Ak Koyunlu

Seventy years of being the smaller one

Drafted from Woods, The Aqquyunlu: Clan, Confederation, Empire (1999)formation

The White Sheep were Turkmen of the Bayandur, one of the twenty-four Oghuz clans, pasturing in the country around Diyarbakır in the upper Jazira. For the first three-quarters of their history they were the junior of the two confederations, and the page usually skips it.

Woods' study is about that period as much as about the famous one, and his argument gives the polity a shape it otherwise lacks. The Ak Koyunlu were not a tribe that suddenly produced a conqueror. They were a clan — the Bayandur — which built a confederation around itself by marriage, patronage and the distribution of pasture, and which carried a genealogical claim the whole time: descent from Bayandur Khan, grandson of Oghuz Khan, which made the ruling house the legitimate leadership of the Oghuz. That claim was in the chancery documents and on the coins, which means the dynasty was resting its right to rule on two grounds at once: what it had taken, and who it said it was descended from.

The politics of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries were determined by having the Black Sheep as neighbours and rivals for the same grazing. When Timur came west the Ak Koyunlu took his side, and Qara Yuluk Uthman Beg was confirmed in Diyarbakır for it — the standard reward for a confederation that backs the winner, and the reason the White Sheep survived the period that scattered the Black.

Then Timur died and Qara Yusuf came back, and the White Sheep spent another fifty years in Diyarbakır watching their rivals hold Tabriz. Qara Yuluk was killed fighting them in 1435. His sons fought each other. The confederation was still there in 1452 because it had a genealogy, a pasture and a fortress, which was enough to persist on and not enough to do anything with.

Three years

Drafted from Woods, The Aqquyunlu: Clan, Confederation, Empire (1999)expansion

Uzun Hasan — Tall Hasan — took the confederation in 1452 after beating his own brother for it, and inside seventeen years turned the junior of the two sheep into the most powerful state between Constantinople and Herat. The transformation happens in three years and it is worth setting out at that speed, because the speed is the point.

In 1467, at Chapakchur, he destroyed the Kara Koyunlu and killed Jahan Shah, who had been the strongest ruler in the region for thirty years. In 1468 the Black Sheep collapsed entirely and he took Azerbaijan, Iraq and Tabriz, which became his capital. In 1469, at Qarabagh, he defeated and captured Abu Sa'id, the Timurid ruler of Iran, and had him executed — which ended Timurid power west of Khurasan for good and left the White Sheep holding Fars, Kerman and most of central Iran as well.

Three campaigns removed both of the powers that had contained the confederation for seventy years. Woods' framing of the sequence is that it is the moment the confederation becomes an empire in his sense: the Bayandur clan had been assembling a following for a century, and what changed was not the following but that it suddenly had settled provinces underneath it.

The reason the period is filed as an interval is that it is short and it ends in a defeat. But for about a decade after 1469 the Ak Koyunlu were the principal Muslim power between the Ottoman frontier and India, they held the trade route through Tabriz, they claimed suzerainty as far as Hormuz on the Gulf, and every European power that wanted the Ottomans fought on two fronts wrote to Uzun Hasan about it.

What Uzun Hasan hired

Drafted from Woods, The Aqquyunlu: Clan, Confederation, Empire (1999)peak

Having taken Iran, Uzun Hasan did what every successful pastoralist does with a settled country, and what the Ghaznavids and the Seljuks and the Ilkhanids and the Timurids had each done before him. He hired the Persian bureaucracy.

The senior civil offices went to Iranian officials and the divan ran in Persian. He promulgated a law code — the qanunname of Uzun Hasan — regulating taxes and dues across the territory. That is the substantive act of the reign, and it outlived the state comprehensively: the Safavids kept it, and the Ottomans were still applying "the law of Hasan Padishah" in eastern Anatolia generations after the confederation that produced it had gone.

Woods' three-word subtitle is the argument — clan, confederation, empire — and the third stage is this. A clan builds a confederation by distributing pasture and marriages; a confederation becomes an empire by taking a settled revenue and then acquiring the apparatus to collect it. What Woods is careful about is that the stages do not replace each other. Uzun Hasan had a Persian chancery and a tax code and he still ruled a coalition of Turkmen leaders whose loyalty was personal and whose troops went home, and the second fact eventually decided the polity's fate regardless of the first.

The court also produced art of a quality out of proportion to the state's thirty years at the top. The Tabriz atelier under Uzun Hasan and his son Ya'qub produced illustrated manuscripts in what is called the Turkman style, and its painters and its book-making went straight into the Safavid workshop when the Safavids took the city. Ya'qub built the Hasht Behesht palace, which Venetian visitors described at length and which is gone.

The guns that did not come

Drafted from Woods, The Aqquyunlu: Clan, Confederation, Empire (1999)peak

Uzun Hasan spent a decade conducting a foreign policy towards western Europe, and it is the strangest thing any Turkmen confederation ever did.

He married Theodora Komnene, daughter of the emperor of Trebizond — Despina Khatun to the Persian sources — whose own page records the marriage as that empire's last attempt to buy a protector. It did not work: Trebizond fell to Mehmed II in 1461 and Uzun Hasan did not come.

