Southwest Asia, 1300–1800: Ottomans, Safavids, and the Turco-Persianate Imperial Tradition
Jack Fairey
The lands of Southwest Asia, bounded by the waters of the Mediterranean, Indian, Black, and Caspian seas and by the rivers of the Nile and Danube, hold a special place in the global history of empire. The region has been the staging ground for some of the world’s earliest imperial polities, dating back to what many historians consider the first such state: the Akkadian Empire of the third millennium bc.1 The lands of the “Near East” would go on to form the geographical and spiritual core of many of the most important empires in history, ranging from the Macedonian Empire of Alexander the Great to the Byzantine and Abbasid empires. As a result, the region has been a particularly productive and influential laboratory for the development of imperial ideas, practices, and institutions. Southwest Asia witnessed, for example, the earliest and most successful attempts to combine empire-building with monotheism in several different forms, beginning with Akhenaten’s promotion of the cult of Aten in Egypt during the fourteenth century bc and reaching its apogee between the third and eighth centuries ad with the Sassanid adoption of a militant Zoroastrianism, the Roman adoption of Christianity, and the creation of the first Islamic caliphate.2
This long association with imperial forms continued into the early-modern era and at the dawn of the 1500s the region had come to be divided between two great empires: those of the Ottoman and Safavid dynasties. Despite their many differences, these two rival empires shared similar origins, drew on a large body of common literary and imperial culture, and heavily influenced each other over three centuries. They can therefore fruitfully be studied together as what we might call the “Turco-Persianate empires of Southwest Asia.” The geographical qualifier is important, since the two empires belonged to a larger Turco-Persianate cultural and political world that linked the courts of Istanbul and Isfahan with those of Bukhara, Samarqand, Kabul, Delhi, and Lahore. This chapter is therefore linked in vital ways with those on Inner and South Asia.
History of the Imperial Idea: Persia
Two particularly dominant lineages of empire had emerged in Southwest Asia by the era of the Crusades: those of Persia and of the Greco-Roman world. The Persian was the elder of the two traditions, tracing its origins to the Median and Achaemenid empires of the sixth to fifth centuries bce. It also exercised the greatest influence over the region and over the Ottoman and Safavid empires in particular, whereas the Greco-Roman tradition became more associated with Christendom. In Persian literary culture, the art of being an imperial ruler or shāh was seen as coeval with the origins of organized society and a critical factor in human advancement. The first king of Persian legend, Keyumars, was responsible for introducing not only governance by “crown and throne” (tāj va takht) to the world, but also religion, clothing, domestication of animals, and all the other benefits of civilization. Ferdowsi, in his epic Book of Kings (Shāhnāma), neatly encapsulated this ideology of imperial benevolence in his description of the succession of Keyumars’s grandson:
The just and prudent Hushang was now master of the world, and he set the crown on his head and ruled in his grandfather’s place. He reigned for forty years, and his mind was filled with wisdom, his heart with justice. Sitting on the royal throne, he said, “From this throne I rule over the seven climes, and everywhere my commands are obeyed.” Mindful of God’s will, he set about establishing justice. He helped the world flourish, and filled the face of the earth with his just rule.3
The most distinctive feature of the Persian “shahs of shahs” (shāhanshāh) was thus that their authority was universal in scope, embracing all seven of the concentric climes into which Ptolemaic and Avestan geography divided the surface of the earth. An emperor did not have to control literally every inch of the globe to qualify as world-ruling; it sufficed to have a foothold in each clime (ekalim/kishvar).4 While global extension was the external mark of imperial authority, its essence was supposed to be righteousness rather than oppressive violence. Every work of Persianate political theory would repeat the maxims of Ardashīr I, founder of the Sassanid dynasty, that “kingship and religion are twins” and that the legitimacy of a ruler depended on his ability to provide justice, prosperity, and protection.5 So central was virtue to this imperial ideal that God was believed to endow shahs with a divine splendor (farr) that shone perceptibly from their faces and was depicted in art as a halo or flaming aura.6
History of the Imperial Idea: Greco-Roman World
Whereas Persian imperial ideology appeared early and in a relatively well-developed form, the Greco-Roman world moved more fitfully toward a different vision of empire (Greek: basileia, Latin: imperium). The main trajectory of political life in the Mediterranean world during the 500s–200s bce was republican and antimonarchic in the main, and prone to defining itself specifically in opposition to the “tyranny” of empires—which were associated with Persia.7 This tension appears in the very word imperium, which began during the early years of the Roman Republic as an intrinsically antimonarchic term identifying those civil magistrates who, in the absence of a king, exercised the right of life or death over other citizens. The cognate title of imperator—or commander—was similarly a republican honorific awarded by the Roman senate to victorious generals.8 Even after powerful consuls like Julius and Augustus Caesar managed to concentrate monarch-like power in their hands, they were careful to eschew the title of “king” (rex) in preference for republican honorifics like “extraordinary magistrate” (dictator) and “first senator” (princeps)—titles that emphasized their dependence on the consent of senate, army, and citizenry. Imperialism in the Greco-Roman world would thus continue to be linked over the centuries to a sense of delegated power, circumscribed authority, and military command.9
Empire in the Greco-Roman world would also remain permanently linked to the notion of the city-state, albeit one expanded to become a cosmopolis—the whole world a single city as the orator Aelius Aristides boasted in 155 ad.10 This sense of the empire as city-state writ large meant that Rome and its successors made a fundamental distinction between “citizens” and subject peoples that transcended both class and ethnicity. The centrality of the imperial city also meant that whereas Persianate empires like the Safavids were free to construct their own imperial capitals where they wished, the influence of Greco-Roman ideals on the Ottomans meant that they could not claim the imperial mantle until they had conquered Constantinople in 1453. As the humanist George of Trebizond wrote in a letter to Sultan Mehmed II in 1466: “he is emperor who by right possesses the seat of the empire, but the seat of the Roman Empire is Constantinople.”11
In order to bolster their relatively uncertain position relative to “the City,” emperors in the Greco-Roman world looked to divine sanction. This was most notable in the Greek-speaking East, where Macedonian, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Persian traditions of rule encouraged Hellenic rulers from the time of Alexander the Great to be franker about the monarchic nature of their reign and to claim divine parentage or recognition as minor divinities in their own right as “savior” (sōtēr) and “manifest god” (theos epiphanēs). The emperors of Rome would eventually give up such claims in the fourth century ad in favor of a new form of divine association: the adoption of Christianity as the imperial faith. Emperors were henceforward no longer gods, but instead—as the new Church declared Constantine and his mother Helena—“equals to the Apostles” (isapostoloi) who preserved, promoted, and represented the Christian faith. In the opinion of grateful clergymen like Eusebius, Christianity and empire were henceforward “two great powers proceeding from a single starting point” since both opposed the unity of God to the evils of polytheism in religion and polyarchy in politics.12 This being so, there could only be one true empire on earth, just as there was only one true faith. All other states existed through delegation or usurpation, and all princes owed their obedience ultimately to the Roman emperor. Christians gave expression to their sense of the sacral quality of their emperors by surrounding them with elaborate rituals and symbols, ranging from the reservation of purple as an imperial color to the practice of prostrating before them (proskynēsis).13 So close had faith and imperial identity become intertwined by the Middle Ages that Patriarch Anthony IV of Constantinople could declare in 1395: “it is impossible for Christians to have a church but not an empire. For the empire and the church have a great unity and community and cannot be separated from one another.”14
History of the Imperial Idea: Caliphate
The convergence of imperial and religious identities reached its acme in the mid-seventh century with the expansion of Islam outward from the Arabian Peninsula to overwhelm Sassanid Persia and all of Roman North Africa and the Levant. Like the caesars and shahs before them, the Umayyad caliphs and their Abbasid successors embodied the identity of religion and state (dīn wa dawla). As deputy (khalīfa) of the Prophet, the caliph was formally “commander of the faithful” (amīr al mu’minīn) and head of the entire Islamic community (ummah). Islam provided the caliphate with a new state language (Arabic), a legal system (the Sharia), and a pool of judges, scholars, and potential bureaucrats (the ulema).15 Religion also provided the caliphate with a central organizational principle for organizing and administering its subject populations. At the pinnacle of society were Muslim Arabs; below them were converts to Islam from other ethnic groups who were affiliated to the dominant group as clients (mawālī) of individuals; finally, non-Muslims were allowed to remain and organize themselves into semiautonomous communities so long as they accepted a contractual arrangement (dhimmah) with the caliphate pledging their obedience, payment of a special tax (jizya), and acceptance of a series of legal disabilities and restrictions. The mawālī system of patronage would disappear following the Abbasid Revolution of 750, but the division between Muslims and non-Muslim “people of the contract” (‘ahl al-dhimmah) would remain a fundamental feature of governance in Southwest Asia down to the establishment of the Ottoman and Safavid empires.16
Just as the Roman Empire had grown out of the city-states of the Mediterranean, the caliphate showed its origins in the tribal society of Arabia. The caliphate itself was limited to descendants of the Quraysh tribe to which the Prophet had belonged, and every branch of state from the army to the civil service was riven by disputes between northern (Qaysī) and southern (Yemeni) tribal groupings and between different branches of the Quraysh tribe (particularly the Banū Hāshim and Banū Umayya).17 This was an important development as the Roman and Persian empires had ruled over tribal peoples, but tribalism per se had played little role in the life of the imperial center. In comparison, their successors in the region from the Umayyads to the Safavids gave tribal groups and political concepts much greater prominence (albeit often unwillingly). The incorporation into the Islamic world of many other nomadic peoples from Inner Asia and North Africa helped, moreover, to ensure that tribalism would remain a politically potent force in Southwestern Asia.
For all these innovations, of course, the Umayyad caliphs and their successors down to the Seljukid sultans also absorbed large amounts of imperial practices, images, and ideas from both the Byzantine and Sassanid administrations they had supplanted. Historians have suggested, for example, that the iqṭā‘ system of prebendal grants, which would become a characteristic feature of virtually all Turco-Persianate states, derived its ultimate origins from the Byzantine system of assigning tax revenue to state servitors known as pronoia.18 Similarly, Muslim scholars assimilated many elements of Hellenic thought, such as Greek theories of social evolution and the use of Galen’s medical theories about the humors of the body as a conceptual tool for thinking about the “health” of states and societies.19 Overall, however, the Umayyads and Abbasids drew most heavily and obviously on Persian court culture in their efforts to transform, in Andrew Marsham’s words, “Arabian tribal customs of consultative leadership ... into a theatre of universal imperial monarchy.”20
Well into the ninth century, Southwest Asia continued to be divided along a bipolar axis between the two main strains of imperial tradition. Even as the Byzantine and Abbasid empires declined, their main challengers continued to align themselves with either Greco-Roman Christendom or Persianate Islam. The Serbian and Bulgarian empires, for example, presented themselves as legitimate inheritors of the mantle of the Roman Empire, while Armenian and Georgian princes eagerly adopted Byzantine titles and practices. On the Iranian plateau, local dynasts such as the Ṣaffārids, Sāmānids, and Būyids consciously modeled their courts on that of Baghdad and presented themselves either as vassals of the caliph or as successors in their own right to the Sassanid shahs.21
Between the ninth to thirteenth centuries, the arrival in the region of successive waves of nomadic raiders, mercenaries, slaves, and settlers from Central Asia disrupted this bipolar status quo and hastened the decline of both Byzantine and Abbasid rule. This period of disruption began in earnest with the arrival of large populations of Oğuz Turks (also known as Türkmen) on the Iranian and Anatolian plateaus in the 800s–900s, both as nomads with their herds and as military slaves and foederati. At first, the newcomers strove to legitimize their power within existing imperial frameworks. Turkic warlords like the Ghaznavids (977–1186) and the Seljuks quickly assimilated Islam and Persianate court culture and posed as protectors of the caliphate. In addition to the authority they enjoyed over their own people as chieftains, Seljuk dynasts claimed to be “sultans of East and West”—regents who ruled, ostensibly, on behalf of the Abbasid caliphs.22 The influx of peoples from Central Asia became more disruptive from the 1000s to 1200s, however, as they increased in numbers and failed to establish regimes as stable as those they were displacing. The Seljuks, for example, struggled to control the other Türkmen groups arriving from Central Asia. Many of the latter evaded obedience by moving westward toward the Anatolian frontier with the Byzantine Empire.23 The Byzantines were even less successful at managing these incursions, and Byzantine rule in central Anatolia collapsed following the Seljuk victory at Manzikert in 1071.24 The Seljuk Empire itself rapidly fragmented after the death of Sultan Malikshāh in 1092, as the brother, sons, governors, and vassals of the deceased sultan turned against each other.
