The religious dichotomy between the Ottoman and Safavid Empires and the early modern Ottoman state’s role in the persecution of Kızılbaş communities in Anatolia have been the subject of sustained scholarly interest. While scholarship from the 1960s through the 1980s explained Ottoman anti-Kızılbaş policies in the context of mere security concerns, revisionists, who have dominated the field since the 1990s, rightfully emphasize the importance of the religious motivations behind political decisions made by these two empires. These studies, however, not only depicted the formation of Kızılbaş communities in Anatolia as an “umbrella movement” against the Sunni Ottomans but also reduced the nature of the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and its Kızılbaş subjects to a perpetual struggle against rebellious heretics. I rather argue that pro-Safavid propaganda disseminated by certain political and religious actors in early modern Anatolia constituted a significant dynamic that shaped Ottoman policy vis-à-vis its Kızılbaş subjects and its rival to the east for more than a century. Beginning with the transformation of the Safaviyya sufi order into a military and political movement under the leadership of Junayd in the 1450s, Safavid shaykhs, then shahs, deployed the tool of pro-Safavid propaganda among Anatolians both to recruit new followers for the order and to find soldiers and taxpayers for the newly-established political entity. The main methods utilized by the Safavids included the dispatching of religious agents, or halifes; circulating books, poems, and objects; making marriage alliances; supporting political and social upheavals; and encouraging migration to Safavid Iran with the lure of lands and titles. Significantly, in the second half of the sixteenth century pro-Safavid propaganda intensified to an extent that the Ottoman central authority switched its focus from born Kızılbaş to Kızılbaş converts as a response to ongoing pro-Safavid efforts. This fraught period in the history of early modern Anatolia provides us with a vibrant case of the “rationalization of religion" as a complex process shaped by the interplay of material conditions, social groupings, active state involvements, and value commitments. An examination of the intricacies of pro-Safavid propaganda in Anatolia is, therefore, crucial for a deeper understanding of both the early modern religious transformation of the Ottoman and Safavid polities and the formation of Anatolian Kızılbaş communities. To this end, I use utilize both Ottoman and Safavid sources, including imperial degrees, legal opinions, treaties, court chronicles, polemics, and poems, as well as the accounts of European travelers and merchants.