All Things Medieval

We’ve traced the messy patchwork of changing power alliances in the sweep of Asian land between Turkey and China. In 1500, the patchwork was as shifting as ever, although the Ottoman piece grew larger and larger. On its eastern border, the “White Sheep” (Ak Koyunlu) Turcoman alliance ruled a large swathe (including Baghdad), to the Persian border. They were a network of clan chiefs and war leaders, rather than a supreme leader. In Persia, there were regional dynasties like the Shirvanshah in Baku, and a mix of Sunni and Shi’ite tribes with shifting confederations. All this was about to change.

Ismail, the son of Sheikh Haydar, hereditary Grand Master of the Safaviya Sufi Order, was descended also from every ruling family in the region. His mother was the daughter of the White Sheep confederation leader, while her mother was descended from the Byzantine and Georgian royals. Orphaned at age 7, Ismail was raised by scholars in a rural county by the Caspian Sea, speaking Azeri Turkish and Persian.

The region of eastern Turkey, northern Persia, and Azerbaijan had a religious and military movement called the Kizilbash; the name meant “red head” and referred to a 12-gored red turban they wore—-12, to honor the Imams of the Twelver Shi’ite system. It seems to have included both Azeri Turkish and Persian tribes who were united by their Safaviya blend of Sufi mysticism and loyalty to Ali and Hussein, the first Imams driven out by the Sunni Caliphs. The Kizilbash were rejected by other Twelvers as too extreme, since they believed their ruler—the Murshid—was divine, and they initiated jihads against local Christians.

In the summer of 1500, Ismail was 12, and it was time to put him forward as the new Murshid in Erzincan, eastern Turkey. The Kizilbash tribes came to support him. The first military target was the Shirvanshah, who ruled in Baku. That army was defeated, although they allowed him to rule as a vassal. Ismail’s new realm was large enough to be a challenge to the White Sheep of eastern Turkey and western Iran, so next the White Sheep army crossed the Aras River to put down the 13 year old king. In a pitched battle, the Kizilbash forces won—of course! since the Murshid was invincible. Ismail soon added some minor kingdoms in Georgia to his territory. In 1501, he was proclaimed the Shah of Azerbaijan.

As Shah of Azerbaijan, Ismail proclaimed the Safavid Sufi Twelver faith as the official and mandatory religion of his realm. He dissolved Sunni organizations and ordered anyone unwilling to convert to Safavid Shi’ism to be executed. In 1502, he defeated the main army of the White Sheep and took over their territory, proclaiming himself Shah of Iran. Over the next eight years, he took city after city, until he had united all of Iran. In every new territory, he enforced Savavid Twelver Shi’ism with executions.

In 1507, 19 year old Ismail started replacing Kizilbash ministers with Iranian (Persian, not Turkish) ones. He felt the Kizilbash who had installed him were too powerful. Now that Iran was entirely Safavid Shi’ite, the Kizilbash were not special. Their religious identity became that of the whole nation. Ismail made no exceptions: when he conquered the territory of always-Sunni Baghdad, he smashed the tombs of the Abbasid Caliphs and some Sunni Imams. By 1510, he ruled Armenia, Iraq, Iran, eastern Turkey, parts of Georgia, Kurdistan, and the Uzbek area of Samarkand. He must have permitted historical Christians to retain their religion as dhimmis paying extra tax, while he enforced Safavid Twelver Shi’ism on Muslims.

In 1510, Shah Ismail formed a partnership with Babar, the ruler of Kabul and Herat. Babar had been born a prince in the Fergana Valley, farther north. He was a descendant of Timur (Tamerlane). He succeeded his father at age 11, but he went through a period of instability in which he would try to conquer Samarkand, while back at home in the Valley, his nobles revolted. After he regained his home and lost it again, he ended up succeeding his uncle as ruler of Kabul, which he kept. From Kabul, he added Herat, but he wasn’t content. If he couldn’t rule Samarkand, he would rule North India.

The young Shah of Iran’s partnership with Shah Babar of Kabul allowed them both to focus on modernizing their armies. Gunpowder was the nuclear warhead of the 15th century; those who could afford to buy and train artillery squads tended to win wars. The Ottoman Empire could afford it, and they were leading the arms race at that time. The Janissaries had now been gun handlers for many generations, with an array of gun sizes, from the huge bombards used against Constantinople to the most up-to-date sidearms. They are known today as the first Gunpowder Empire. But Shah Ismail and his new friend Babar could aspire to become the second and third Gunpowder Empires.

Before they could get very far in the modernizing project, the Ottomans challenged the Shah. In 1511, a pro-Safavid uprising among Ottoman subjects in eastern Turkey led the Ottoman Sultan Selim, son of Bayezid II, to move against Ismail. In 1514, the Ottoman and Safavid forces fought the first battle of what became a 40-year power struggle over eastern Turkey and Mesopotamia.

