Selim I: The Conquest of the Arab Lands

Selim I ruled the Ottoman Empire for only eight years, from 1512 to 1520, and in that time altered its character more fundamentally than any sultan since Mehmed II. He defeated the newly founded Safavid state of Iran at Chaldiran, destroyed the Mamluk Sultanate that had ruled Egypt and Syria for two and a half centuries, and brought Mecca and Medina under Ottoman protection. An empire whose centre of gravity had been the Balkans and Anatolia became, in less than a decade, the dominant power of the Arab Middle East.

He is known in Turkish as Yavuz Sultan Selim — rendered variously as Selim the Resolute, the Stern, or in older European usage Selim the Grim. Both the achievements and the severity are well attested, and this article treats them together.

Accession by Force

Selim was born at Amasya in 1470, a son of Bayezid II. His path to the throne was violent even by Ottoman standards.

Bayezid II's reign had been comparatively cautious, and by its final years the succession was contested among his sons, with Selim, Ahmed and Korkud each holding provincial commands and each building support. The dispute was sharpened by policy: Selim favoured a hard line against the Safavids, whose religious appeal was spreading among the Turkmen tribes of eastern Anatolia, while his father's government had temporised.

Selim secured the janissaries' backing and marched on the capital. In 1512 he compelled his father to abdicate; Bayezid died shortly afterwards en route to retirement. Selim then eliminated his brothers and their sons, ending the civil war and establishing himself unchallenged. The practice of fratricide on accession, formalised under Mehmed II, was applied here with unusual thoroughness.

Chaldiran and the Safavid Confrontation

The most urgent problem Selim faced was not military but ideological.

Shah Isma'il had founded the Safavid state in Iran in 1501 on the basis of a militant Shi'i movement with a devoted following among the Turkmen tribes — the Qizilbash — many of whom lived inside Ottoman territory in eastern Anatolia. Safavid propaganda addressed these populations directly, and a major Qizilbash revolt in Anatolia in 1511 had demonstrated the danger. For the Ottomans this was a threat of a different kind from a rival army: it contested the loyalty of their own subjects on religious grounds.

Selim's response was to seek a decisive engagement. He obtained juristic opinions supporting war against the Safavids, moved against the Qizilbash within his territories, and marched east in 1514.

The armies met at Chaldiran, north-east of Lake Van, on 23 August 1514. The Ottoman force was larger and, decisively, equipped with field artillery and janissary handgunners deployed behind prepared positions; the Safavid army was a superb cavalry force with neither. The result was a comprehensive Ottoman victory. Isma'il escaped wounded; his capital Tabriz was occupied.

Selim did not hold Tabriz — the logistics of wintering an army in Azerbaijan defeated him, as they would defeat later Ottoman commanders — but the consequences were lasting. Safavid expansion westward was halted permanently, eastern Anatolia and much of Kurdistan and the upper Euphrates came under Ottoman control, and the Ottoman-Safavid frontier that resulted approximated the modern boundary between Turkey and Iran. The confessional division between the two empires hardened from this point, and the wider background is treated in the article on the historical origins of the Sunni and Shia traditions.

The Destruction of the Mamluk Sultanate

The Mamluk state ruled Egypt, Syria and the holy cities of the Hejaz, and had done so since the thirteenth century, when Baybars and his successors had halted the Mongols and eliminated the Crusader states. By the early sixteenth century it was in serious difficulty: its cavalry army had not adapted to gunpowder, its revenues had been damaged by the Portuguese diversion of the Indian Ocean spice trade around the Cape, and its politics were factional.

Relations with the Ottomans deteriorated after Chaldiran, with the Mamluk sultan Qansuh al-Ghawri suspected of an understanding with the Safavids. Selim marched south in 1516.

The campaign was decided in two battles. At Marj Dabiq, north of Aleppo, on 24 August 1516, the Mamluk army was destroyed and Qansuh al-Ghawri was killed. Ottoman artillery and firearms again proved decisive against a force built around heavy cavalry. Syria and Palestine submitted, in several places with the active cooperation of local elites who preferred Ottoman order to Mamluk exactions.

At Ridaniya, outside Cairo, on 22 January 1517, the successor Mamluk sultan Tuman Bay was defeated. Cairo was taken after further fighting in the streets; Tuman Bay was captured and executed. The Mamluk Sultanate ended, and Egypt became an Ottoman province — the wealthiest in the empire, and the source of the grain that fed Istanbul for the next three centuries.

