After a half-century long Ottoman-Safavid rivalry in the sixteenth century, a peace agreement signed in Amasya in 1555 suspended warfare and ideological competition for more than three decades. Although Ottoman and Safavid forces fought each other later, the Amasya Treaty became the reference point for later diplomatic negotiations and transactions. In short, the Amasya Treaty was a formative in determining the boundaries between the Ottoman and Safavid Empires and later between Turkey and Iran. This paper focuses on why the Ottoman and Safavid empires made this treaty despite a long-standing ideological and politico-religious divide between the two. In the literature, it has been held that the Safavids could not afford such a costly rivalry and pleaded the Ottomans to make peace, because the former were tired of the military campaigns of the latter. On te basis of my extensive and comparative research in Ottoman, Persian and European sources, I find that this narrative misses many essential points and omits certain historical facts just before the treaty was signed. I argue that it was rather the Ottomans who wished, hoped for and in once instance requested peace with the Safavids. As the Ottoman armies were not able to destroy the Safavid state, every Ottoman expedition proved to be a fruitless, futile and hollow victory, mainly due to the the Safavids’ scorched-earth tactics and their evacuation of cities in war zones. Using correspondence, ambassadorial reports, and narrative sources, I will show from various kinds of historical sources that although the Ottoman army had left Istanbul to fight with the Safavids before the agreement was signed, the primary Ottoman motive was to force the Safavids to ask for peace. Moreover, at some point the Ottoman rulers had even secretly asked the Safavid rulers to make peace.

Rising as a political power in the early sixteenth century, the Safavids were able to mobilize people from Azerbaijan, Iraq, Syria and Anatolia. Sultans Selim (r. 1512–1520) and Süleyman’s (r. 1520–1566) military undertakings brought most of Anatolia under the Ottoman military and administrative control, but many Qizilbash people from the Ottoman territories maintained their “affiliation” with the Safavids. This paper investigates the religio-legal opinions of Sarıgörez Nureddin Hamza (d. 1522), Kemalpaşazade (d. 1534) and Ebussuud (d. 1574) about the Safavids and the Qizilbash. Sarıgörez and Kemalpaşazade drew up their pieces in 1514, while Ebussuud wrote down most of his opinions in the late 1540s and 1550s. Historians have hitherto tended to see these writings as uniform political documents, intended to justify both fighting against the Safavids and the unhindered persecution of Ottoman Qizilbash subjects. However, examination of these opinions with particular attention to their religio-legal content reveals differences; no two authors agree on all views about this issue. Generally speaking, among the reasons for their disagreement are different perceptions of the gravity of the Safavid and Qizilbash threat, changes in the preference of applicable jurisprudential doctrine and the interpretation of the jurisprudential concepts and shifts in socio-political conditions. All the jurists under study justify fighting against the Safavids; however, they differ in the evaluation of the religio-legal situation of Ottoman Qizilbash subjects. For example, Sarıgörez provides the Ottoman executive authorities with religio-legal arguments to persecute the supporters of the Safavids everywhere, including the Ottoman territories; Kemalpaşazade prohibits the persecution of Ottoman Qizilbash subjects; finally, Ebussuud emphasizes the primacy of the Sultan’s decision, proposes lenient treatment of Ottoman Qizilbash subjects and opens the way for their integration to the Ottoman society. It is possible to say that the analysis of these three religio-legal opinions sheds light not only on the treatment of the Safavids and Qizilbash but also on the nature of juristic authority and its position vis-à-vis the government in the Ottoman Empire.