The arrival of the Mongols, beginning with the destruction of the Khwarazmian Empire in 1219 and crowned by the sack of Baghdad in 1258, marked a major watershed in the imperial history of the region, as it did almost everywhere else in Asia. The following century saw increased migration westward from Inner Asia, the final dissolution of the Abbasid Caliphate, and the reduction of the Seljuk and Byzantine empires to shadows of their former selves. In their place, the Mongols briefly unified most of Persia, Mesopotamia, eastern Anatolia, and the Caucasus under Hülegü and his heirs as a “subordinate khanate” (Ilkhanate) of the Mongol Empire between 1256 and 1335. As already described in Chapter 1, however, the power and cohesion of the Ilkhanate was to be short-lived. By the end of the 1300s, all of the traditional pillars of imperial legitimacy in Southwestern Asia—Rome, Persia, the Caliphate, and even the Chinggisid Ulus—thus lay in ruins, with little certainty over what would arise to take their place.
At the cultural-civilizational level, three centuries of conquests and migrations helped to create a new hybridized culture in most of the Islamic world that fused together Persian, Arabic, Turkic, and Mongol elements. Politically, however, the repeated pattern of disruption and dissolution meant centuries of political fragmentation as centralized authorities gave way to a succession of ephemeral principalities dominated by Inner Asian newcomers. Iranian historians thus refer to the post-Mongol era as the period of “the Türkmen dynasties,” while Turkish historians refer to it as the era of “frontier chieftaincies” (uç beyliks) and “splinter kingdoms” (tevâif-i mülûk). Beneath the multiplicity of states, however, lay many underlying similarities arising from common culture and socioeconomic structures. Historians have detected, for example, a basic tension between two different modes of state organization within all the states built upon Turkic martial prowess and Persian statecraft. In each case, the nomadic horsemen who provided the mainstay of Türkmen armies tended to prefer centrifugal, confederative political structures that reproduced the interior life of the war-band, with its comradeship, freedom, ties of loyalty, and the generous sharing of spoils gained through constant, low-level raiding (gaza/akın).25
The same groups also tended to insist on the preservation of characteristically Inner Asian political traditions such as collective sovereignty and the practice of tanistry among the menfolk of the ruling family.26 In religion, the Türkmen also favored less conventional forms of Islam such as Sufism and Shi’ism. Historians such as Babak Rahimi thus speak of the emergence across the Anatolian and Iranian plateaus of a common “Sufi-knightly culture,” combining “mystical religiosity with the warrior ethos of bravery, independence and, above all, honour.” Opposed to these was the bureaucratic-imperial state faction composed by princes, their courts and personal slaves, educated urbanites, and the orthodox ulema, who supported the princes in order to revive centralized political rule and the reign of Sunni Islamic law.27 In Iranian history, this idea of a fundamental struggle between “Turk and Tajik” (Türkmen nomad and Persian urbanite) over control of the state dates back to Seljuk times and also formed an important part of Ottoman historiography.28 The late 1300s to early 1400s thus witnessed a new synthesis of political traditions as Abbasid, Sāmānid, and Seljuk court culture combined in new ways with what many historians have referred to as the “steppe (or inner) Asian imperial tradition” of the Mongol and Türkmen ruling elites.29 It is out of this chaotic but creative milieu that the Ottoman and Safavid empires would emerge.
Ottomans: From Beylik to Sultanate
Ibn Khaldūn observed in the fourteenth century that the formation of any lasting polity depended on ʻaṣabīyyah—an esprit de corps or sense of group solidarity.30 Nomadic peoples like the Türkmen and Mongols possessed such group solidarity in spades during their rise to prominence, but struggled to build a new identity that could incorporate outsiders or combat fissiparous tendencies within the founding elite. The success of both Ottomans and Safavids thus depended on their ability to use imperial ideologies and practices to overcome both of these barriers.
The documented history of the Ottomans begins with the foundation of the first Ottoman state as one of the many Türkmen beyliks in the northwest corner of Anatolia (Byzantine Bithynia) in the early 1300s. The founder of the dynasty, Ertuğrul, was a leader of the Kayı clan of the Oğuz Turks in Merv, Turkmenistan, and a recent convert to Islam. Like many others, he had fled before the Mongol advance in the early 1200s and ended up enlisting under the banner of a junior branch of the Seljuk Sultanate that had established itself in Anatolia. While ostensibly in the service of this Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, Ertuğrul captured the small town of Thebasion (Söğüt) in 1231 and began to carve out a small fiefdom for himself in the Sakarya Valley. His son, Osman, therefore claimed authority as an emir or bey on three principal bases: (1) descent from the hereditary leaders of the Kayı clan; (2) vassalage to the Seljuk Sultan Kayqubad; and (3) de facto conquest of much of Bithynia between 1302 and 1337.31
The slow disintegration of the Sultanate of Rum following its submission to the Mongol Ilkhanate in 1243 after the battle of Kösedağ left vassals like Osman free to pursue their own aggrandizement. Key to the ability of Osman and his descendants to create an independent polity seems to have been their skill at building a new sense of ‘aṣabīyyah and legitimacy that did not depend on either Oğuz, Seljuk, or Byzantine antecedents. Exactly how the early Ottoman dynasts achieved this has been the subject of much controversy, but it seems clear that they managed to balance and reconcile the expectations of both “Turks and Tajiks.” On the one hand, the Ottomans identified themselves first and foremost as gazis, who welcomed all Muslims—and a great many renegade Christians—into the ranks of their war band. The seminal moment, according to Heath Lowry, seems to have been a meeting around 1320, when a small group of Türkmen chieftains and disgruntled Byzantine warlords agreed to form what Lowry has evocatively dubbed a “plundering confederacy” under Osman’s leadership.32 Karen Barkey has similarly stressed the importance to the future of the Ottoman state of their early success as social “brokers” and coalition builders between the different ethnic, religious, and political groups on the frontier.33 Another effect of these origins on the future empire was that the Ottoman state grew, in many senses, directly out of the household of the dynast. Osman began almost immediately to claim independence by minting his own coins around 1320, although he did so without giving himself any titles other than “Osman son of Ertuğrul.”34 In 1326 the Ottomans conquered their first sizable city, Bursa, which thereafter served as their first capital.
Another advantage that Osman possessed over most other frontier beys was that his lands immediately abutted the Byzantine Empire and the route across the Turkish Straits into Europe. He could therefore attract manpower with the prospect of perpetual warfare and its attendant spoils. The Byzantine civil war of 1341–47 provided a critical opportunity when one claimant to the throne, John VI Kantakouzinos, offered to marry his daughter, Theodora, to Osman’s heir, Orhan, and then invited Ottoman troops across the Dardanelles into Thrace to harry his rival’s forces.35 Between 1352 and 1354, the Ottomans used this opening to establish a permanent bridgehead on the Gallipoli Peninsula from which they launched forays in all directions. Decades of warfare had already exhausted the Byzantine, Serbian, and Bulgarian empires and Orhan’s successor, Murad I, expanded rapidly at their expense. By Murad’s death in 1389, the Ottomans had conquered all the lands of the second Bulgarian Empire, reduced the Serb princes and the Byzantine emperor himself to vassalage, and absorbed most of the neighboring emirates of Karası, Hamid, and Germiyan. From ca. 1365 to 1370, the Ottomans signaled their shift of focus to Europe by establishing a new and more splendid capital at Edirne (Adrianople).
Osman’s descendants from the time of Orhan began making grander political claims. The earliest monumental Ottoman inscription, from Bursa ca. 1337, describes Orhan as the “Exalted Great Emir, Warrior on behalf of God [i.e., Mujāhid], Sultan of the Gazis, Gazi son of the Gazi, Champion of the State and Religion, and of the Horizons, Hero of the Age.”36 A decade later, Orhan was styling himself “sultan of justice” (sulṭān al-‘adl).37 Such titles were still, however, relatively modest, especially in comparison with the sweeping imperial claims being made by their Byzantine, Bulgarian, Serbian, Mamluk, and Timurid rivals.38 Ottoman dynasts continued, in a sense, to represent themselves as primus inter pares for most of the 1300s and to rely on the loyal support of their retainers and clansmen. It is worth noting, for example, that two of Osman’s key military supporters, Evrenos Bey and Köse Mihali, were entitled malik (king) and amīr al-kabīr (great emir). As late as 1390, one of Köse Mihali’s descendants was recognized in official ottoman documents as Great Emir ... King of the Gazis and Mujahidin.39 What is most striking about Ottoman titulature in the 1300s, then, is that it was relatively modest, that it was all done in proper Arabic, and drew directly on Seljuk precedents.40
Ottomans: Imperialism as Crisis Management
While Ottoman imperial claims appeared during a period of expansion and military success, they became more developed and consistent during a period of reverses and uncertainty. The Ottomans suffered a particularly jarring and extended crisis in the first two decades of the 1400s that hinged precisely on questions of who the Ottomans were. Osman, Orhan, and Murad I (r. 1361–89) had presented themselves primarily as gazi emirs, whose authority rested lightly on the (mostly Türkmen and Christian) followers they led to wealth and glory. After Murad’s death in battle against the Serbs at Kosovo Polje in 1389, his son Bayezid behaved much more like the imperial rulers that the Ottomans were replacing. For raisons d’état, for example, Bayezid launched lightning campaigns of conquest not only against Christian states in the Balkans but also against Muslim neighbors in Anatolia. He thus rapidly subdued the beyliks of Saruhan, Aydın, Menteşe, Kastamonu, İsfendiyaroğlu, and Karaman in 1390–91.