Selim's settlement of Egypt was pragmatic. He retained much of the Mamluk administrative apparatus and many of its personnel, governing through a system that blended Ottoman provincial forms with local continuity. The arrangement is examined in Michael Winter's study of Ottoman Egypt and proved durable, though it also left a Mamluk military class in place whose descendants shaped Egyptian politics for centuries.

Why the Mamluks Lost

The speed of the Mamluk collapse — two battles, five months, the end of a state that had stood since the 1250s — invites explanation, and the reasons are reasonably well understood.

The military factor was gunpowder. The Mamluk army was built around heavy cavalry of exceptional individual quality, recruited as slave-soldiers, trained from childhood in horsemanship and archery, and organised around a warrior ethos that regarded firearms as the weapons of tradesmen. The Ottomans had adopted artillery and matchlock infantry wholesale and integrated them into a combined-arms system: guns in prepared positions, janissary handgunners behind field fortifications, cavalry on the wings to exploit a broken enemy. At Marj Dabiq and Ridaniya the Mamluk cavalry charged into that system and was destroyed. David Ayalon's study of the Mamluk response to firearms traces the institutional and cultural reasons for the failure to adapt, and it was not simple conservatism: the Mamluk military system was a closed corporation whose privileges depended on the skills it valued, and adopting infantry firearms would have meant admitting outsiders to the army.

The economic factor was the shift in trade. Mamluk revenues had depended substantially on the transit of Indian Ocean spices through the Red Sea to Alexandria. The Portuguese rounding of the Cape from 1498 diverted a growing share of that traffic, and Mamluk attempts to contest the Indian Ocean militarily had failed. The state was in fiscal difficulty at exactly the point when it needed to finance modernisation.

The political factor was internal. Qansuh al-Ghawri's authority rested on a factional balance among Mamluk amirs, and the sources describe defections and half-hearted service. In Syria the governor of Aleppo, Khayrbak, is generally reported to have gone over to the Ottomans before or during Marj Dabiq; Ottoman rule was subsequently established in Egypt partly through him. Local Syrian elites, urban notables and religious scholars in several cities preferred an Ottoman order that promised security and lower exactions to a Mamluk regime whose demands had grown with its difficulties.

Ibn Iyas, the Egyptian chronicler who witnessed the conquest and disliked it, is the essential source for the collapse from the inside, and his account of the disorder in Cairo, the executions, and the plundering is unsparing about both sides.

The Holy Cities

The most consequential result of the Egyptian conquest was the transfer of authority over the Hejaz. The Sharif of Mecca acknowledged Selim's suzerainty in 1517, and the Ottoman sultan became protector of Mecca and Medina and guarantor of the pilgrimage routes.

The title associated with this — Servant, or Custodian, of the Two Holy Sanctuaries — carried immense prestige across the Muslim world. Responsibility for the safety and provisioning of the Hajj caravans, for the maintenance of the sanctuaries, and for the annual subsidies to the populations of the holy cities became a central obligation of Ottoman sovereignty and a standing claim to leadership among Muslim rulers. Ottoman patronage of the Great Mosque of Mecca and of the Prophet's Mosque continued from this point until the empire's end.

The Caliphate: What Happened and What Did Not

A claim requiring careful statement attaches to this reign, because a widely repeated account of it is not supported by the evidence.

The story runs that when Selim took Cairo he found there al-Mutawakkil III, the last of the Abbasid caliphs who had been maintained under Mamluk protection since 1261 as a figurehead, and that al-Mutawakkil formally ceded the caliphate to him in a ceremony — thereby transferring the office to the Ottoman dynasty, which held it until 1924.

What is established is narrower. Al-Mutawakkil III was in Cairo, was taken to Constantinople, and the shadow Abbasid caliphate of Cairo ended with the Mamluk state that had sustained it. Selim did assume the protection of the holy cities and the pilgrimage, and his conquests made the Ottomans indisputably the pre-eminent Muslim power.

What is not established is the ceremony. Modern scholarship treats the account of a formal transfer of the caliphal office as a later construction, developed well after the event — the romanticised version dates substantially from the eighteenth century, when the Ottoman state had a new political interest in asserting a universal Islamic authority as its territorial power declined, and when the language of the caliphate became useful in dealings with European powers and with Muslim populations outside Ottoman borders. Contemporary sources for Selim's reign do not describe such an investiture, and Selim's own titulature does not rest on it.

