by Alan Mikhail
The soldiers for whom Selim had provided plunder, booty, and slaves proved a willing audience for his ambitious plan to continue his conquests. When they returned to their homes and relayed Selim’s words to their families and friends, we are told, all “became, with heart and soul, the slaves of that court.” In using the carefully chosen words “slaves of that court” (my emphasis), this devotedly pro-Selim chronicle shoots an arrow directly at Bayezit’s administration, casting Selim as a sultan with a court of his own. The Selimname goes on to relate that as people throughout the empire learned of Selim’s message, they took to composing verses extolling his splendors and virtues and the glories of the day when he would finally become sultan, describing him as, for example, “the world-conquering monarch of glory and resolute endeavour” and “lord of a fortunate conjunction of the planets.” Thus, after the Georgia campaign, if we are to believe the Selimname, Selim began emerging as sultan.
Selim’s father was, of course, still the reigning sultan. He and his entourage watched nervously from Istanbul as Selim built a power base in the east. In the Selimname’s rendition of their fears, these men became “afflicted with great distress, . . . envy and jealousy,” thanks to Selim’s “valour and his laudable disposition for consummate bravery, manliness and skill.” With Selim’s rise, Bayezit and his retinue came to realize “that the courageous men of zeal who had been sick and ill with the diseases of lack of esteem and degradation had revived and gained fresh vigour.” Moreover, “with the emergence of that monarch [Selim, viewed here as sovereign] whose state was dominion and whose mark was prosperity, they [Selim’s soldiers] had come together and reassembled.” With his own personal army, Selim surged in power. The Selimname goes on to say, rather prematurely, that “the people at [Bayezit’s] court became aware that the sun of their prosperity had passed into eclipse and come near to setting.”
As sultan of the empire, not to mention Selim’s father, Bayezit refused to tolerate such insolence and escalated his support for Ahmed. As both camps grew more bellicose, it became clear that the succession battle would be bloody. The pro-Ahmed faction at Bayezit’s court, again according to the Selimname, “began to strive eagerly, incessantly, and as much as possible, for the discrediting of the bravery and erudition of His Majesty Sultan [Selīm], whose home is in heaven, and for the increase of Sultan Aḥmed’s grandeur and glory. In that matter they showed no lack of exertion and diligence.” Meanwhile, Korkud, who had by now developed a serious interest in the throne, had begun to assemble his own retinue of supporters as well. Thus, as Bayezit aged and his three sons prepared for what might come next, their subjects girded themselves for the looming internecine battle.
SOON, A MAJOR CRISIS fanned the flames of this smoldering fraternal struggle. The Safavid capture of Tabriz in 1501 had emboldened Shiites throughout the Ottoman Empire, promising them powerful support against the Sunni empire that had often subjugated them. The imperial administration endeavored to stave off any attempts at a Safavid–Ottoman Shiite alliance that might undermine the empire from within by forcibly resettling Shiites away from the zone of Safavid influence. From eastern Anatolia, they were sent wrenchingly vast distances—to southwest Anatolia, even to the Balkans—to get them as far from the Safavids as possible. This plan, however, completely backfired. Instead of destroying what they perceived to be a threatening stronghold of Safavid sympathy, Ottoman officials spread the threat to every corner of the empire. They now had to chase the Safavid challenge all the way from the Balkans to Syria.
The province of Teke—the bulge of southwestern Anatolia just to the west of Antalya, lying between the Taurus Mountains and the Mediterranean Sea—received one of the largest populations of resettled Shiites. In 1511, a charismatic leader emerged from among them and threw the empire into crisis. His nom de guerre, Şahkulu, revealed his Shiite political program: with sword in hand, he rebelled against the Ottoman state as a slave (kul) of the Safavid ruler Ismail (Şah, or shah). Like so many other upstarts in early sixteenth-century Anatolia, Şahkulu began his career as a roving mystic proselytizer with a small band of followers. As did the early Safavid shahs and numerous other Muslim, Jewish, and Christian parvenus, Şahkulu began gaining more and more followers, forcing local Ottoman officials to pay him increasing attention. In line with the empire’s policy of co-optation, Şahkulu, whose roots were among the tribal Turkmen, initially even received an allowance from Bayezit’s imperial administration—a fact that would later be used against the sultan as evidence that he had, knowingly or unknowingly (which was worse?), aided an enemy of the state.