Bayezid I was also the first Ottoman ruler to attempt to move away from the less organized regimes of his predecessors toward a more formal and centralized state structure. As a counterbalance to the power of his Türkmen retainers, Bayezid sought to create a proper court, complete with a chancellery, bureaucracy, and an enlarged personal household of slaves whose loyalty was to him personally rather than to tribe, faith, or family. In order to fund this enlarged imperial household, Bayezid used another long-standing imperial practice: that of appropriating most of the new lands conquered by his hosts and insisting that these lands be held in trust by his servitors as prebendal grants (tımars) rather than as private property.41 The gazi chieftains, who had carved out virtual fiefdoms for themselves, chaffed against these developments. They partic ularly disliked taking the field against other Türkmen Muslims at the command of a sultan who drank heavily and surrounded himself with slave-troops and the levies sent by his Christian vassals and allies. Ordinary Türkmen, similarly, resented Ottoman attempts to control their movements and demote them from free warriors to tax-paying commoners.42
These tensions came to a head when the Chaghatai warlord, Tīmūr Lang, invaded eastern Anatolia in 1402 as part of his quest to revive the global empire of the Chinggisids. The beys of Anatolia flocked to Tīmūr’s banner and complained of their ill treatment at the hands of the Ottomans. Tīmūr was happy to oblige and announced his intentions of coming to their defense. In an illuminating exchange of letters with Bayezid, Tīmūr accused the Ottomans of oppressing Muslims and of being crypto-Christians.43 It is noteworthy that at this point in the development of Ottoman ideology, Bayezid rejected both world conquest and the overthrow of legitimate monarchs. He implicitly criticized Tīmūr for seeking world domination and emphasized that the Ottomans had come into their state by honest means, having fought loyally on behalf of the Seljuk sultanate and liberated new lands from the oppressive rule of unbelievers. Bayezid added that the Ottomans had adopted such policies as a question of principle rather than ability, since “the world and what is in it are like a little hillock in the gaze of our power. If we had set out to destroy countries and persecute subjects in world-conquest, we would easily have captured everything from east to west. Instead we have struggled in repelling the opponents of Muhammad’s religion.”44
When the two armies met in battle near Ankara, events belied Bayezid’s rhetoric: the Türkmen and Muslim Anatolians rejected Bayezid’s policies by abandoning him en masse. The only troops who fought on to the end for their master were his slave-troops and Serbian allies. Bayezid himself was captured and ended his days in captivity. The disaster at Ankara was compounded by a vicious period of civil warfare (Fetret Devri) between Bayezid’s four sons from 1402 to 1413 until one claimant, Mehmed I, finally emerged victorious.45 No sooner had one period of civil war ended than another began as Mehmed I was forced to defend his throne from further rebellions in 1416–20 by restive peasants and nomads. The latter seem particularly to have resented the increasing demands of the Ottoman state as it sought to establish and expand its authority.46
Even following the suppression of these rebellions, the Ottomans continued to struggle over the next century to control the Türkmen of Anatolia. The latter gave expression to their resistance to the new imperial regime by embracing heterodox religious ideas and practices—most notably Shi’ism—that set them at odds with the Orthodox Sunni identity of the Ottoman court. The threat posed by these elements became ever more dangerous to the Ottomans over the fifteenth century, especially with the rise of the Safavids, who actively proselytized Anatolian Türkmen. In 1511, the latter rose again in a serious rebellion, led by a figure named Şahkulu (“Slave of the Shah”), which briefly paralyzed southwestern Anatolia. Sultans Bayezid II and Selim I responded with a bloody persecution of Shi’ites and Safavid sympathizers.47
The crises of the Fetret were followed by a period of truly meteoric territorial expansion under the reigns of four sultans. Mehmed II (r. 1444–46 and 1451–81) conquered Constantinople, putting a final end to the Roman Empire in the East, and solidified Ottoman control over Anatolia, the Aegean, and the Balkans south of the Carpathian Mountains. Mehmed’s son Bayezid II (r. 1481–1512) consolidated these gains and prepared the ground for a series of aggressive campaigns by his successor, Selim I (r. 1512–20), which repulsed the Safavid threat and destroyed the Mamluk sultanate. In less than five years, the Ottomans had brought all of eastern Anatolia, the Levant, Arabia, and Egypt into submission. The Ottoman Empire is usually seen as having reached its apogee under Süleyman I (r. 1520–66), when it achieved both its greatest territorial extent and a system of imperial administration that later generations would consider normative.
Safavids: From Sufi Ṭarīqah to Millenarian Empire
Unlike the situation in Anatolia and the Balkans, where the Ottomans had early emerged as the sole dynasty capable of conquering the entire region, Persia and Mesopotamia saw a succession of imperial experiments following the disintegration of the Ilkhanate. From 1335 to 1384, the Mongol Jalayir tribe had attempted to keep alive something of the Ilkhanate’s former glory in western Persia, but Jalayirid power never recovered from the devastating invasions of 1385–1405 as two Chinggisid successor states, the Chaghatai under Tīmūr Lang and the Golden Horde under Toqtamish, fought for control of the region.48
Timurid rule over Persia and Mesopotamia was fleeting, however, and the lands of the Ilkhanate were soon torn between two Türkmen confederacies. The first of these, the Qarā Qoyunlu (Black Sheep) confederacy, was ascendant from 1432 until 1467, when the Aq Qoyunlu (White Sheep) confederacy defeated and supplanted them. The Safavids thus arose at the end of a prolonged period of political volatility and, like the Ottomans, owed their initial prominence to a talent for appealing to multiple constituencies: first and foremost different Türkmen clans, but also Persians and other ethnic groups.49 Whereas the Ottomans had grounded their identity in the role of gazi chieftains, the Safavids started out as a Sufi movement (ṭarīqah) founded at Ardabil in 1301 by Sheikh Ṣafī al-Dīn. Although the founder of the movement seems to have belonged to a Tajik family of Gilani landowners, he managed to attract many Türkmen followers and his successors married into Türkmen noble families.50
Under Ṣafī al-Dīn’s descendants, and particularly Sheikh Junayd (ca. 1420s?–60), the ṭarīqah-yi Ṣafaviyyah underwent an extraordinary evolution, transforming itself from a devout brotherhood of prayer into a military order espousing its own millenarian creed. An ideological drift from Sunni to Shi’ite theology accompanied this change, and under Junayd’s grandson, Ismā’īl I, the order officially embraced an extremist version of Twelver Shi’ism. As a sign of their commitment to the Twelve Imams, the brotherhood adopted a distinctive red cap or “crown” (tāj) with twelve gores, leading to the sobriquet of “red head” (qizilbāsh).51 The central lodge of the order in Ardabil resisted these changes and sought to remain true to the founder’s teachings, but the followers of Junayd and his progeny marginalized these traditionalists. The new movement carried out an active program of proselytization and appealed particularly to Türkmen tribal groups in the mountainous regions of eastern Anatolia and western Iran. So successful was the movement that Shah Ismā’īl could boast in a letter to Selim I in 1514 that “most of the inhabitants of the [Ottoman Empire] are followers of our forefathers.”52
In addition to the promotion of their own particular religious ideas, the Safavid movement made explicit claims to political authority and contemporary critics accused the Safavid family of an unseemly worldliness. As in all Sufi orders, a Safavid disciple (murīd) bound himself by personal ties of spiritual obedience to the guide (murshid) or elder (pīr) of the order. In the Safavid case, however, discipleship also entailed unquestioning political and military submission to a sheikh who claimed increasingly to be not just a saint, but sultan, messiah (mahdī), and voice of God himself. Such sweeping claims and their rising military strength brought the militant wing of the Ṣafaviyyah into direct conflict with the overlords of Ardabil during the mid-1400s. The Qarā Qoyunlu sultan, Jahānshāh, ordered Sheikh Junayd to disperse his armed supporters and when Junayd refused, Qarā Qoyunlu forces expelled him from Ardabil. After seven years of wandering in exile, Junayd eventually took refuge with Jahānshāh’s rival, Uzun Ḥasan of the Aq Qoyunlu. The new alliance was cemented by the marriages of Uzun Ḥasan’s sister and daughter with Junayd and his son, Ḥaydar. Aq Qoyunlu patronage did not survive Uzun Ḥasan’s death, however, as the successors quarreled among themselves and turned against their father’s ambitious Safavid clients. The heads of the Safavid family were either killed or imprisoned in the ensuing internecine struggle. A difficult decade followed in which the Safavids had to struggle for their very survival.
Safavid fortunes improved dramatically in 1499 with the succession of Ismā’īl I to the leadership of the order. The 14-year-old Safavid leader set out to make a name for himself by leading a gaza against Christian Georgia. Thousands of Qizilbāsh tribesmen flocked to his banners and the host set out in March of 1500. The road to Georgia led through Shirvan, however, and Ismā’īl’s jihad quickly turned into a settling of old scores with the Yezidid princes of Shirvan (who had killed both Ismail’s father and grandfather in battle). Safavid forces wrought a fearful vengeance, decapitating the ruling shīrvānshāh, violating the graves of his predecessors and massacring thousands of their subjects. When the smoke cleared, the Safavids found themselves the unexpected masters of Shirvan. They completed this conquest the following year by routing an Aq Qoyunlu army sent to dislodge them. Ismā’īl’s new political status was sealed in 1501 by his capture of Tabriz, the pleasant capital that had previously served as imperial seat for Ilkhanids, Jalayirids, Qarā Qoyunlu, and Aq Qoyunlu.53
From Azerbaijan, the nascent Safavid state rapidly extended its reach during the next decade over modern Iran, Iraq, and Turkmenistan, as well as much of eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan. In 1511, Ismail even sent troops to help the founder of the Mughal Empire, Bābur, briefly recover his ancestral lands from the Uzbek Shaybanids. In exchange for this aid, Bābur was to recognize Safavid suzerainty. The dramatic expansion of the Safavids stirred millenarian expectations that Ismā’īl was the mahdī and that his victories heralded the end of time. It was also attended by ostentatious displays of violence against those accused of being enemies either of the Safavids or Shi’ism generally. Qizilbāsh armies carried out mass killings of civilians in many cities and roasted and ate several Aq Qoyunlu notables in a manner calculated to spread terror.54 In a limited sense, then, one can see both the Ottoman and the Safavid states as being founded on the ideology and practice of gaza—the Ottomans practicing it primarily against Christians in defense of Sunni Orthodoxy, and the Safavids practicing it primarily against other Muslims in defense of Shi’ism.55
The meteoric expansion of Ismā’īl’s new state brought it quickly into conflict with the Ottomans, who were expanding eastward and fretted about Safavid proselytization in Anatolia. The two young empires finally came to grips with each other at the battle of Çaldıran in 1514, where the Ottoman army led by Selim I demonstrated the decisive superiority of its well-organized and provisioned slave army, armed with muskets and artillery, over the traditionally armed qizilbāsh cavalry archers of Ismā’īl. Ismā’īl’s forces were decimated and Selim pushed on to occupy Tabriz. Selim was unable to convince his men to winter there and continue their pursuit of Ismā’īl into the highlands, and so was forced to withdraw. Despite this strategic retreat, the first Ottoman-Safavid war had clearly been a disaster for the Safavids. It marked a watershed in the dynasty’s history, entailing both territorial losses in the west and a serious loss of prestige and authority internally. The Safavids would never again be able to demand the unquestioning obedience of their murīds and had to find alternative sources of authority.56 From 1514 onward, the Safavids sought to bolster their position by evoking Persian and Timurid imperial traditions and downplaying their earlier claims to a messianic vocation. Especially after Isma’il’s heir, Ṭahmāsp, lost the lands his father had acquired in the west around Erzincan and Diyarbakır, the Safavids increasingly identified their state with Iran and Persian culture rather than with the Türkmen tribes of eastern Anatolia.57
In the short term, however, the Safavids continued to rely on their qizilbāsh supporters, whose leaders (amīr) dominated the military and figured prominently in the new government. Competition between the different tribes (uymak) for control of the resources of the state began almost immediately, and after the death of Ismā’īl tensions boiled over into open warfare in 1524–33 between the principal qizilbāsh tribes for control of the crown prince.58 Shah Ṭahmāsp was finally able to assert himself over the various factions, but he would continue to confront serious internal challenges for the rest of his fifty-two-year reign. He nevertheless consolidated Safavid rule sufficiently to be able to resist repeated invasions from the Shaybanids in the east and the Ottomans in the west at a time when both states were at the zenith of their military power.
Like the Ottomans, the Safavids struggled to impose a centralized state authority on the Türkmen warriors who had brought them to power and the new court was riven by factions made up of the various Türkmen tribes, Iranian aristocrats, and Caucasian servitors of the court. The throne became a pawn in these factional struggles once again upon Ṭahmāsp’s death, resulting in the assassination of one Safavid prince (Ḥaydar ‘Ali) in 1576, the probable assassination of another (Ismā’īl II) in 1578, the execution of the heir apparent (Ḥamza) in 1586, and the overthrow of a reigning shah (Moḥammed Khudābanda) in 1587. By the end of the sixteenth century, the empire was so beset by internal disorders as to cast the very future of the state into question. It was not until the accession of ‘Abbās I (r. 1587–1629) that the Safavids finally managed to replicate Ottoman success in replacing a debilitating reliance on Türkmen tribesmen with some version of the military-slave institution. ‘Abbās came to power understandably wary of the qizilbāsh emirs, whom he blamed for the deaths of his mother and brother and the overthrow of his father, Moḥammed Khudābanda. ‘Abbās immediately set about breaking their power, first through signal punishment of the worst offenders and then, more lastingly, by accelerating the process Ṭahmāsp had begun of creating a standing army and bureaucracy of personal slaves (kul/ghulām).59 ‘Abbās and his successors would remunerate these primarily Caucasian and Circassian administrators and warriors directly out of state coffers, thereby ensuring that they owed their loyalty primarily to the shah rather than to any tribe or chieftain. The viability of this plan depended, in turn, upon ‘Abbās’s success in transferring massive amounts of land and revenue from the control of local qizilbāsh elites to his treasury, specifically through the passage of private and “state” or indirectly administered land (mamālik) to the personal household of the shah (khaṣṣa).60 By the end of ‘Abbās’s reign, he had transformed the military and administrative structure of the empire.