In the Battle of Çaldiran, the Shah’s forces lost badly to the gun-firing Ottomans. The Persian horses were not trained to hear gunshots, so they panicked badly, contributing to the loss. Ismail was wounded, and his wives were captured. The Safavid Shi’ites were shocked to see their Murshid actually lose a battle, and probably Ismail himself was shocked and demoralized, having been raised to see his victory as inevitable.

Sultan Selim entered Tabriz, Ismail’s capital, in triumph. He could have smashed and ended the Safavid project, but he received word of an uprising in Ottoman lands, so he retreated as quickly as possible. As we know from Egypt’s history, Selim conquered Mamluk Egypt instead of Iran. The ten remaining years of Shah Ismail’s reign were spent investing in gunpowder. Ismail built up a trained musket corps that may have numbered as much as 20,000. Ismail’s son, Tahmasp, took over an increasingly strong empire. In 1555, the Ottoman and Iranian Empires signed a treaty defining their border, ending a long-running war.

In parallel, during the same period, Shah Babar of Kabul hired an Ottoman general to teach his army how to use guns. They trained in using matchlock guns in the field, not just artillery in sieges. The common enemy of the two Shahs was the more primitive tribe of Uzbeks. Their new firepower pushed the Uzbeks right back. But Babar wanted to spread out in a direction that would not bring him into more conflict with Uzbeks, so he moved south.

In 1519, he crossed into what’s now Pakistan. As the third Gunpowder Empire, he had a clear advantage over every army he met. He defeated the Sultan of Delhi (a fellow Muslim) in 1526, which is considered the official founding of the Mughal Empire. At the Battle of Khanwa in 1527, Babar’s army of 10,000 faced a unified army of 100,000 from all of the kingdoms of the Rajput Confederacy. Outnumbered 10 to 1, Babar’s musket-firing soldiers still won. The next year, at the Battle of Chanderi, the Hindus chose mass suicide inside the fortress over another defeat. And so when Babar died in 1530, he ruled Afghanistan and North India.

The Gunpowder Empires transition our narrative to the modern world, decisively ending the Middle Ages.

1492 was a very bad year in Egypt. It was a particularly bad plague visitation year, in a place with a large aging elite class. The only thing worse than thousands of geezers who still control everything and have all the money piled up is having most of them die within a few months, causing chaos. 200,000 people died in Cairo, and the survivors heard rumors of evil Jinns and visions of the Prophet, both portending disaster and destruction. There were food riots and the Mamluk king, who was about 80, was badly injured in a fall from a horse.

The Mamluk system had been falling apart in the last few decades, which is why they were so dependent on veterans for leadership and even active military duty. Economic hardship had made it more difficult for them to defend their northern territories. They barely held onto Aleppo and Damascus against the Ottomans, but the effort left the treasury drained. The Ottomans now held the lands farther north where Mamluk slaves had been purchased, so in addition to running short on money, they also ran short on slave supply (no doubt driving up the prices). The descendants of Mamluks had always been barred from becoming Mamluks themselves, but they lived in Cairo off their grandparents’ trust funds. There was probably more wealth among individuals than in the treasury. The Mamluks ran so short on soldier recruits that they actually did form some units of Mamluk descendants, but just as they’d predicted, it wasn’t the same.

The gunpowder arms race was another huge issue for them. Mamluk training had traditionally emphasized archery, which took years to learn. At this point in small arms development, bows were actually more effective than arquebuses and early muskets. They didn’t create clouds of smoke, they could be fired more rapidly (and farther), and they probably had much better aim. But it was the large artillery that traditional weapons couldn’t compete with, as we saw in the fall of Constantinople. Field guns light enough to be portable, but heavy enough to be lethal, were impossible to fight back with arrows and swords. A few of them wouldn’t be enough, since they had to be cooled down between shots, but they were very expensive.

There were two ways to obtain large artillery: make it or buy it. Making it meant getting enough bronze or iron, in addition to all the components of gunpowder. Some of these things could not be obtained within Egypt or its remaining territories, so they had to buy even the materials from rivals and enemies. It’s possible, too, that Muslim countries were at first disadvantaged in casting cannon because they had never learned to cast bells, as Christians had done. Early Mamluk do-it-yourself experiments exploded in all the wrongs ways, so for a while they just had to buy imported guns—probably from sellers who didn’t want them to get the best stuff (just as it is today).

The Ottomans had begun to learn these things about two generations earlier, since it was the only way to keep up with the European armies that were pioneering such inventions. Also, the Ottomans were in the stage of vigorous expansion, as the Mamluks had been once. They could afford anything, as they kept conquering more territory. They had a solid tax base and an expanding supply of replacement soldiers. So their armies typically numbered close to 100,000 with large units of field artillery, and even after a crushing defeat, they could quickly replace 10,000 or 20,000 soldiers. By contrast, the Mamluks near the end were doing really well to come up with a few thousand.