Increasingly emboldened, Şahkulu ratcheted up his claims, to the point of asserting his own divinity as a Shiite prophet. Some of his supporters claimed he was the Messiah. His oppositional and inspirational message found willing ears among a wide swath of those disgruntled with the Ottoman state—which seems to support one of the more bombastic assertions of Selim’s speech in Georgia: that many of the empire’s Sunnis were converting to Shiism. Accounts of Şahkulu’s impact describe his followers as “the people of Anatolia,” suggesting a large and varied base of support not only in Teke but also farther afield. Indeed, he sent letters as far as Greece and Bulgaria to drum up support for his intended rebellion. In 1510, newly arrived Jews in Salonica received letters inviting them to join him against the imperial state (few did). Inevitably, Şahkulu’s attempts to foment rebellion received a military response.
Just after Bayezit resettled the eastern Shiites in Teke, he appointed Korkud governor of the province, charging him to become the “majestic and strong commander” required to defend against any Shiite challenge in the region. By the time Şahkulu launched his rebellion, on April 9, 1511 (the Shiite holy day of 10 Muharram, commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, son of ‘Ali), it was patently clear that Korkud had failed in this charge. Already consumed by the impending succession battle, Korkud had abandoned Teke and taken to the road to win support around the empire for his own bid for the throne. In the spring of 1511, he was in Manisa, an important economic hub and one of the major cities in western Anatolia—and strategically located close to the Aegean coast, should a run on the capital be necessary.
Korkud’s absence from Teke empowered Şahkulu, not only tactically but also rhetorically, by reinforcing Şahkulu’s propaganda about the ineffectiveness and failure of Ottoman rule—that it did not serve the interests of the people, that its days were numbered. Şahkulu posited that Korkud had deserted Teke because the sixty-three-year-old Bayezit was near death—the death of a sultan always being a time of major chaos in the empire—and painted a picture of Ottoman bankruptcy and ineptitude, cowardice and selfishness, of an empire in tumult and decline.
In 1511, Şahkulu and his men were on the march, notching important victories against Ottoman forces in Teke and around the picturesque port city of Antalya. Much like the contemporary tactics of the Taino and Wolof half a world away in Hispaniola, Şahkulu and his rebels found ideal hiding spots in the forested mountains of southwestern Anatolia. From their upland locations, these forces would charge down onto Ottoman strongholds, burn military barracks, steal food and provisions, and decimate livestock. When reports reached Bayezit that the rebels had made inroads into the Ottoman military, even convincing some soldiers to switch sides, the sultan knew an immediate mobilization was needed. He dispatched one of his strongest military leaders, Karagöz Pasha, the governor-general of Anatolia, to smash the Shiite upstarts.
Karagöz Pasha pursued Şahkulu out of Teke and through western Anatolia. In town after town, he witnessed the carnage the rebels left in their wake. Some twenty thousand strong, Şahkulu’s marauding Shiite forces even burned Sunni mosques and Qur’ans. Townspeople recounted tales of murder and rape, pillage and destruction. For instance, in the hilly, landlocked town of Kütahya, more than two hundred miles north of Antalya, the rebels “destroyed everything—men, women, and children—and even sheep and cattle if there were too many for their needs; they de
stroyed cats and chickens. They looted all the valued possessions of the [villagers] of Kütahya province—their carpets and whatever else they could find—and collected them up and burned them.” At the end of April, a judge in Bursa, a hundred miles north of Kütahya, implored the head of the Janissaries to send soldiers immediately to protect his city, writing that if reinforcements did not arrive “within two days, the country was lost.” Fortunately for the people of Bursa, Karagöz Pasha caught up with Şahkulu in Kütahya. Distressingly for the empire, though, Şahkulu’s rebels far outnumbered the Ottoman troops. Outmanned and uninspired, the imperial army was easily routed from Kütahya, and Karagöz Pasha fell into the rebels’ hands. On April 22, 1511, in front of the citadel of Kütahya, they impaled him for all to see, then beheaded him and burned the body.