The advantages of these reforms were quick to appear and the reign of Shah ‘Abbās is remembered as the Safavid golden age, judged both by military successes against the Ottoman, Shaybanid, and Mughal empires, economic prosperity, and achievements in the arts. ‘Abbās’s crowning achievement was the creation of a glittering new imperial capital at Isfahan in 1598, from which the shah ruled over an empire that stretched the length and breadth of the Iranian Plateau, from the Caucasus and Mesopotamia to Khorasan, the Hindu Kush, and Baluchistan.
The violent resistance of key supporters of the Ottomans and Safavids to greater state centralization was intended to frighten both dynasties into relying on methods of governance that were less effective, but more familiar and less offensive to Türkmen sensibilities. Instead, both dynasties concluded from the upheavals of the Ottoman Fetret and the Safavid factional wars that it would be dangerous to rely on their Türkmen supporters and Central Asian political traditions. The custom of investing an entire bloodline with political sovereignty and of parceling territory up between them as local princes, for example, had led to the fratricidal dissolution of Turkic polities from the Seljuks to the Aq Qoyunlu. In order to combat these centrifugal tendencies, both dynasties began to promote official ideologies that privileged a single individual—the ruling dynast—over his male relatives and broadened the former’s support base by reaching out to (or simply creating) new elite groups.61
Did Southwest Asians possess a political concept approximating that of “empire”? The evidence from their official proclamations, correspondence, and self-representations indicates they did. Already in the 1300s, for example, the Ottoman chancellery was issuing official documents in Greek and Italian and in these documents the Ottomans (or at least their scribes) deliberately deployed Western words for empire and emperor. During the reign of Mehmed II (Figure 4.1), for example, his scribes issued decrees (ferman) proclaiming him “by the grace of God, Emperor of all Asia and Greece” (Dei gratia totius asye et grecie Imperator) and referred to his possessions as “my Empire” (Imperio mio).62 Similarly, when Greek subjects wrote formal petitions to the Ottoman sultan in their own language, they often addressed him as emperor (autokratōr, basileus).63 The Safavids, by comparison, only began diplomatic relations with Christendom in the early 1500s and thereafter corresponded less frequently with European princes than did their Ottoman neighbors. It is clear from the surviving correspondence, however, that the Safavids understood the distinction made in Western Christendom between imperator and rex, and that—by Western criteria—they did not quite qualify as the former. They thus seem to have accepted that even an ally like the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V would not address Ismā’īl as a peer—only as “The Most Serene and mighty Prince, the Lord Shah Ismā’īl Sufi, King of Greater Persia” (Serenissimo ac potentissimo Principi Domino Xaka Izmael Sophi magno Persarum regi).64 By comparison, Ottoman possession of Constantinople gave Charles little choice but to address his nemesis Süleyman I as “emperor of Turkey and Asia, Greece, etc.” (imperatori Turcarum ac Asiae, Graeciae, etc.).65 It is striking that when one of ‘Abbās the Great’s ambassadors to the West, Uruch Bey, wrote an account of the Safavid Empire in Spanish he referred to the Romans, Achaemenids, Habsburgs, and even Ottomans as having emperors (emperadores) while the shahs qualified only as kings of Persia (reyes de Persia).66
Questions of self-classification become more difficult to answer, however, when we turn from correspondence in European languages to Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and Persian documents. These languages had large political vocabularies, but titles and honorifics (alqāb va ‘anāwīn/elkâb ve unvan) were often ambiguous in content and inflationary scribal usage aggravated their imprecision. Just about any petty ruler, in other words, could be addressed as sultan and even caliph either out of flattery or ambition. Certainly, there was no one word that substituted for the modern sense of empire in all situations. No one term, for example, subsumed at one and the same time a dynasty, the personnel and administrative structures of their state, its territories, and subject populations. The closest parallels were sultanate (salṭanat) or “shah-dom” (padişahlık/pādishāhī), but more poetic terms like “world governance” (cihanbani/jahānbānī), “refuge of the world” (cihanpenah/jahānpenāh), “world conquest” (cihangiri/jahāngīrī), and “world sovereignty” (cihandari/jahāndārī) were used to distinguish emperors more clearly from other kinds of rulers.
If we look at what the most important polities of Southwest Asia called themselves, however, we see that the most common terms used were devlet/dawlat and memalik/mamālik.67 Unfortunately, neither term is particularly illuminating. Memalik merely meant something possessed or under sovereignty (hence the cognate word mamluk for slaves) and could refer to dependent lands, districts, provinces, territories within a state, independent states, and great empires.68 Devlet/dawlat was similarly vague. It is often translated into English as “state,” but the word only acquired this connotation in the late seventeenth century under European influence. Originally, it was an Arabic word referring to a “turn,” and later developed additional meanings that included a dynasty, fortune, the divine charisma of a ruler, prosperity, and success.69
That the Ottomans and Safavids saw empires as distinct from other polities can be seen from the pains they took to present themselves as heirs and successors of other world conquerors, such as the mythical Jamshīd, Alexander the Great, Chosroes, Chinggis Khan, and Tīmūr Lang. The importance of a translatio imperii led the Safavids, for example, to emphasize their descent from the Prophet through ‘Ali and from Uzun Ḥasan, the Aq Qoyunlu “pādishāh of Iran” (pādishāh-i Īrān), and to present themselves as the latest iteration in a long line of Persian empires stretching from the Achaemenids to the Timurids. Ismā’īl I thus identified himself specifically with the emperors and conquerors of Persian history and legend, boasting in verse: “I am Faridūn, Chosroes, Jamshīd and Zohak. / I am the son of Zāl [Rustam] and of Alexander.”70
Ottoman sultans made similar claims. Selim I, for example, referred to himself in a poem as having “checkmated the Shah of India, when I played the chess of empire (dawlat) upon the board of suzerainty (mulk),” and of his name being “graven upon the coinage of world sovereignty” (sikke-i mulk-i jahān).71 Selim’s grandson, Süleyman I, was memorialized in stone as the “possessor of the kingdoms of the world, shadow of God over all peoples, sultan of the sultans of Arabs & Persians.”72 The long list of titles that accompanied such claims included Caesar, Shah of Shahs, Great Khan (Kağan), and “Master of the Auspicious Conjunction (of Jupiter and Saturn)” (Ṣāḥib-i Qirān)—titles explicitly borrowed from the Roman, Persian, Chinggisid, and Timurid emperors.73 Self-conscious reference to and imitation of earlier world empires was thus expected in the Turco-Persianate world and encouraged in young princes.74
Such comparisons with previous world-conquerors also underline the extent to which Southwest Asian visions of empire had become by the 1500s quintessentially dynastic, personal, and—in sharp contrast with Inner Asian traditions—territorially impartible.75 As their name indicates, the Ottoman and Safavid empires were always grounded on loyalty to a particular dynasty and neither developed much sense of the state as an entity that could exist apart from the charisma of its founders. Individual dynasts might be overthrown in extreme circumstances, but the line itself was irreplaceable. This attention to dynastic bloodline is all the more striking for the fact that Southwest Asian societies did not otherwise vest particular significance in noble birth or possess hereditary aristocracies. Among the Ottomans, for example, all sons of a reigning sultan were considered potential successors, regardless of their birth order, the social origins of their mothers, and whether they were produced from legal wedlock or a fleeting tryst. Also noteworthy is that until the early 1600s the Ottomans had no fixed rules of succession. Instead, all adult princes were given concrete opportunities to prove themselves by acting as the governor of a province under the guidance of an appointed tutor (lala/atabey). Upon the death of a reigning sultan, there was a brief interlude of uncertainty and fratricidal conflict as all the adult princes vied for the throne. Once a prince had gained control of the capital and the adherence of most of the armed forces, he became sultan de jure and would execute all other male claimants to the throne—including infants and pregnant members of the imperial harem.76 This brutal solution to the fissiparous tendencies of other Turkic and Mongol dynasties was finally replaced in the seventeenth century by a milder system that gave the succession automatically to the eldest male member of the dynasty. All other princes were sequestered away for life within a section of the imperial harem known as the “cage” (kafes), in what Fletcher has dubbed the last step in the Ottomans’ “transition from grand khan to agrarian bureaucratic emperor.”77
Why were certain bloodlines seen as more exalted than those of ordinary people? Historians have speculated that Ottoman and Safavid claims were ultimately grounded in Inner Asian notions of a ruler’s qut or divine charisma. Certainly, the prophetic dream foreshadowing empire was a standard trope in Turco-Persianate political culture. Seljuk, the founder of his eponymous dynasty, was supposed to have dreamt that he ejaculated sparks of fire all over the world from east to west.78 Tīmūr Lang dreamt of a great tree, symbolizing his posterity, which reached to the heavens and rained fruit upon the earth.79 Osman, similarly, dreamt that a tree grew out of his chest and spread its branches to enshadow the entire world.80 Sheikh Ṣafī al-Dīn was said to have dreamt of himself as a sun that filled the world with light.81
The corollary of such divine selection was a responsibility to protect Islam and administer justice. The Ottomans and Safavids insisted on their mandate to maintain the divinely instituted “order of the world” (nizam-i ‘âlem), including both social justice and religious orthodoxy.82 Protection of Islam and justice was expected, however, of any government, not just empires, so imperial aspirants had to show that the degree of protection they offered was exceptional and affected the entire world. In the early years, this meant a heavy reliance on the ideology of gaza—that the Ottomans, for example, were an antemurale Islamismi. After the Ottoman conquest of Arabia in 1516–17, the sultans promptly adopted the title of khādim al-Ḥaramayn al-Sharīfayn—protector of the holy cities of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem and, by extension, of the Hajj. The Ottomans placed considerable stock in this guardianship as it clearly differentiated them from other Muslim rulers who could claim to be patrons of the ulema, upholders of the Sharia, and zealous guardians of justice. It forced even the Safavids to treat the Ottomans with a modicum of respect, as Shi’ites could not make pilgrimages to the Holy Places without Ottoman approval. The Ottomans therefore guarded their position jealously, issuing orders in the late 1500s, for example, that prohibited Mughal royalty from distributing moneys too ostentatiously in Mecca.83 The Ottomans would increasingly claim to be the caliphs and imams of all Muslims everywhere. While Ottoman rulers thus claimed a dual role as both sultan and caliph of all Sunnis, the Safavids put forward mirror claims for the Shi’ite world. As shahs, Ismā’īl and his successors reigned as heads of state; as murshids, they guided the Ṣafaviyyah order; as deputies of the hidden Imam, they championed the cause of Shi’ism everywhere.84
Victory in battle was an extremely important part of imperial ideology exactly because it demonstrated divine support. Indeed, the need for such evidence justified the Ottomans’ lack of a formal rule of succession as a short but sharp period of fratricidal strife gave God a chance to show his hand.85 When one town refused to take sides between two warring Ottoman princes in the early fifteenth century, for example, its representatives declared: “You will confront each other and whoever receives the devlet (i.e., from God) will also receive the fortress.”86 Abdülvâsi Çelebi thus ascribed the victory of Mehmed over his brother Musa during the Fetret to the fact that “although devlet existed in Musa, / The devlet of Mehmed was truly greater.”87 In the 1500s, the Ottoman and Safavid preoccupation with divine sanction took an increasingly eschatological turn. This was most obvious in the case of Ismā’īl, but the Ottomans too began to speak of their sultan as the shadow of God (zil’ullah), messiah of the last days (mehdi-yi ahir üz-zaman), renewer of the age (müceddid), and possessor of the end of time (ṣāḥib-i zamān-i ākhar).88
Armed with such a mandate, an Ottoman or Safavid ruler considered himself the sole legitimate source of political authority under heaven. All land belonged, ultimately, to him and all laws sprang from his will, from those of his predecessors (as kanun/qānūn), or from God—either in the direct form of the Sharia or indirectly as customary laws (örf).89 In keeping with this imperative, no state official could exercise their office without a patent (berat) in which the sultan listed the duties of the position and licensed the holder to exercise a share in the sultan’s imperial prerogatives sufficient to carry out these duties. Similarly, Ottoman and Safavid law divided all lands and sources of tax revenue into six categories: (1) endowments dedicated to God for the funding of pious works (evkaf/awqaf); (2) lands administered directly by the palace and its officials (hassa/khaṣṣa); (3) state-owned lands (miri) awarded as temporary prebendal grants (tımar/tiyūl) in exchange for service; (4) land “abandoned” (metruk) to public use such as pastureland, roads, and so on; (5) waste land judged “useless” (mevat) for agriculture; and (6) de facto private property (mülk) belonging to particular individuals or groups (albeit preserving the legal fiction that ownership of all such lands belonged ultimately to the sultan).90 The personal nature of imperial rule was underlined by the fact that upon the death of a sultan all licenses and awards (as well as all international treaties) became void and had to be confirmed or reissued by the new sultan.