The old Sultan was dying, and the jousting to replace him had begun, when Vasco da Gama invaded the Indian Ocean. If it was any empire’s responsibility to fight him away from the ports of East Africa, it was Egypt’s. When the “new Sultan roulette” had finally stopped at an aging mediocrity named al-Ghawri, the Portuguese were harder to dislodge. The Mamluks fortified Jedda and began fighting to regain their ports south of the Horn of Africa. Interestingly, the Ottoman Sultan helped; he sent men and materials for the Jihad. Hindsight makes this much less surprising; whoever “helps” also has men on the ground when the tide turns, and makes the takeover power transition much easier.

Last week we were talking about whether the Portuguese end-run around Africa really made a difference to the vast Muslim empires. Here’s a few lines out of The Knights of Islam: Wars of the Mamluks by James Waterson. He’s quoting Ibn Ayas, a chronicler of the time:

“The prefect of Jeddah collected from the Indian merchants a tenth of their income, an act discouraging them from entering the port at all—which thus fell idle. Their goods became scarce in Egypt, and the town was deserted. Similarly, the ports of Alexandria and Damietta were abandoned because Frankish merchants ceased entering them. European merchandise also disappeared.”

In addition to the Portuguese sea route, Venice had settled a truce with the Ottomans and returned to trading through Constantinople, so merchants could take a northern Silk Road route. Egypt suffered most as the Red Sea passage became irrelevant.

Meanwhile, just as the Ottomans and Mamluks had settled a truce in the region of Syria, where the Mamluks still held onto a few cities, new pressures came from the boy Shah of Iran. In the years before the Ottomans beat him so badly at Chaldiran, the newly energized Shi’ite Turkish tribesmen were raiding those cities. Then the Mamluk Sultan learned that the boy Shah was sending messages to the kings of Europe, seeking alliances against the Ottomans—and the Mamluks. The Shi’ite Shah wiped out the last Khan of the Crimean Tatars and, Waterson says, he even sent the Khan’s skull as a drinking vessel to Egypt for a “what about an alliance?” gift. The new Iranian kingdom was pretty flexible at that point, ready to ally with anyone who could contribute to its growth or fight anyone who couldn’t.

Egypt’s last Mamluk years, 1511 through 1516, were continually more miserable. The shrinking fighting corps was hardly paid and hardly fed. Any money went into the gunpowder arms race, and the other Mamluks resented that. They kept having near-uprisings and riots. Nobody knew if the army would follow the Sultan into battle—the aging Mamluks had found it harder and harder to leave Cairo, for decades now—-and when the final showdown came, fewer than a thousand Royal Mamluks (the really elite ones) could be mustered.

After the boy Shah was wounded and the Shi’ites’ confidence in his and their invincibility was shaken, apparently the Mamluk Sultan had the poor judgment to send messengers to seek a defensive alliance against the Ottomans—with whom Egypt had a truce. He also rode to his Syrian territories to muster an army (perhaps the smallest force the Mamluks had fielded). If the Ottomans had gone back to Tabriz to finish off the Shi’ite Shah, Egypt might have  been okay. But with the Mamluk forces massed on the border, looking ready to break the truce, Sultan Selim turned aside.

In the decisive battle just north of Aleppo, summer 1516, the Mamluks at first did surprisingly well. Even as veterans and retirees, they still had great discipline and skill. But when the battle began to turn against them, the Sultan had a stroke and fell from his horse. Then it all disintegrated. Aleppo and Damascus both surrendered to the Ottomans.

The Mamluks crowned one last king, but he presided in Cairo only long enough for the Ottoman army to invade. In January 1517, the last Mamluk Sultan placed all the field artillery they had managed to obtain in the front lines to stop the advancing Turks. But he didn’t have sufficient number of guns to keep a steady fire, since they had to be cooled between shots. The Ottoman Sultan entered Cairo in triumph. There was one last battle among the pyramids at Giza, when the Turks mopped up and captured the last Mamluk king. He was carried back to Cairo, where he expected negotiated surrender. Instead, he was publicly hanged, with other Mamluk emirs.

Some Mamluks remained at large and continued to harry the Ottoman conquerors, while some were re-appointed to administrative roles. During their waning years, they started to become legends in their own time. Ottoman students started reading about Mamluks as heros, now that the legacy of Egypt had been adopted. Mamluks were Islam’s answer to Europe’s knights and heros. But while its former glories were bruited abroad, Egypt remained under Ottoman centralized authority, turning into just a province, until Napoleon disrupted the quiet flow of time in the desert.