For Bayezit, the situation was both terrifying and intolerable. The lack of strong leadership in Anatolia had allowed a rebel thug to run roughshod across the heart of his empire. A Shiite apostate had destroyed property, murdered imperial subjects including a prominent governor-general, and was now spreading his vitriolic heresies across the realm. In an attempt to stop him, Bayezit turned to his grand vizier—Hadım Ali Pasha, originally from Bosnia, now the second most powerful man in the empire—and ordered him to annihilate Şahkulu and his rebels. While Bayezit, of course, wanted to end the rebellion and make an example of Şahkulu as a warning to all potential enemies of his state, he understood that his response to Şahkulu offered opportunities to further other interests as well.
Of Bayezit’s three possible successors—Selim, Ahmed, and Korkud—the empire’s military men now rightly saw Selim as the most aggressive: chasing down Safavid raiders and Anatolian Shiites, invading Georgia, offering soldiers his own share of the spoils of war. Bayezit and the pro-Ahmed faction thus felt obliged to prove that the sultan’s favorite son was as engaged and proactive a military commander as Selim—demonstrating just how successfully Selim had manipulated the debate over the empire’s use of force. Grand Vizier Hadım Ali Pasha headed the palace’s pro-Ahmed faction, so appointing him to be the one to destroy Şahkulu would further Ahmed’s military reputation. In a deft smoke-and-mirrors operation, Ahmed remained in Amasya, far from any fighting, but it was widely reported that he was in constant contact with Ali Pasha—thus giving the impression that he was the tactical mastermind of the empire’s fight against the rebels, even as he avoided any exposure to danger. This piece of political theater was a direct response to the threats Selim had issued to Ahmed and their father during the Georgian campaign. Bayezit was well aware that many in the Janissary Corps, commanders and common soldiers alike, remained skeptical of Ahmed’s military chops; unforged by the fire of combat, he was considered weak, inexperienced, and even uninterested in defending the empire. In this regard, he was very much his father’s son, preferring Bayezit’s path of diplomatic engagement with the empire’s enemies.
Unfortunately for Ahmed and Bayezit, and much more unfortunately for the grand vizier, things did not go as planned. When imperial forces confronted the rebels near Kütahya, Şahkulu and his men escaped eastward toward Safavid Iran to gather needed supplies and men from their Shiite allies. Ali Pasha, still “in coordination” with Ahmed, gave chase and met Şahkulu’s forces near the mineral-rich central Anatolian mountain town of Sivas. The attrition of Ottoman troops on the long march eastward, a lack of supplies, and possibly even the treason of some of his own soldiers put Ali Pasha and his men in a highly compromised position against the already-restocked Shiite rebels. When the fighting began in July, the imperial army suffered heavy losses. A few weeks later, word reached Istanbul that Ali Pasha had been killed. The Ottomans, however, did capture some of the Shiite rebels and eventually forcibly resettled most of them in the Peloponnese, very far from the Safavid frontier. Meanwhile, the majority of the Shiite fighters fled back toward Safavid territory. When they reached Ismail’s court in Tabriz later that summer, they were welcomed as heroes. The list of those arriving at the court, however, does not include Şahkulu, suggesting that he died either in the battle at Sivas or during the march to Iran.
Whatever Şahkulu’s end, it does not much matter for his legacy. He had rocked the edifice of the Ottoman Empire, exposing its frailties and leaving a trail of destruction throughout its heartland. It was Şahkulu who laid the groundwork for future Safavid challenges to the Ottomans. He killed the sultan’s most trusted confidant, gained supporters for Shiite interests in towns and cities throughout Anatolia, exposed Korkud as selfish and inept, and dealt a major setback to Ahmed’s ambition for the throne. In the domestic game of imperial succession, Selim clearly benefited from Şahkulu’s rebellion. It confirmed what he had felt for years and what he had asserted in his speech to the troops in Georgia: his father and his father’s administration were weak, his half-brothers even weaker. Factionalism and nepotism, power and money motivated them, rather than the well-being of the state and its people. Korkud, having departed Teke for Manisa, had proved his fecklessness. The power vacuum he had left in southwestern Anatolia allowed the Şahkulu Rebellion to break out in the first place, and Ahmed’s fearful, tepid machinations only bolstered its success. As the heir apparent, Ahmed had the most to lose from the Şahkulu Rebellion, and lose it he did. His (and Ali Pasha’s) thunderous failure reverberated like a cannon blast through the mountain passes of Anatolia.