Such measures gave the state administration and armed forces the appearance of being little more than an extension of the sultan’s person and household. The most notorious and distinctive example of this was the increasing reliance of both Ottoman and Safavid rulers over the 1400s–1500s on personal slaves (kul) to staff the most elite units of the army and key posts in the civil administration. The attraction of such kuls was that, being personal property, they could be selected, appointed, transferred, dismissed, and even executed based solely on merit and the whim of the sovereign. As Fletcher has pointed out, slaves thus served a ruler as “surrogate nomads,” who built a separate ‘aṣabīyyah around him.91 The golden ages of the Ottoman and Safavid empires were therefore closely linked to a move away from the earlier reliance on tribal levies and locally based prebendal cavalrymen (sipahi) toward a musketeer infantry and a corps of professional administrators. Both empires staffed the latter largely with enslaved Christians (Balkan Christians in the Ottoman Empire; Georgians and Armenians in the Safavid Empire) and ensured their loyalty to the dynasty by salarying them. The necessary funds had to be secured by converting lands that had formerly been prebendal grants benefiting local figures (timariots in the Ottoman Empire; qizilbāsh emirs in Safavid Persia) into khaṣṣa and tax-farms that put cash directly at the disposal of the central administration and the palace.92
Imperial Visions of World Order
Southwest Asian empires saw the political world as being divided into a definite and fairly clear hierarchy with themselves at the apex. Claims to paramountcy and superior prestige are reflected in standard Ottoman and Safavid titles such as “sultan of sultans” (sulṭān al-salāṭin), “most honoured of sultans” (ashrāf-i salāṭin), and “bestower of crowns upon the kings (Chosroes) of the world” (tacbahş-ı Hüsrevan-ı cihan/tājbakhsh-e Khosrovān-e jahān). Ottoman sultans lost no opportunity to remind other rulers gently of this preeminence. An Ottoman letter to the Sa’di sultan of Fez thus mentioned: “our imperial threshold ... the kissing of which honours the lips of the kings of the Orient and the Occident.”93 A good illustration of the Ottoman worldview is the following intitulatio from a letter of Süleyman I to King François I of France in 1526:
I, Sultan Süleyman Shah Khan, son of Sultan Selim Khan, son of Hazret Sultan Bayezid, Sultan of Sultans of the Age, Paragon of Kağans, Bestower of Crowns upon the Chosroes of the world, Shadow of God the Most Gracious, Sultan and Padishāh of the Mediterranean and Black Seas, of the Balkans and Anatolia, of Damascus and Aleppo, Karamania and Rome, the lands [vilayet] of Dulkadir, Diyarbakır and Azerbaijan, the lands [vilayet] of Van, Buda and Timişoara, of Egypt, Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, Hebron and all Arabia and Yemen, ... and of the many other lands conquered by the irresistible force of my noble forefathers and illustrious ancestors—may God illuminate their tombs—and which my August Majesty has made subject to my flaming sword and victorious blade, to thee, François, Christian king [kıral] of the country [vilayet] of France.94
Such an address reveals the Ottomans’ sense of themselves as direct lords of a combination of lands and successors to world dominion, as well as their implicit sense of the order that ranked these states and lands.95 Ottoman adoption of the title khan, for example, was a nod to the unique charisma of Chinggis, despite the fact that Osman was not of Chinggisid descent (indeed, he was a refugee of the Mongol advance) and the Ottomans therefore had no legitimate right to the title. The Ottomans also afforded an extraordinary degree of formal consideration to rulers of Chinggisid blood. The Chinggisid khans of the Crimea, for example, paid no tribute despite their nominal status as Ottoman vassals.96 Below the Chinggisids were “brother” Muslim emperors, pādishāhs, and sultans. Practical realities forced the largest Muslim states—those of the Ottomans, Safavids, Moguls, Shaybanids, and Sa’dis—to grant each other a degree of mutual, albeit grudging, recognition. Beneath these came other lesser Muslim rulers and, finally, non-Muslim princes. The Ottomans were generally reluctant to give Christian rulers parity with Muslims and therefore evolved a host of confessionally exclusive titles for them. Friendly Christian monarchs of great powers like France were granted special recognition as çasar (not kaysar), but most were dubbed kıral or some other explicitly Christian title like duke, tekfur, voivoda, knez, and so on. The Ottomans thus insisted on referring to their Habsburg and Russian counterparts not as caesar or emperor, but as the Christian kings (kıral) of Vienna, Spain, and Moscow and, in the case of the Byzantine emperor, as “the Roman tekfur.”97 There was considerable variance over time and space, however, in how strictly this hierarchy was observed, especially as Ottoman power declined during the 1600s–1700s and Christian powers could no longer be belittled in cavalier fashion. The Safavids, as a weaker state, were less discriminating than the Ottomans and addressed just about any foreign ruler as pādishāh—even explicitly republican figures such as the doge of Venice and the stadtholder of Holland.
How did Ottomans and Safavids imagine the limits of their empires? This is a difficult question to answer, as both states seemed to have a relatively vague sense of their own physical limits.98 This was not from lack of geographical information per se, but rather because the Ottomans and Safavids inhabited a world in which borders were, to quote Palmira Brummet, “broad, porous, and impermanent.”99 Borders were also multiple in the sense that several different kinds coexisted and overlapped each other. Among the Ottomans, for example, there was a solid core of lands that were more or less under the direct control of the sultan—“the two seas and two lands,” made up of the Mediterranean and the Black seas and the Balkans and Asia Minor. The most distinctive feature of these lands is that they were tax paying and fully integrated into the prebendal system. The next sort of frontier was that of semiautonomous states such as Moldavia, Wallachia, Transylvania, Egypt, the republic of Ragusa, and the Kurdish emirates of eastern Anatolia. These paid annual tribute but were not administered directly from Istanbul.100 The Safavids possessed a similar schema for understanding their empire, with the lands under the direct control of the shah (khaṣṣa) at the ideological center, then the prebendal “state provinces” (mamālik) and tribute-paying vassal territories, such as Daghestan, Kartli, Kakheti, Ardalan, Luristan, and Arabistan. A special class of tributary recognized by both the Ottomans and Safavids were hereditary chieftainships (yurtluk-ocaklık/ulka), which included transhumant groups who moved relatively freely back and forth across state borders. In many cases, the Ottoman-Safavid border was literally coterminous with the disposition of particular Kurdish and Bedouin tribes and shifted in accordance with their seasonal, communal migrations (Figure 4.2).101
The outermost fringe of the empire was what Ottomans called the “ever-victorious frontier” (serhadd-i mansure) and the “realm of jihad” (dar al-cihad). These were marcher regions that Ottoman forces were actively seeking to occupy or raid.102 Most Ottoman borders thus defied exact definition as the lines of control consisted of thick bands of defensible points such as towns, forts, and castles, the agricultural lands that supported them, and natural features like mountains and rivers.103 Control over these was, however, in a constant state of flux. Such borders as existed thus tended to reflect little more than the “state of play” when the last truce went into effect. A striking example of the political ambiguities of these marches was the practice of condominium rule that evolved during the bitter Ottoman-Habsburg wars for control of the Danubian basin. Some villages in the contested zone ended up paying taxes to both Ottoman and Habsburg authorities, regardless of which side had the upper hand at the time. OneOttoman official thus wrote to a Habsburg opponent concerning their common interest in the affairs of “your village, Nagyegrös, [which] is in my possession in Turkey, I mean, it is in your possession [i.e., as a feudal fief] in Hungary.”104
This is not to say, of course, that permanent political barriers were unimaginable. As Dariusz Kołodziejczyk and Sabri Ateş have pointed out, the Ottomans did possess the concept of a fixed border (sınır) and rigidly observed several in practice.105 The Ottomans thus upheld the established land border of Venetian-controlled Dalmatia as well as long stretches of the border with Poland. The situation was rendered more complicated, however, by the fact that the Ottomans did not consider Venice and Poland to be fully independent states, but rather vassals under ultimate Ottoman sovereignty. Indeed, the sultans made the rendering of formal tribute a precondition for their signature of the very treaties establishing the borders in question.106
Finally, the Ottomans saw their imperial authority as extending to more notional frontiers set by Hanafi jurisprudence, which divided the world into the realms of belief and unbelief—the so-called House of War (Dar-ül-Harb) and the House of Islam (Dar-ül-Islam). This division meant, on the one hand, that the Ottomans saw themselves as possessing a religious and legal right to expand their territory perpetually at the expense of the House of War, including Christendom, Safavid Persia, and even far off lands like China.107 On the other hand, Ottoman claims to be “lord of coinage and the Friday sermon” (sahib-i sikke ve hutbe) meant that Sunni Muslims of all lands owed their allegiance ultimately to the Ottomans. As Casale has shown, this juridico-religious framework allowed the Ottomans to represent their authority as extending to Gujrat, Calicut, the Maldives, Aceh, China, and wherever else Muslim communities acknowledged the sultan as caliph.108 In 1560, the seafarer Seydi Ali Reis even placed an admission of the legitimacy of Ottoman claims in the mouth of the Mughal emperor Humāyūn, who supposedly admitted to Ali that “no man on earth [is] worthy of the title of ‘Pādishāh’” but the Ottoman caliph.109
The common legacy of Islamic law, administrative history, and Persian literary culture ensured that the Ottoman and Safavid administrations shared many comparable institutions and structures. Both empires, for example, relied on a corpus of Greek and Persian advice literature (“ethics”—akhlāq, “advice for rulers”—naṣīhat al-mulūk) to understand how polities functioned and how they should be ruled. It was widely accepted, for example, that societies since the days of Jamshīd naturally contained four groups corresponding roughly to the four humors of the physical body: “men of the pen” who upheld religion and administered the state, “men of the sword” who enforced order, “men of transactions” who traded, and commoners who created the wealth that supported all. Each required the services of the other three classes. A ruler, as head or heart of the body politic, had the task of maintaining this “order of the world” and the “circle of equity” by keeping these elements distinct and balanced.110 The Ottomans further clarified the dynamics of this social model by dividing their subjects into a “protected flock” (reaya) of commoners and a “ruling institution,” which, although known collectively as the “soldiery” (askeri) comprised both “lords of the sword” (arbāb al suyūf) and “lords of the pen” (arbāb al qalām) who staffed the imperial service and law courts. It was the duty of the askeri to maintain order, security, and justice, for which purpose they were entitled to bear arms and collect revenues from the reaya. The latter supported the ruling institution through taxes and law-abiding obedience.111
A further important distinction made in both empires was between Muslims and non-Muslims. Both empires tolerated a wide range of religious beliefs, from Zoroastrianism to Catholicism, but the state itself was always understood as belonging in a more fundamental sense to the official state confession: Hanafi Sunni orthodoxy in the Ottoman Empire and Twelver Shi’ism among the Safavids. “Dissenting” faith groups were therefore organized into semiautonomous communities (taife) or nations (millet). In exchange for loyalty, payment of a special tax (cizye/jizya) and acceptance of their legal inferiority, non-Muslims were left to manage most of their own affairs, including their own separate legal courts, schools, and charitable organizations.112
Finally, both empires shared a common courtly culture that was reflected not only in shared aesthetics, but in many shared administrative structures and titles. The highest state functionary in both empires was, for example, the “grand vizier” (sadrazam) who presided over a council of state (divan) composed of other subordinate viziers, generals, ulema, and chief scribes (reisülküttab). Both states were also unusual for the degree of state control and conformity that they sought to impose on Islamic religious scholars through the creation of an office of chief jurisprudence (şeyhülislam in the Ottoman Empire, ṣadr in the Safavid).