The distinction matters for more than pedantry. The Ottoman claim to leadership of the Muslim world was real, and it was grounded in what Selim actually did: he took the Arab heartlands, he assumed custody of Mecca and Medina, and he commanded the resources to defend them. That is a stronger foundation than a disputed ceremony, and presenting the legend as history obscures it. The later history of the Ottoman caliphal claim, and its abolition, is treated in the article on the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Government and Character

Selim's eight years left little time for the institutional work that occupied longer reigns, and his administration largely operated the machinery Mehmed II had built. Two features of the reign are nonetheless notable.

The first is the reorientation of the empire. Before 1516 the Ottoman state was a Balkan and Anatolian power with a Christian-majority population in its European provinces; after 1517 it was the ruler of Damascus, Aleppo, Jerusalem, Cairo, Mecca and Medina, with an Arab Muslim population that changed the empire's demographic and religious composition and its self-understanding. The consequences ran through everything from the language of administration to the sultan's ceremonial titles.

The second is his reputation for severity. The Ottoman and European sources agree on it, and it rests on more than the circumstances of his accession: he executed a considerable number of senior officials, including grand viziers, and the accounts of his campaigns in eastern Anatolia against Qizilbash populations describe harsh measures. He was also, on the same evidence, an effective administrator and a poet in Persian of some accomplishment. The byname Yavuz was applied to him in Ottoman usage and carries connotations of resolute severity rather than simple cruelty; the English "the Grim" is a rougher translation than the Turkish supports.

The Red Sea and the Indian Ocean

One consequence of the Egyptian conquest is easily overlooked and mattered a great deal: the Ottomans inherited a maritime frontier in the Indian Ocean, and with it a confrontation with Portugal.

The Portuguese had entered the Indian Ocean from 1498 and had spent two decades attacking Muslim shipping, seizing ports, and attempting to close the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf to the spice trade. The Mamluks had contested this and lost. When Selim took Egypt he acquired the Red Sea coast, the Hejaz, the responsibility for the pilgrimage sea routes, and the Mamluk naval establishment at Suez.

The Ottoman response developed mostly after his death, under Suleiman — the expeditions to Diu and the Yemen, the fortification of the Red Sea, the campaigns in the Gulf. But the strategic commitment dates from 1517, and it converted the Ottomans from a Mediterranean and Balkan power into one with obligations on the Indian Ocean rim. The protection of Muslim shipping and pilgrim traffic against a European naval power became an Ottoman duty, and it was claimed as one in Ottoman correspondence with Muslim rulers as far away as Gujarat and Aceh.

Death and Succession

Selim died in September 1520 at Çorlu in Thrace, aged about fifty, while preparing a further campaign. The cause is given in the sources as illness, variously described.

He was succeeded without contest by his only surviving son, Suleiman — the sole instance in this period of an Ottoman succession passing to a single uncontested heir, a result of the thoroughness with which Selim had eliminated rival lines. Suleiman inherited an empire roughly twice the size of the one Selim had received, with the treasury full and the army victorious, and his forty-six-year reign is generally regarded as the Ottoman height.

The Qizilbash Question

The aspect of Selim's reign that has attracted most criticism concerns his treatment of the Qizilbash populations of Anatolia, and it requires a plain statement.

The Qizilbash were Turkmen tribal groups of eastern and central Anatolia whose religious allegiance had been captured by the Safavid movement. This was not a foreign population: they were Ottoman subjects, Turkish-speaking, and had supplied troops to Ottoman armies. Their devotion to Shah Isma'il, whom they regarded in terms approaching the messianic, made them a standing security problem — the revolt of 1511 had come close to breaking Ottoman control of Anatolia and had been suppressed with difficulty.

Selim's response combined military action, deportation and executions. The sources record substantial numbers killed and communities moved, and juristic opinions were obtained characterising the Qizilbash as outside the bounds of Islam in order to license the measures. Modern estimates of the scale vary widely and none is secure.

Two things should be said about this. The first is that it happened and was severe, and that presenting Selim's reign purely as a story of conquest omits it. The second is that the doctrinal characterisation obtained from the jurists — that the Qizilbash were not Muslims — was a legal device to permit action against people who would otherwise have been protected, and later Islamic scholarship has treated such devices critically. The confessional hardening between Sunni and Shia that followed the Ottoman-Safavid confrontation was in significant part manufactured by both states for reasons of security and legitimacy, and the article on the historical origins of the Sunni and Shia traditions sets out that longer development.

Assessment

Selim I presents one of the sharper contrasts in Ottoman history between the brevity of a reign and the scale of its effects.

