and replaced them with faithful companions from earlier operations, men who had proven themselves bloodthirsty and committed to the empire above all else, even their own careers and lives.
The same summer that the Portuguese secured their hold on Hormuz, Selim set out to strengthen his navy. The Chaldiran campaign had revealed the weakness of the Ottoman fleet, as the ships that sailed to Trabzon to reprovision the army had proved wholly inadequate, and, after this long venture in the Black Sea, they were now even more desperately in need of attention. A successful invasion of the Mamluk Empire would require a steady line of ships based in eastern Mediterranean ports, to provision the army as it marched south and to support its attacks with cannon fire from the sea. The ultimate prize—Cairo—was much farther overland from Istanbul than Chaldiran was, and Selim was determined that his army should not grow as disgruntled, tired, and low on supplies as it had on that campaign.