Critically, both empires took part in a common chancellery culture that stretched across the Islamic world from Central and South Asia to North Africa. As Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal scribes all modeled their official and unofficial documents on templates from the same manuals on the art of epistolography (‘ilm al inshā‘), they produced official and unofficial documents that were alike not only in form (utilizing, e.g., similar titles, modes of address, protocols, and rhetorical conventions) but also in function.113 Notwithstanding variations over time and between places and individual writers, for example, it would have been broadly understood from Marrakesh to Delhi that any document bearing the title ‘arz would be some manner of formal petition and that it would possess a predictable structure—beginning with a formal invocation and concluding with the date, place of writing, signature, and seal of the petitioner.114 This shared chancellery culture enabled a sophisticated diplomacy (tarassul) among states that otherwise would have had difficulty reconciling their conflicting political and religious claims. A good example was the convention that whenever a Muslim ruler conquered new territory, he would issue a special epistle, known as a fathnāma, announcing the victory to his Muslim peers, who were expected to respond with polite expressions of congratulation. Such exchanges between potential or actual rivals were obviously fraught, and the fathnāma genre allowed princes to navigate the fine line between self-assertion and insult by imposing a range of courtesies and pious expressions.115
The intermediary position of the Ottoman and Safavid empires between Western Christendom and the rest of Asia ensured that their successes and failures had far-reaching repercussions for all other imperial polities on the Eurasian continent. The rise of the Ottomans in the late 1400s to early 1500s, for example, served both to obstruct and stimulate European expansion abroad, as the Ottomans seemed poised to gain control of the spice trade with the Indies and to annex many parts of Eastern Europe and the Italian and Iberian peninsulas.116 By the mid-1500s, the Habsburg and Ottoman dynasties had come to see each other as imperial nemeses, locked in a struggle for global dominance that stretched from the plains of Hungary to the straits of Melaka. The Portuguese, similarly, saw os Rumes (Ottomans) as the most serious threat to their presence in Asia during the early 1500s. Ottoman naval forces succeeded in expelling the Portuguese and Spanish from the Red Sea and most of the Persian Gulf, but failed to drive them from the Indian Ocean itself—a failure with sweeping consequences for all polities in the region.117
As agents of Western Christian states moved steadily eastward, they carried with them expectations and strategies for dealing with local states that were born in part out of their encounters with the empires of “the Grand Turk” and the “Grand Sophy.” Many European merchants thus learned from their dealings with Ottomans and Safavids how to negotiate commercial concessions with the Muslim rulers of India and Southeast Asia. They arrived in the Indies, for example, convinced of the need for translators skilled in Arabic and Persian and the necessity of securing favorable concessions and extraterritorial privileges. The semiautonomous Levant companies that Western rulers had created to deal with the unique trading conditions existing under the Ottomans became models for the East India companies that would later play such a critical role in the history of Asia.118 Many personnel who came to serve in the East Indies and China had cut their teeth in the Levant, North Africa, or the Persian Gulf, and they sought to replicate similar arrangements.119 It should come as no surprise that these same agents deployed further east strategies that had already proved so successful for Spain and the Italian city-states in the Near East and North Africa: the establishment of commercial-defensive enclaves (“forts and ports”), divide and rule policies, the cultivation of local patrons, the turning of economic means to political ends, and strategic use of Western technological advantages.
If the Ottomans and Safavids provided Europeans with opportunities for studying Asian states, they provided a similar window for Asian empires onto the West. By the twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire would stand out as the sole, great Muslim power to have survived the rising tide of European imperialism. As such, their successes and failures provided object lessons for other Asian rulers—if they cared to study them.120 The survival of the Ottoman Empire, in particular, proved to Muslims across Asia from the Dutch East Indies to the westernmost provinces of the Qing Empire that it was possible to build a modern caliphate that could hold its own against Christian empires. The Ottomans played a role in keeping such hopes alive, from the sixteenth-century military missions sent to equip and train Sumatran Muslims in “European” gunpowder technology to nineteenth-century efforts to promote pan-Islamism from South Africa to Qing China.121 From the 1830s on, however, the Ottomans and their Persian neighbors (the Qājār dynasty after 1796) increasingly invested in the construction of a new international order based less on faith than temporal interest and mutual respect. In 1856, for example, the Ottoman Empire became the first non-Christian state to join the Concert of Europe, and by the 1870s Ottomans and Persians increasingly identified not just with other Muslim states but also with the struggle of other “Asian” empires like China and Japan to find their way in a Western-dominated world.
Notes
1Antony Black, A World History of Ancient Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 34.
2Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 17–18, 61–5, 90–2, 444–5.
3Abolqasem Ferdowsi, Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings, trans. Dick Davis (New York: Penguin, 2007), p. 3.
4Persian writers also sometimes equated the seven climes politically with the seven great “realms” of India (Hind), China (Chīnistān), Central Asia (Tūrān), Rome (Rūm), Africa, Arabia (Arabestān), and, at the center of it all, Iran. A. Miquel, “Iḳlīm,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 3, pp. 1076–8.
5For the “Testament of Ardashīr” (‘Ahd Ardashīr), see: Mario Grignaschi, “Quelques spécimens de la littérature Sassanide conservés dans la bibliothèque d’Istanbul,” Journal Asiatique 254 (1966), 72.
6Linda Darling, A History of Social Justice and Political Power in the Middle East: The Circle of Justice from Mesopotamia to Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 39–46; J. Duchesne-Guillemin, “La Royauté iranienne et le Xᵛarənah,” in Iranica, ed. G. Gnoli and A. V. Rossi (Naples: Istituto per lo Studio del Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1979), pp. 375–86.
7Ryan Balot, Greek Political Thought (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 146–53; Albrecht Dihle, “City and Empire,” in Conceiving the Empire: China and Rome Compared, ed. Fritz-Heiner Mutschler and Achim Mittag (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 5–11.
8For a review of the development of the concept of imperium in Republican Rome, see: T. Corey Brennan, “Power and Process under the Republican ‘Constitution,’” in The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Republic, ed. Harriet Flower (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 36–50.
9Dihle, “City and Empire,” pp. 18–23.
10Aelius Aristides, “Pώμης Eγκώμιον,” in Aristides ex recensione Guilielmi Dindorfii (Leipzig: Libraria Weidmannia, 1829), vol. 1, p. 348.
11George of Trebizond to Mehmed II on February 25, 1466. In Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time, ed. William Hickman, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 249.
12Eusebius, “Eις Kωνσταντίνον τον βασιλέα τριακονταετηρικός,” in Historiae Ecclesiasticae, ed. Friedrich Heinichen (Leipzig: Hermann Mendelssohn, 1868), vol. 1, p. 293.
13George Ostrogorsky, “The Byzantine Emperor and the Hierarchical World Order,” The Slavonic Review 35, no. 84 (1956), 3–7.
14Patriarch Anthony IV of Constantinople to Grand Prince Vasilii I of Moscow. In Franz Miklosich and Josef Müller (eds), Acta et Diplomata Graeca Medii Aevi Sacra et Profana (Vienna: Carl Gerold, 1862), vol. 2, p. 191.
15For a classic formulation of the theory of the imamate/caliphate, see: Abu’l Ḥasan ‘Ali al-Māwardi, The Laws of Islamic Governance/Al-Aḥkām al-Sulṭāniyya w’al-Wilāyāt al-Dĩniyya, trans. Asadullah Yate (London: Ta-Ha Publishers, 1996), pp. 10–36. Also see: Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1974), vol. 1, pp. 197–9, 206–11.
16For a concise review of the treatment of non-Muslims, see: Claude Cahen, “Dhimma,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 2, pp. 227–31; and Patricia Crone, “Mawlā,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 6, pp. 874–82. Also see: Milka Levy-Rubin, Non-Muslims in the Early Islamic Empire: From Surrender to Coexistence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
17Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, vol. 1, pp. 227–30; Antony Black, The History of Islamic Political Thought: From the Prophet to the Present (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), pp. 10–13.
18Claude Cahen, ‘L’evolution de l’iqṭā‘ du IXe au XIIIe siècle: Contribution à une histoire comparée des sociétés médiévales,” Annales: Économies, Societés, Civilisations 8, no. 1 (1953), 25–52. For this and other proposed Byzantine influences on Islamic states, see: Speros Vryonis, Jr., “The Byzantine Legacy and Ottoman Forms,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 23/24 (1969/1970), 273–5.
19Vasileios Syros, “Shadows in Heaven and Clouds on Earth: The Emergence of Social Life and Political Authority in the Early Modern Islamic Empires,” Viator 43, no. 2 (2012), 377–406; Vasileios Syros, “Galenic Medicine and Social Stability in Early Modern Florence and the Islamic Empires,” Journal of Early Modern History 17, no. 2 (2013), 1–53.
20Andrew Marsham, Rituals of Islamic Monarchy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 313.
21Clifford Bosworth, “The Ṭāhirids and Ṣaffārids,” in The Cambridge History of Iran, ed. R. N. Fry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), vol. 4, pp. 129–30; R. N. Frye, “The Sāmānids,” in ibid., vol. 4, p. 146; Ami Ayalon, “Malik in Modern Middle Eastern Titulature,” Die Welt des Islams N.S. 23/24, nos. 1–4 (1984), 308. On the Balkans, see: Paul Stephenson, Byzantium’s Balkan Frontier: A Political Study of the Northern Balkans, 900–1204 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 316–23; Alain Ducellier, “Balkan Powers: Albania, Serbia and Bulgaria (1200–1300),” in The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire c. 500–1492, ed. Jonathan Shepard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 801–802.
22Clifford Bosworth, The History of the Seljuq State: A Translation with Commentary of the Akhbār al-dawla al-saljūqiyya (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 19.
23Songül Mecit, The Rum Seljuqs: Evolution of a Dynasty (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 19–53; Claude Cahen, Formation of Turkey (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2001), pp. 7–14.
24Speros Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 69–130; Michael Angold, “Belle époque or crisis? (1025–1118),” in The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire c. 500–1492, ed. Jonathan Shepard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 609–10.
25Halil İnalcık, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300–1600 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), pp. 31–2, 186–8, 194–7.
26Joseph Fletcher, “Turco-Mongolian Monarchic Tradition in the Ottoman Empire,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 3–4 (1979/80), pt. 1, 237–42.
27Babak Rahimi, “Between Chieftaincy and Knighthood: A Comparative Study of Ottoman and Safavid Origins,” Thesis Eleven 76, no. 1 (2004), 90–1, 95–7.