1480-1520 was undoubtedly a period of profound change in the central Islamic lands: the Aq-Qoyunlu, Mamluk and Timurid dynasties were swept from power by a new constellation of states – the Ottomans, Safavids, and Uzbeks. This political turbulence – which would come to be increasingly framed by polemicists along ‘official’ Sunni-Shi`ite binaries – transformed the rich and variegated religious landscape of the late 15th century from Anatolia to Khurasan. Understanding this transformation can be helped by focusing on those religious and bureaucratic notables who were living in Aq Qoyunlu or Timurid cities (e.g. Tabriz, Shiraz, Herat, Yazd), and how they chose to respond to the maelstrom events of 1480-1520. This particular paper will examine Qazi Mir Husain Maybudi (d. 1504), who had studied with the great philosopher al-Davani in Shiraz and later served as an Aq Qoyunlu-appointed judge in the city of Yazd. Most famous for his extensive commentary on the poetry of Ali, Maybudi also wrote a number of commentaries on philosophy, logic, astronomy, mathematics, and astrology. As a Shafi`i-inclined Sufi, scholar, litterateur, and philosopher who also wrote extensively on the inviolability of Ali and the Imams, Maybudi is indeed an exemplar of the ubiquitous confessional ambiguity of the 15th century. He was a witness to the rise of the Safavids, and indeed his collection of letters (munsha’at) contains a letter addressed directly to Shah Isma`il. Of particular interest, however, is a lengthy fath nama (“victory letter”) which was penned as a model epistolary text, and as such intended for a ruler to propagandize a great military victory. This unaddressed epistle includes a rich pastiche of Qu’ranic texts, Prophetic hadiths, millenarian references, esoteric poems, as well as a variety of literary allusions. It is the contention of this paper that Maybudi penned this letter amidst the rise of the Safavids in Azarbaijan and their expansion eastwards across the Iranian Plateau. Unlike his Aq Qoyunlu contemporaries like Khunji-Isfahani and Idris Bidlisi who fled to Samarqand and Istanbul and began contributing to the emerging polemical discourse, Maybudi sought instead to use his literary acumen and religious ecumenism to negotiate a role in this new world order. Despite this textual evidence which underscores Maybudi’s broad (and sophisticated) religious and literary sensibilities, later Safavid historiography has categorized him as a staunch and unrelenting Sunni whose participation in the defense of Yazd earned him a public execution at the behest of Shah Isma`il.

Concentrating on a number of works by the noted litterateur and painter, Sadiqi Afshar (d. 1018/1609-10), the paper seeks to place Turkic literature in Safavid Iran against the background of the Persianate “Republic of Letters” and early modern state formation in the 16th-17th century Islamic World. As is well known, the Safavids came to power at the head of a largely Turkoman tribal confederation (the Qizilbash) and it was to the latter that most of the popular messianic Turkic propaganda poetry was dedicated. However, the Safavids were also heir to the Timurid tradition, and as part of that, some of their Turkoman Qizilbash elite perpetuated both the Persian and the Turkic literary traditions of the Timurids. A case in point is Sadiqi Beg, who came from one of the Qizilbash tribes and wrote works in Persian, Azeri Turkic, the language mostly used under the Safavids, as well as Chaghatay Turkic, the prestige idiom practiced under the Timurids; he emulated Ali Shir Nava’i, the most important figure of the Timurid and Chaghatay Turkic literary traditions, who in his well-known pamphlet entitled Muhakamat al-lughatayn, produced a language ideology for Turkic as part of a political theology in the late 15th century. The paper argues that the late Timurids and the Ottomans had a veritable early modern language ideology, something similar to the ones produced in 15th-16th century Europe, where Latin was giving way to vernaculars. However, Turkic had no such function under the Safavids. It never disappeared from Persia, but it disappeared from Safavid ideology. Sadiqi thus strove for a lost cause with his Turkic endeavors when Abbas I (1587-1629) introduced large-scale centralizing policies and the Qizilbash lost much of their power. At the same time, I also argue that unlike the Ottoman and Mughal context, where there were Turkish and Persian language ideologies as part of political theology, no such assertion of its status could be seen in the case of Persian in Safavid Persia. Jettisoning their explicitly messianic tenets, the Safavids espoused the ideology of Persian kingship as conveyed by the Persian literary tradition, and they sponsored primarily Persian, spreading Twelver Shiism among the populace at large. However, contrary to the Mughal and Ottoman cases, under the Safavids, there was no reassertion of language as part of a new political theology, and thus there was never competition between Persian and Turkic.