The territorial achievement is not in dispute. In eight years he added Syria, Palestine, Egypt, the Hejaz, much of Kurdistan and eastern Anatolia, and secured the frontier against the Safavids. No other Ottoman sultan expanded the empire so fast, and the acquisitions were not transient: Egypt and Syria remained Ottoman until the First World War.

The strategic judgement behind the conquests was sound. He identified the Safavid religious challenge as the more urgent threat and dealt with it first, then turned on a Mamluk state whose military obsolescence he had correctly assessed. The use of artillery and firearms against cavalry armies at both Chaldiran and Marj Dabiq shows a commander who understood where the advantage lay and arranged his battles to exploit it.

The consequences for the Muslim world were profound and mixed. The Ottomans became the protectors of the holy cities and the leading Muslim power, a position they held for four centuries. The Ottoman-Safavid frontier hardened into a confessional and political division that shaped the region into the modern period, with two centuries of intermittent warfare across it. And the Arab provinces, which had been ruled from Cairo, were now ruled from Istanbul — a change whose long consequences reach into the politics of the twentieth century.

Two things should be recorded against the reign. The accession and the executions were brutal, and the campaigns against the Qizilbash populations of eastern Anatolia involved measures that the sources describe unsparingly. And the reign's brevity meant that the vast new territories were absorbed administratively by his successors rather than by him; the settlement of Egypt in particular was left half-finished, with a Mamluk military class surviving inside an Ottoman provincial framework.

The final observation concerns the legend rather than the man. Selim's genuine claim to Islamic leadership rested on conquest and custodianship, both fully documented. The story of a caliphate handed over in a Cairo ceremony was attached to him later by a state that needed it, and repeating it as fact does him a disservice by substituting a fiction for an achievement.

References and Further Reading

Primary Islamic Sources

• Quran, Surah al-Fath (48:1) — on clear victory, invoked in the Ottoman celebration of the eastern and southern conquests
• Quran, Surah Al-Imran (3:96–97) — on the sanctuary at Mecca and the obligation of pilgrimage, the scriptural basis of the custodianship Selim assumed in 1517
• Quran, Surah al-Anfal (8:60–61) — on military preparedness and on inclining toward peace
• Quran, Surah al-Nisa (4:58) — on rendering trusts and judging with justice, the standard applied to rulers in the Ottoman literature of governance
• Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, Books of Jihad and of Leadership — the prophetic material on warfare and on the accountability of rulers, and the reports on the sanctity of the two holy cities

Classical Islamic Sources

• Ibn Iyas. An Account of the Ottoman Conquest of Egypt. Translated by W.H. Salmon. London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1921. [Compiled early 16th century] — an eyewitness Egyptian account of 1516–17, indispensable and hostile
• İbn Kemal (Kemalpaşazade). Tevarih-i Al-i Osman. [Compiled early 16th century]
• Selimname literature — the Ottoman genre of narratives devoted to Selim's reign, composed under his son
• Al-Ghazzi, Najm al-Din. Al-Kawakib al-Sa'ira. [Compiled 17th century] — biographical material on the Syrian scholars of the transition to Ottoman rule
• Khwandamir and the Safavid chronicle tradition — for the Persian account of Chaldiran and its aftermath

Academic and Scholarly Sources

• İnalcık, Halil. The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300–1600. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973.
• Imber, Colin. The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650: The Structure of Power. 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
• Faroqhi, Suraiya, and Kate Fleet, eds. The Cambridge History of Turkey, Volume 2: The Ottoman Empire as a World Power, 1453–1603. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
• Winter, Michael. Egyptian Society under Ottoman Rule, 1517–1798. London: Routledge, 1992.
• Cook, Michael, ed. A History of the Ottoman Empire to 1730. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
• Bacqué-Grammont, Jean-Louis. Les Ottomans, les Safavides et leurs voisins. Istanbul: Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch Instituut, 1987.
• Hathaway, Jane. The Arab Lands under Ottoman Rule, 1516–1800. Harlow: Pearson, 2008.
• Newman, Andrew J. Safavid Iran: Rebirth of a Persian Empire. London: I.B. Tauris, 2006. — the Safavid side of the confrontation

Further Reading

• Finkel, Caroline. Osman's Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1923. London: John Murray, 2005.
• Ayalon, David. Gunpowder and Firearms in the Mamluk Kingdom. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1956. — on the military disparity that decided 1516–17
• Peters, F.E. The Hajj: The Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca and the Holy Places. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.
• Kramer, Martin. Islam Assembled: The Advent of the Muslim Congresses. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. — on the later development of the Ottoman caliphal claim