28See discussion in: “Tādjīk,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol 10, pp. 62–4; Roger Savory, Iran under the Safavids (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 31–3; and Vladimir Minorsky, Tadhkirat al-Mulūk (London: E.J.W. Gibb Memorial Series, 1943), p. 188. Also see: Maria Subtelny, “Centralizing Reform and Its Opponents in the Late Timurid Period,” Iranian Studies 21, no. 1 (1988), 123–51; Hodgson, Venture of Islam, vol. 2, p. 407.
29Nicola Di Cosmo, “State Formation and Periodization in Inner Asian History,” Journal of World History 10, no. 1 (1999), 4–8, 25; Peter Gold, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1992), pp. 13–14, 110; Fletcher Jr., “Turco-Mongolian Monarchic Tradition in the Ottoman Empire,” 236–51.
30Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, an Introduction to History, trans. Franz Rosenthal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), vol. 2, pp. xi–xii, 123–33.
31İbrahim Kaya-Şahin, Âşıkpaşa-zade as Historian: A Study on the Tevârîh-i Âl-i Osman, unpublished MA thesis, Sabancı University, 2000, pp. 70–88.
32Heath Lowry, The Nature of the Early Ottoman State (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), p. 46.
33Karen Barkey, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 10, 28–36, 44–52.
34İbrahim Artuk, “Osmanlı Beylig ïnin Kurucusu Osman Gazi’ye Ait Sikke,” in Birinci Uluslararası Türkiye’nin Sosyal ve Ekonomik Tarihi (1071–1920) Kongresi Tebliğleri, ed. O. Okyar and H. İnalcık (Ankara: Meteksan Yayınları, 1980), pp. 27–32.
35Anthony Bryer, “Greek Historians on the Turks: The Case of the First Byzantine–Ottoman Marriage,” in The Writing of History in the Middle Ages; Essays Presented to Richard William Southern, ed. R. H. C. Davis and J. M. Wallace-Hadrill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 471–93.
36Lowry, The Nature of the Early Ottoman State, pp. 35–6.
37İbrahim Artuk and Cevriye Artuk, İstanbul Arkeoloji Müzeleri Teşhirdeki İslami Sikkeler Kataloğu (Istanbul: Milli Eğitim Bakanlığı, 1974), vol. 2, pp. 453–6.
38Serb and Bulgarian rulers both referred to themselves as emperors (tsar), while Tīmūr Lang declared himself “pādishāh, master of the auspicious conjunction and sultan of sultans of the world” (pādişāhı ṣāḥib-kırān ve sulṭān-ı selāṭin-ı cihān) and the Mamluks were led by their “sultan of Islam and of the Muslims” (sulṭān al-Islām wa’l Muslimin), “master of kings and sultans, heir to kingship, sultan of the Arabs, the Persians and the Turks” (sayyid al-muluk wa’l-salāṭin, warith al-mulk, sulṭān al-‘arab wa’l ‘ajam wa’l-turk). Abdurrahman Daş, “Ankara Savaşı Öncesi Timur ile Yıldırım Bayezid’in Mektuplaşmaları,” Selçuk Üniversitesi Türkiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi 15 (2004), 164; Reuven Amitai, “Some Remarks on the Inscription of Baybars at Maqam Nabi Musa,” in Mamluks and Ottomans: Studies in Honour of Michael Winter, ed. David Wasserstein and Ami Ayalon (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 47–8; P. M. Holt, “The Position and Power of the Mamlūk Sultan,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 38, no. 2 (1975), 244; Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “The Delicate Art of Aggression: Uzun Hasan’s Fathnama to Qaytbay of 1469,” Iranian Studies 44, no. 2 (2011), 204.
39Lowry, The Nature of the Early Ottoman State, pp. 60–4.
40Ibid., pp. 44, 86.
41Halil İnalcık, “Ottoman Methods of Conquest,” Studia Islamica 2 (1954), 104–105.
42Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, Histoire de l’empire Ottoman depuis son origine jusqu’à nos jours, trans. J. J. Hellert (Paris: Bellizard, Barthès, Dufour et Lowell, 1836), vol. 1, pp. 316–20; Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 112.
43Ali Anooshahr, The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam: A Comparative Study of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), pp. 124–5.
44Bayezid to Tīmūr. The original is in Feridun Bey’s chancery manual Compositions of Sultans (Münşe’atü ‘s-Selatin). This translation is from Anooshahr, pp. 125–6. Also see: Abdurrahman Daş, “Ankara Savaşı Öncesi Timur ile Yıldırım Bayezid’in Mektuplaşmaları,” Selçuk Üniversitesi Türkiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi 15 (2004), 141–67.
45The most complete history of this conflict in English is: Dimitris Kastritsis, The Sons of Bayezid: Empire Building and Representation in the Ottoman Civil War of 1402–1413 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007).
46Barkey, Empire of Difference, pp. 154–75.
47Rıza Yıldırım, “Turkomans between Two Empires: The Origins of the Qizilbash Identity in Anatolia (1447–1514),” PhD dissertation, Bilkent University, Ankara, 2008, pp. 303–415, 549–87.
48J. A. Boyle, “Dynastic and Political History of the Īl-Khāns,” in The Cambridge History of Iran, ed. J. A. Boyle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), vol. 5, pp. 413–16; K. Z. Ashrafyan, “Central Asia under Timur from 1370 to the early Fifteenth Century,” in History of Civilizations of Central Asia, ed. M. S. Asimov and C. E. Bosworth (Paris: UNESCO, 1998), vol. 4, pt. 1, pp. 332–7.
49Andrew Newman, Safavid Iran: Rebirth of a Persian Empire (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006), pp. 8–17.
50Mohammad Karim Youssef-Jamali, “The Life and Personality of Shah Ismā’īl I (1487–1524),” PhD dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 1981, pp. 1–15; Savory, Iran under the Safavids, pp. 5–9; Rahimi, “Between Chieftaincy and Knighthood,” 92–3.
51Shahzad Bashir, “The World as a Hat: Symbolism and Materiality in Safavid Iran,” in Unity in Diversity: Mysticism, Messianism and the Construction of Religious Auithority in Islam, ed. Orkhan Mir-Kasimov (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014), pp. 343–66; Yıldırım, “Turkomans between Two Empires,” pp. 223–4.
52Shah Ismā’īl to Selim I. In Asnād va nāmah’hā-yi tārīkhī va ijtimā‘i-yi dawrah-i Safavīyah, ed. Z. Sabitiyan (Tehran: Ibn Sina, 1964), pp. 112–17.
53Roger Savory, “The Struggle for Supremacy in Persia after the death of Timūr,” Der Islam 40, no. 1 (1965), 35–65. H. R. Roemer, “The Safavid Period,” in The Cambridge History of Iran, ed. Peter Jackson and Laurence Lockhart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), vol. 6, pp. 209–12; Colin Mitchell, The Practice of Politics in Safavid Iran: Power, Religion and Rhetoric (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2009), pp. 20–4.
54Mitchell, The Practice of Politics in Safavid Iran, pp. 23–5; Shahzad Bashir, “Shah Isma’il and the Qizilbash: Cannibalism in the Religious History of Early Safavid Iran,” History of Religions 45, no. 3 (2006): 234–56.
55Michel Mazzaoui, “The Ghazi Backgrounds of the Safavid State,” Iqbal Review 12, no. 3 (1971), 79–90.
56Savory, Iran under the Safavids, pp. 46–7.
57Mitchell, The Practice of Politics in Safavid Iran, pp. 46–50, 66–7.
58Roemer, “The Safavid Period,” vol. 6, pp. 233–40.
59Mitchell, The Practice of Politics in Safavid Iran, pp. 176–80; Roemer, “The Safavid Period,” vol. 6, pp. 263–6; Sussan Babaie, Kathryn Babayan, Ina Baghdiantz-McCabe, and Massumeh Farhad, Slaves of the Shah, New Elites of Safavid Iran (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2004), pp. 6–19.
60Babaie et al , Slaves of the Shah, New Elites of Safavid Iran, pp. 9, 51, 60, 71–7.
61For a study on this process among the Ottomans, see Kastritsis, The Sons of Bayezid, pp. 200–20.
62Sultan Mehmed II to Doge Giovanni Mocenigo, April 24, 1480. Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Miscellanea documenti turchi, documento n. 14. Also see the safe conduct issued by Mehmed II for Tomaso Malipiero, February 25, 1478, in Victor Ménage, “Seven Ottoman Documents from the Reign of Meḥemmed II,” in Documents from Islamic Chanceries, ed. Samuel Stern and Jean Aubin (Oxford: Cassirer, 1965), pp. 85–6.
63Romanian writers, similarly, referred to the Ottoman dynasts in their own language as împăratul turcesc. See, for example, the many references in: Grigore Ureche, Chronique de Moldavie depuis le milieu du XIVe siècle jusqu’à l’an 1594, trans. Emile Picot (Paris: Libraire de la société asiatique de l’école des langues orientales vivantes, etc, 1878).
64Emperor Charles V to Shah Ismā’īl, August 25, 1525. In E. Vehse, Memoirs of the Court, Aristocracy, and Diplomacy of Austria (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1856), vol. 2, p. 491.
65Emperor Charles V to Sultan Süleyman II, ca. 1545. In ibid., p. 490.
66Juan de Persia [Uruch Beg], Relaciones de Don Juan de Persia (Valladolid: Juan de Bostillo, 1604), pp. 13, 29, 35, 52, 60, 165.
67The official names for the Ottoman Empire, for example, were the Memalik-i Mahrusa-i Şahane (“Well-Protected Domains of the Shah”) and the Devlet-i Âliyye (“Sublime Devlet”). The Safavid Empire was similarly the Mamālik-i Mahrūsa and Mamālik-i Īrān (“Domains of Iran”).
68André Miquel, “Mamlaka,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 6, p. 313; Francis Johnson, A Dictionary, Persian, Arabic, and English (London: H. Allen, 1852), pp. 588, 1247, 1250; Roger Savory, “The Safavid Administrative System,” in The Cambridge History of Iran, ed. Peter Jackson and Laurence Lockhart (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), vol. 6, pp. 351–2.
69F. Rosenthal, “Dawla,” Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 2, pp. 177–8; Marinos Sariyannis, “Ruler and State, State and Society in Ottoman Political Thought,” Turkish Historical Review 4 (2013), 96–104. The importance of the word is shown by the fact that when Greeks wrote addresses to the Ottoman government in their own language they frequently referred to it as devléti in preference to the usual words for state or empire.
70Vladimir Minorsky, “The Poetry of Shah Isma’il I,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 10, no. 4 (1942), 1047a.
71Gazel by “Selimi” (Sultan Selim), 1520. English translation in E. J. W. Gibb, Ottoman Poems (London and Glasgow: Trubner, 1882), vol. p. 33; original Persian text in Hasan Gültekin, “Yavuz Sultan Selim’in Farsça Beyitleriyle Tercümeleri,” Turkish Studies 10, no. 8 (2015), 1241–2.
72Inscription on the Süleymaniye mosque, composed in 1557 by Şeyhülislam Ebu’s-Su’ud. The text can be found in Cevdet Çulpan, “İstanbul Süleymaniye Camii Kitabesi,” in Kanuni Armağanı (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1970), pp. 291–9.
73On the significance of the title of Ṣāḥib-i Qirān, see: Cornell Fleischer, “The Lawgiver as Messiah: The Making of the Imperial Image in the Reign of Süleyman,” in Soliman le Magnifique et son temps, ed. Gilles Veinstein (Paris: La Documentation Française, 1992), pp. 162–7; Lisa Balabanlilar, Imperial Identity in the Mughal Empire (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2012), pp. 47–8; Kathryn Babayan, Mystics, Monarchs, and Messiahs (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 300–301.