In earlier entries, you read about how the Mamluks, slaves raised to fight, became a ruling class with a complete bureaucracy as well as attempts to normalize into a hereditary monarchy. The Kipchak Turk Mamluks had their “Mafia” structure in power from about 1250 to 1382. In 1382, a competing Mamluk network took over, probably the finalization of a process that had been going on for a while. These new Mamluks were Circassians who, like the Kipchak Turks, favored their own ethnic group in spite of the official doctrine that Mamluks had no ethnicity.

There’s another storyline that’s important to notice; if we focus only on the rulers, we miss many other stories. At the start of the Mamluk period, Egyptian Muslims were probably still a minority, though a large one. Between the initial Muslim conquest and the end of Mamluk rule in 1517, about 900 years passed. That’s longer than Americans can easily imagine. At the beginning, and for maybe two centuries, the daily language of Egypt was what we now call Coptic, but it was really just the language of the Pharaohs (all languages change over time). During Greek rule, the Greek alphabet and some symbols derived from hieroglyphics were used to write the Coptic language. However, by the time the Mamluks fell to Ottoman conquest (spoiler, sorry!), Christians had become the minority. The Mamluk period oversaw the key flip in majority/minority roles.

The Muslim conquerors had never set out to convert their new subjects, since they were mainly interested in tribute being paid fully and on time. The tribute rate was set much lower—in fact it was a mere tax—for Muslims. In some periods, life was made easy for the majority Christians and minority Jews. But they were always subject to rules that could be suddenly made much more restrictive, and in certain periods, that’s what happened. One of the basic rules was that houses of worship needed approval from the secular governor to be built or repaired. In restrictive times the Muslim rulers just refused, and the churches and synagogues fell apart. There were constant pressures like this to just suddenly see the light of Mohammed’s truth and join the ruling religion. In very restrictive times, the pressure became more than some could bear and there were waves of conversion.

The Mamluk period was one of the more difficult times. Apparently, there was a Muslim jurist named Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) who left many books and precedents. He was so important that he was known as the Elder of Islam, the Sheikh al-Islam. He was educated in Damascus in the most traditional (i.e. least friendly to modernizing) Sunni schools, the Hanbali. He made his first mark at age 30 when he led a party that insisted on the execution of a Christian man who had “insulted Mohammed.” His Hanbali school was anti-wine, anti-music, and pro-jihad. Islam has always had this strain present in its culture; in our time it’s the Wahhabis, in that time it was the Hanbalis. They are all Salafis, followers of the Salaf (first 3 generations of Muslim believers).

Ibn Taymiyya and the Salafis interpreted the Mongol invasions as punishment from Allah for being too soft on unbelievers. Ibn Taymiyya ruled that Muslim governors had no obligation to give building/repair permits to any Christians or Jews, and if their houses of worship ceased to be, so much the better. He was controversial; other schools of Islam sometimes had him imprisoned or put on trial. But he left a strong influence, as we might say today, he shifted the Overton Window of acceptable discourse. Whenever life could be made more difficult for Christians and Jews, that’s what should be done. Obviously.

Coptic monasteries and churches continued to function, but they were smaller and had less funds. They could copy books to keep old manuscripts from dying out, but the effort to write theology and history in Coptic stopped. Coptic clergy did not have good relationships with Mamluk rulers, who were mostly first-generation converts and eager to win the approval of the Salafis. In 1354, the rulers seized a huge amount of land endowment from the Church, following three days of riots against Christians.

During the Burji period (1382-1517), Egypt was struck by many calamities, starting with the plague that kept returning (as in Europe). The effects of the plague peaked around the time the Burjis came to power; in Europe, there were peasant uprisings as finally the plague began to cause labor shortages in the countryside to bring in the harvest. Egypt must have seen similar developments. The people in the countryside were more likely to be Coptic farmers. Over the century of Burji Mamluk rule, the Copts not only became a minority as all but the most stalwart believers converted to Islam, they also became the scapegoat for all woes. Riots targeted Coptic churches in cities and towns.

There was a wave of martyrdom. Unlike in the Roman period, when Christians were directly persecuted, the Burji era martyrs were usually converts to Islam who were stricken by conscience and chose to go back. Now they were not just Copts, they were Muslim apostates. Some chose to do this in a very public way, making the announcement in public knowing that they would swiftly be executed. Others did it privately or retreated to monasteries where they were less likely to be hunted down.

By the close of the Burji Mamluk rule, Egypt was the land of mosques and Arabic language that we know today. Its local variant of Arabic was loaded with Old Egyptian words that persisted as borrowings. Its remaining churches were the largest ones in the big cities, where bishops sat, and the smallest ones in the farm villages where they had little to lose. The in-between layer disappeared.

with thanks to chapter by Maged S. A. Mikhail in The Coptic Christian Heritage, ed. Lois M. Farag.