He negotiated with Venice. The Venetians were at war with the Ottomans, wanted a second front in the east, and Uzun Hasan wanted what the Ottomans had and he did not, which was artillery and men who could work it. Ambassadors went back and forth for years — Caterino Zeno, who was married to a niece of Uzun Hasan's wife, and Josafat Barbaro, whose account of the court is one of the better European descriptions of fifteenth-century Iran. Guns and gunners were promised repeatedly. A small quantity arrived too late and in the wrong place.

That is the diplomatic shape of the whole eastern Mediterranean in the 1460s and 1470s. Venice, Trebizond, the Ak Koyunlu and the Mamluks all wanted the Ottomans contained, and none of them could coordinate a campaign across that distance with that technology. The Ottomans could fight them one at a time and did.

When Uzun Hasan met Mehmed II in 1473 he had the finest Turkmen cavalry in the region and essentially no firearms. The promised alliance had produced a decade of embassies and nothing on the field.

What gunpowder settled

Drafted from Woods, The Aqquyunlu: Clan, Confederation, Empire (1999)contraction

In August 1473, at Otlukbeli in eastern Anatolia, Mehmed II destroyed the Ak Koyunlu army. The Ottomans had field artillery and janissaries with handguns; Uzun Hasan had the finest Turkmen cavalry in the region and the Venetian firearms he had spent a decade being promised had not come. His son was killed in the battle.

The immediate consequence was the frontier. Eastern Anatolia was Ottoman from that point in a way it had not been before, and the eastern boundary of Ottoman power stopped being a question of which Turkmen confederation was strongest. Uzun Hasan lived another five years and did not fight the Ottomans again.

The longer consequence is best seen by putting four dates in a row. Otlukbeli in 1473, Chaldiran in 1514, Marj Dabiq and Ridaniya in 1516 and 1517. In forty-four years the same combination — cannon in a fixed line, drilled infantry with firearms, cavalry used to exploit rather than to decide — settled who ruled eastern Anatolia, Iran's western frontier and the Arab lands, and in every case the losing side was mounted archers commanded by men who understood exactly what had beaten them and could not reproduce it in time.

The Ak Koyunlu were the first to lose to it, and the first to try to buy it. Uzun Hasan's decade of embassies to Venice was an attempt to acquire the technology by alliance rather than to build it, which is the strategy the Mamluks tried at Diu and the Safavids tried at Chaldiran, and it did not work for any of them. What the Ottomans had was not guns. It was a standing paid infantry that could be drilled to use them, and none of these polities had a revenue system that could support one.

After Otlukbeli the confederation held together for two decades on Uzun Hasan's reputation and his son Ya'qub's competence, and then came apart on schedule.

The cup

Drafted from Browne, A Literary History of Persia, Volume III: The Tartar Dominion (1265-1502) (1920)contraction

Ya'qub held the confederation together for twelve years after Otlukbeli, and the Ottoman historian Munajjim-bashi gives him in a line: disposed to drink and a merry life, and very fond of poetry, with poets gathering to his court from all quarters and composing resonant qasidas in his praise. A Venetian merchant resident in Persia in those years describes the palace Uzun Hasan had built outside Tabriz, and then describes how Ya'qub died, and the second account is the one that decided what happened to Iran.

His wife had arranged with a kinsman of his that she would make him king, since in the absence of children he would have the right to it. She prepared the poison while Ya'qub was in the bath. He had gone in, as he usually did, with his son of eight or nine, and stayed from the twenty-second hour until sunset; and because it was his habit to drink something on coming out, she was waiting at the door of the harem with a cup and a gold vase. She made more of him than she usually did, and could not govern her face, and went very pale. Ya'qub had already begun to distrust her. He told her to drink first. She knew what it was and drank it anyway, because she could not refuse. Then she handed him the cup and he and the boy finished it. By midnight all three were dead.

Everything after that follows from three people dying in one night in 1490. The great lords quarrelled; for five or six years, says the Venetian, all Persia was in civil war, with first one noble and then another becoming sultan. Ya'qub's son Baysunqur reigned a year and eight months before his cousin Rustam replaced him. Rustam marched against the Timurids, turned back to deal with a revolt at Isfahan, chased the governor to Qum and killed him, and sent an expedition to Shirvan that celebrated its success in the manner of the previous century, by building pyramids of skulls.

And then, needing men against Baysunqur, Rustam did the thing that ended his house. He released the Safavid prisoners held at Istakhr — the sons of Shaykh Haydar, who had been killed by Ya'qub — and sent them out to avenge their father. They did: they defeated and killed Baysunqur at Ahar. Rustam, finding that Sultan Ali's following was now larger than was comfortable, sent four thousand horse after him. The Safavids were seven hundred and fought, in the words of another Venetian who was there, like lions, and were destroyed, and Sultan Ali was killed after naming his young brother Isma'il as his successor.

Isma'il went into hiding in Gilan, where the governor protected him and a Shi'i propaganda was worked among the population with great success.