74So much was this the case that al-Juvaynī singled out as extraordinary the fact that Chinggis Khan had managed to create the Mongol empire without such imitation, “from the page of his own mind, without the toil of perusing records or the trouble of conforming with ... all that has been recorded touching the practice of the mighty Chosroes of old and all that has been written concerning the customs and usages of the Pharaohs and Caesars.” ‘Ala-ad-Din ‘Ata-Malik Juvaini, The History of the World Conqueror (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), vol. 1, pp. 23–4.
75Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650: The Structure of Power (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 98; Leslie Pierce, The Imperial Harem (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 15–27.
76Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650, pp. 96–115.
77Fletcher, “Turco-Mongolian Monarchic Tradition in the Ottoman Empire,” 249; İnalcık, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300–1600, pp. 60–1.
78Clifford Bosworth, The History of the Seljuk State: A Translation with Commentary of the Akhbār al-dawla al-saljūqiyya (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), p. 10.
79The Mulfuzat Timury, or Autobiographical Memoirs of the Moghul Emperor Timur, trans. Charles Stewart (London: Oriental Translation Committee, 1830), pp. 17–18.
80Anonymous, Die Altosmanischen anonymen Chroniken, trans Friedrich Geise (Breslau: Selbstverlag, 1922), pt. 1, pp. 6–7; pt. 2, pp. 12–13.
81Sholeh Quinn, “The Dreams of Shaykh Safi al-Din and Safavid Historical Writing,” Iranian Studies 29, no. 1/2 (1996), 127–47.
82Gottfried Hagen, “Legitimacy and World Order,” in Legitimizing the Order: The Ottoman Rhetoric of State Power, ed. Hakan Karateke and Maurus Reinkowski (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005), pp. 55–83.
83N. R. Farooqi, “Six Ottoman Documents on Mughal-Ottoman Relations during the Reign of Akbar,” Islamic Studies 7, no.1 (1996), 39–41.
84Mitchell, The Practice of Politics in Safavid Iran, pp. 3–5; Hamid Mavani, Religious Authority and Political Thought in Twelver Shi’ism (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 188–9.
85Fletcher argues that internecine strife also served the purpose of “rekindling over and over again the Turco-Mongolian version of Ibn Khaldun’s ‘aṣabiyya, namely, the solidarity and enthusiasm of each new emperor’s personal supporters, who formed the nucleus of his regime, enabling him to remain the all-powerful master of his government.” Fletcher, “Turco-Mongolian Monarchic Tradition in the Ottoman Empire,” 243.
86Halil İnalcık, “The Ottoman Succession and Its Relation to the Turkish Concept of Sovereignty,” in The Middle East and the Balkans under the Ottoman Empire (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1993), p. 60.
87Abdülvâsi Çelebi, Ḫalīlnāme, in: Kastritsis, The Sons of Bayezid, p. 226.
88Cornell Fleischer, “The Lawgiver as Messiah: The Making of the Imperial Image in the Reign of Süleyman,” in Soliman le Magnifique et son temps, ed. Gilles Veinstein (Paris: 1992), pp. 159–77. Although this trend is most noticeable in the late sixteenth century, Ottoman poets were already describing their sultans as Mehdi in the early 1400s. See Abdülvâsi Çelebi, Ḫalīlnāme, in Kastritsis, The Sons of Bayezid, pp. 222–2. For a discussion of how many such terms had their origin in Timurid efforts to create a “new vocabulary of Sovereignty” before being appropriated by the Ottomans, see Christopher Andrew Markiewicz, The Crisis of Rule in Late Medieval Islam: A Study of Idrīs Bidlīsī (861–926/1457–1520) and Kingship at the Turn of the Sixteenth Century, PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2015, pp. 295–341, 400, 413.
89Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650, pp. 247–51; Halil İnalcık, “Ḳānūn,” Encyclopedia of Islam, vol. 4, pp. 556–62; Engin Deniz Akarl, “The Ruler and Law Making in the Ottoman Empire,” in Law and Empire: Ideas, Practices, Actors, ed. Jeroen Duindam et al. (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), pp. 87–110.
90Cemal Elitaş et al., Accounting Method used by Ottomans for 500 Years: Stairs (Merdiban) Method (Ankara: Turkish Republic Ministry of Finance, 2008), pp. 275–81.
91Fletcher, “Turco-Mongolian Monarchic Tradition in the Ottoman Empire,” 243.
92On this process among the Ottomans, see: Barkey, Empire of Difference, pp. 75–82. For this process in Safavid Persia, see: Babaie et al., Slaves of the Shah, New Elites of Safavid Iran, pp. 9, 51, 60, 71–7.
93Murad III to al-Manṣūr, 1578. In Abderrahmane El Moudden, “The Idea of the Caliphate between Moroccans and Ottomans: Political and Symbolic Stakes in the 16th- and 17th-Century Maghrib,” Studia Islamica 82 (1995), 108.
94Süleyman I to François I, 1526. In Ernest Charrière, Négociations de la France dans le Levant; ou, Correspondances, mémoires et actes diplomatiques des ambassadeurs de France ... (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1848), vol. 1, pp. 116–17. Original in Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, Supplément turc 1638A (Béthune 8507), f.122.
95A good survey of this hierarchy can be found in: Dimitris Kastritsis, “Ferīdūn Beg’s Münşe’ātü ‘s-Selāṭīn (‘Correspondence of Sultans’) and Late Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Views of the Political World,” in Imperial Geographies in Byzantine and Ottoman Space, ed. Sahar Bazzaz, Yota Batsaki, and Dimiter Angelov (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2013), pp. 91–110.
96Dimitris Kastritsis, “Ferīdūn Beg’s Münşe’ātü ‘s-Selāṭīn (‘Correspondence of Sultans’) and Late Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Views of the Political World,” p. 99.
97Hasan Çolak, “Tekfur, Fasiliyus, and Kayser: Disdain, Negligence and Appropriation of Byzantine Imperial Titulature in the Ottoman World,” in Frontiers of the Ottoman Imagination, ed. Marios Hadjianastasis (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015), pp. 5–28; Halil İnalcık, “Power Relationships between Russia, the Crimea and the Ottoman Empire as Reflected in Titulature,” in The Middle East and the Balkans under the Ottoman Empire (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1993), pp. 382–93; Mehmet Sinan Birdal, The Holy Roman Empire and the Ottomans (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011), pp. 3–4.
98It is true, however, that the Safavids’ increasing association with Persia after Shah Ismā’īl resulted in a more geographically grounded sense of identity with what some Safavids began to call the “expansive realm of Iran.” Rudi Matthee, “Was Safavid Iran an Empire?,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 53, no. 1/2 (2010), 241–2.
99Palmira Brummet, “Imagining the Early Modern Ottoman Space, from World History to Piri Reis,” in The Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire, ed. Virginia Aksan and Daniel Goffman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 24.
100Hakan Özoğlu, Kurdish Notables and the Ottoman State (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), pp. 47–57.
101Sabri Ateş, Ottoman-Iranian Borderlands: Making a Boundary, 1843–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 177–9; Halil İnalcık, “Autonomous Enclaves in Islamic States: Temlîks, Soyurghals, Yurdluḳ-Ocaḳlıḳs, Mâlikâne-Muḳâṭa’as and Awqāf,” in History and Historiography of Post-Mongol Central Asia and the Middle East: Studies in Honor of John E. Woods, ed. Edith Pfeiffer and Sholeh Quinn (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006), pp. 126–8; Gábor Ágoston, “A Flexible Empire: Authority and Its Limits on the Ottoman Frontiers,” International Journal of Turkish Studies 9, no. 1/2 (2003), 17–22.
102Dariusz Kołodziejczyk, “Between Universalistic Claims and Reality: Ottoman Frontiers in the Early Modern Period,” in The Ottoman World, ed. Christine Woodhead (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 206–207; Ateş, Ottoman-Iranian Borderlands, p. 18.
103Brummet, “Imagining the Early Modern Ottoman Space, from World History to Piri Reis,” pp. 24–5, 49.
104In Gábor Ágoston, “A Flexible Empire: Authority and Its Limits on the Ottoman Frontiers,” 24.
105Kołodziejczyk, “Between Universalistic Claims and Reality: Ottoman Frontiers in the Early Modern Period,” pp. 208–12. Also see: Ateş, Ottoman-Iranian Borderlands, p. 19.
106The Polish and Venetian authorities, not surprisingly, represented these payments to their home audiences as voluntary subsidies or “debts” rather than tribute. See, for example, Palmira Brummett, Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomacy in the Age of Discovery (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 102, 108.
107For two examples of Ottoman interest in China, see: Seyfi Çelebi, L’ouvrage de Seyfi Çelebi: Historien ottoman du XVIe siècle, trans. Joseph Matuz (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1968), pp. 20, 23–5; Ildikó Bellér-Hann, A History of Cathay: A Translation and Linguistic Analysis of a Fifteenth-Century Turkic Manuscript (Indiana University Uralic and Altaic Series 162. Bloomington: Indiana University Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, 1995); Yih-Min Liu, “A Comparative and Critical Study of Ali Akbar’s Khitāy Nāma with Reference to Chinese Sources (English Summary),” Central Asiatic Journal 27, no. 1/2 (1983), 58–78.
108Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 30–1, 122–3, 149–51.
109Seydi Ali Reis, Mirror of Countries (Mir’atu’l-Memalik). For an English translation, see: The Travels and Adventures of the Turkish Admiral Sidi Ali Reis, trans. Ármin Vámbéry (London: Luzac, 1899), pp. 51–3.
110Syros, “Galenic Medicine and Social Stability in Early Modern Florence and the Islamic Empires,” 27–8; Darling, A History of Social Justice and Political Power in the Middle East, pp. 2–8.
111Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650, pp. 244–6; Marinos Sariyannis, “Ruler and State, State and Society in Ottoman Political Thought,” Turkish Historical Review 4, no. 1 (2013), 104–11; Darling, A History of Social Justice and Political Power in the Middle East, pp. 128–51.
112Suraiya Faroqhi, “The Ottoman Ruling Group and the Religions of Its Subjects in the Early Modern Age: A Survey of Current Research,” Journal of Early Modern History 14, no. 3 (2010) 239–66; Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (eds), Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, 2 vols (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982); Paraskevas Konortas, “From Tâ’ife to Millet: Ottoman Terms for the Ottoman Greek Orthodox Community,” in Ottoman Greeks in the Age of Nationalism, ed. Dimitri Gondicas and Charles Issawi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 169–79.
113Colin Mitchell, “Safavid Imperial Tarassul and the Persian Insha’ Tradition,” Studia Iranica 26, no. 2 (1997): 173–209.
114For discussion of the form used in the Ottoman Empire, see: Anton Minkov, Conversion to Islam in the Balkans (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004), pp. 110–38.
115For an excellent example, see: Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “The Delicate Art of Aggression: Uzun Hasan’s Fathnama to Qaytbay of 1469,” Iranian Studies 44, no. 2 (2011), 193–214.
116Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), vol. 1, pp. 137–8; John Elliott, Spain and Its World: 1500–1700 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 168–9; Andrew Hess, The Forgotten Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
117Salih Özbaran, The Ottoman Response to European Expansion. Studies in Ottoman-Portuguese Relations in the Indian Ocean and Ottoman Administration in the Arab Lands during the Sixteenth Century (Istanbul: Isis, 1994).
118A. C. Wood, A History of the Levant Company (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935); Maurits van den Boogert, The Capitulations and the Ottoman Legal System (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005), pp. 38–42. See also Chapter 10 in this volume.
119Robert Bickers, The Scramble for China (London and New York: Allen Lane, 2011), p. 110.
120See, for example: Selçuk Esenbel, Japanese Interest in the Ottoman Empire (Istanbul: Boğaziçi University Press, 2003), pp. 95–124.
121Kemal Karpat, The Politicization of Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 57–63, 237–8; Hodong Kim, Holy War in China: Muslim Rebellion and State in Chinese Central Asia, 1864–1877 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 149–55.