Among the great Islamic dynasties, the Safavids are distinguished by the unusual path they followed in their ascent to power. Their emergence onto the world-historical scene involved a process of metamorphosis of the Safaviyya from a conventional Sufi order into a religio-political project, which culminated in the establishment of the empire under the charismatic leadership of Shah Isma'il (r.1501-1524). While scholars commonly acknowledge that the Safavids' followers from Anatolia, known as the Kizilbash, played a key role in Shah Isma'il's success, the nature of the Kizilbash movement is still poorly understood. How was Shah Ismail able to mobilize a following of such magnitude? Who were these dedicated Kizilbash adherents to the Safavid da'wa, scattered all the way from the Balkans to Northern Syriai A group of recently surfaced documents and manuscripts that have been preserved for centuries in the family archives of members of the Kizilbash/Alevi community shed new light on various aspects of these questions, and force us to rethink the formation and evolution of the historical Kizilbash milieu in Ottoman Anatolia and its connection to the Safavids. In the existing literature, Kizilbash-ism is almost exclusively associated with the tribal milieu. This view for the most part took shape on the basis of a number of Turcoman tribes' prominent place in the early Safavid political and military establishment. But the larger Kizilbash milieu in Anatolia and neighboring regions comprised ethnically and socially diverse elements, tribal as well as non-tribal rural communities, and even individuals from within the Ottoman bureaucracy. Moreover, new documents demonstrate the WafaWi origins of an extensive web of Alevi charismatic lineages, or ocaks, in eastern Anatolia. The case of the Wafi i cum Kizilbash ocaks suggests that the building blocks of the Kizilbash milieu were not individual tribes as such, but rather various Sufi circles and itinerant dervish groups who joined together under the spiritual and political leadership of the Safavid shahs. In other words, Shah Isma'il's predecessors established the foundation of the Kizilbash network in Anatolia, not by directly enlisting individual tribesmen or groups of them to their cause, but by recruiting for the Safavid project a number of already well-established mystics and sheikh families with widespread (tribal or non-tribal) followings of their own. With this new perspective on the subject we can more easily account not only for the surprisingly rapid expansion of the historical Kizilbash milieu, but also for its often little recognized resilience.