The White Sheep took a boy out of prison, armed him against their own rival, and were surprised by what he did with it. Eleven years later his brother took Tabriz.

The grandson

Drafted from Woods, The Aqquyunlu: Clan, Confederation, Empire (1999)end

Uzun Hasan died in 1478. His son Ya'qub ruled competently for twelve years, and after Ya'qub died in 1490 the White Sheep did what the Black Sheep had done in a year, only slowly: a decade of cousins fighting each other, with the confederation splitting into an eastern and a western half and the Turkmen leaders choosing between claimants.

What was growing inside that decade was the Safavid order at Ardabil, and the two houses are tied together far more closely than the usual account of a conquering newcomer allows. Uzun Hasan had married his sister to Shaykh Junayd of the Safaviyya and his daughter Halima — Alamshah Begum, the child of the Trebizond princess — to Junayd's son Shaykh Haydar. Isma'il, who took Tabriz in 1501 and founded the dynasty that made Iran Shi'i, was the son of that marriage. He was Uzun Hasan's grandson and, through the same line, the great-grandson of an emperor of Trebizond, and the tribes he led into Tabriz were the same Turkmen his grandfather had led out of it.

It is worth being careful about what that does and does not mean. Being descended from a house is not the same as claiming it. Isma'il's public claim was Safavid and Alid — descent from the seventh imam, and something a good deal stronger than that in the poetry he wrote under his own pen-name — and he never once invoked Bayandur. He destroyed his great-grandfather's dynasty on the authority of his father's.

The genealogy is worth knowing all the same, because it explains why so many Ak Koyunlu Turkmen changed sides so readily.

The end itself was quick. Isma'il beat Alvand at Sharur in 1501 and took Tabriz; the eastern half under Sultan Murad held Iraq-i Ajam and Fars for a few years and lost them by 1503; Diyarbakır, where the confederation had begun, went in 1508, and Murad was killed. A hundred and thirty years, of which about ten were spent as the strongest power in Iran.

The state Isma'il built kept the law code, the chancery, the painters and the tribes. What it added was a reason for the tribes to hold together that survived a defeat, which is the one thing neither sheep ever had.

A pleasant gentleman

Drafted from Browne, A Literary History of Persia, Volume III: The Tartar Dominion (1265-1502) (1920)afterlife

The best surviving portrait of Uzun Hasan was written by a Venetian who had come to sell him a war, and Browne — who read everything the Persian and Turkish historians wrote about the man — says flatly that nothing to compare with it exists in any eastern source he knows.

Contarini at table

Ambrogio Contarini was with him in 1474 and 1475, at the end of the decade of embassies, after Otlukbeli, when the alliance against the Ottomans had already failed. What he wrote down is a man at dinner.

He always drank wine with his meals. He appeared to be a good liver, and took pleasure in inviting his guests to share the dishes in front of him. There were constantly present a number of players and singers, and he commanded whatever he wished to be played or sung; His Majesty appeared to be of a very merry disposition.

He was tall and thin, with a slightly Tartar cast of countenance and a constant colour in his face. His hand trembled as he drank. He seemed about seventy.

He was fond of amusing himself in a homely manner, Contarini adds — but when too far gone was sometimes dangerous.

Take him altogether, however, he was a pleasant gentleman.

What the eastern sources have instead

They have the virtues, in a list.

Munajjim-bashi calls him a wise, just, brave, pious, religious and devout king, a friend of learned and godly men, charitable, a public benefactor, and a builder of many pious foundations; and notes that with a small army he overcame two such mighty kings as Jahan Shah and Abu Sa'id, took tribute from Georgia, and ruled Azerbaijan and the two Iraqs.

Every word of that is probably true and none of it tells you what it was like to be in the room.

Ramusio, introducing another of the Venetian narratives, put his finger on why. It is to be regretted, he wrote, that some Eastern kings, great in power and intellect, have not had historians to celebrate their deeds — since among the sultans of Egypt and the kings of Persia there have been men worthy of comparison not only with famous barbarian kings but with the great Greek and Roman commanders. What struck him particularly was the career: a poor nobleman, the weakest of many brothers, with a small castle and not more than thirty soldiers, who raised himself to the point of disputing the empire of all Asia with the Ottoman house.

Why the portrait is European

Because the Ak Koyunlu lost, and because the people who came to look at them came for a reason that had nothing to do with them.

Venice wanted a second front. It sent ambassadors across Asia to a Turkmen confederation it could not have found on a map ten years earlier, and those men wrote up everything — the roads, the towns, the prices, the ruler's face, his drinking, his trembling hand — because their masters needed to know whether this was a power worth an alliance.

The war never happened. Uzun Hasan was beaten at Otlukbeli in 1473 and did not fight the Ottomans again, and his great-grandson destroyed the dynasty twenty-eight years later. What the embassies produced instead is the fullest description of fifteenth-century Iran by anybody, written by men who were not interested in Iran, preserved because Venice kept its diplomatic papers.

A dynasty is lucky to be described at all. This one was described by strangers, in the wrong language, for the wrong purpose, and it is the only reason anybody knows that Uzun Hasan liked music at dinner and that his hand shook.