A deep sense of crisis gripped the ruling elite as they tried to fathom how such a catastrophe could have happened. Ahmed, who had been publicly projected as the leader of the empire’s response to the rebellion, took most of the blame. Some observers offered critiques of his military strategy, insisting that Ali Pasha and his men had died because Ahmed had not sent reinforcements quickly enough. Others pointed to weaknesses in Ahmed’s personality, suggesting that he was simply too uninspiring and timid to galvanize the empire’s soldiers. When Ahmed had demanded an oath of allegiance from the Janissaries during the rebellion, they refused on the grounds that he was not personally leading them into war. By keeping himself safe, he lost the respect and even the allegiance of soldiers who were risking their lives to defend his family’s empire. Obviously, none of this boded well for his bid to attain the Ottoman throne.
Ahmed suffered another blow when reports surfaced that his own son, Murad, the sultan’s grandson—himself a potential future sultan—had defected to the Safavid side, donning the distinctive red helmet of the Kızılbaş. If Ahmed, as it appeared, could not even impose his will on his own children, how could he rule an empire? For critics of Ahmed, and by extension his father, this only confirmed their view that the two were failures at defending the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, watching helplessly as Shiism infiltrated not only their empire but even the dynastic family. Under Bayezit’s rule, the empire had become soft and vulnerable. If Ahmed’s conduct during the Şahkulu Rebellion was any indication, he would only make matters worse should he become the next sultan.
SELIM, THE RUTHLESS FIGHTER who had for decades battled the empire’s enemies from a remote province on the border with Iran, was the clear alternative to Ahmed. Where his father had chosen to negotiate with the empire’s Shiite enemies, Selim had overwhelmed them with devastating violence. Where Ahmed had cowered in his Amasya palace during the Şahkulu Rebellion, Selim had ridden out to war with his men in Georgia and Safavid territory. Selim was strong where the rest of his family was weak. As the least advantaged of his father’s sons, the least likely to win the throne, he had to become more brutal and resolute than the rest. He had to prove himself against his half-brothers and their supporters, against his own father, against the Safavids—all of whom would resist him.
Selim longed to restore the empire to its former glory and strength, to inspire soldiers and subjects alike. He would reject palace intrigue, factionalism, and greed. He wanted to return the military to the days when the privileged slave classes fought for the empire before themselves; at the same time, he built a fighting force of comparatively disadvantag
ed freeborn Muslims, ethnic minorities, and others. Whoever they were, Selim wanted men who would fight with zeal and inspiration, soldiers who were willing to sacrifice. He had demonstrated his good intentions by giving his troops all the booty, praise, and slaves earned in the Georgian campaign. The only prize Selim wanted was the throne.
CHAPTER
14
SUMMER IN CRIMEA
Selim meets with Mengli Giray in Crimea
EVERY SULTAN IN THE MORE THAN SIX-HUNDRED-YEAR HISTORY of the Ottoman dynasty descended from one man—Osman, the first sultan. Bayezit was the eighth link in this imperial chain; the transition from link eight to link nine proved to be one of the most wrenching for the dynasty. Selim pushed circuitously toward his father’s throne—from Trabzon across the Black Sea to the Crimean peninsula in the far north of the empire, down through the Balkans and eventually to Istanbul. Along the way, he showed himself to be a duplicitous son and a shrewd political strategist, a violent brother and a doting father. Balancing all of these identities on his shaky branch of the dynasty’s family tree proved precarious, to say the least.
IN 1511, WHILE THE Şahkulu Rebellion roiled the empire, Selim’s only son, Suleyman, turned seventeen, the same age as Selim was when he assumed the governorship of Trabzon. Selim at seventeen had been as stern as Suleyman was coddled. Still, the time had come for Suleyman to leave the confines of his palace home and enter the venomous world of imperial administration. The Selimname described him, as he entered adulthood, as “the straight-grown sapling of the orchard of success, and the fruit of the tree of world-government.” As we have seen, the sons of sultans nearly always became governors, usually in the most strategic post available. The sons of these princes often became governors also, although not always, and certainly not in desirable locales. Positioning Suleyman in the right governorship—one that would advance the cause of both father and son—was a key component of Selim’s grand strategy to outwit his half-brothers.