Kara Koyunlu

What filled the space

Drafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 6: The Timurid and Safavid Periods (1986)formation

The Ilkhanate ended in 1335 with no conqueror to name, and the man who put the region back together forty years later could not lawfully call himself khan. Between and around those two facts, eastern Anatolia, Azerbaijan and Iraq were held for most of the fifteenth century by two Turkmen confederations named after sheep.

The Kara Koyunlu — the Black Sheep, from the animal on their standards — were Oghuz Turkmen of the Yiwa, and the ruling house came from the Baharlu. Their country was the pasture north of Lake Van and towards Mosul, and their first appearance in the political record is as somebody's clients: in the 1370s they were vassals of the Jalayirids, who had taken Iraq and Azerbaijan out of the Ilkhanate's collapse and could not hold them without Turkmen cavalry.

Bayram Khwaja and then Qara Muhammad turned that position into an independent one, in the way such groups do, by being the largest coherent armed body in a country where the state had stopped. Roemer's account of the century in the Cambridge History is careful about what this means: these were not migrations or invasions. The tribes were already there, had been for two centuries, and what changed in the fourteenth century was that the apparatus which had been taxing them and hiring them stopped functioning, and the confederations became the government by default.

Then Timur arrived, and being the largest armed body in Azerbaijan turned out to be the wrong thing to be.

The man who came back

Drafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 6: The Timurid and Safavid Periods (1986)expansion

Timur took Azerbaijan in the 1380s and gave it to his son Miran Shah. Qara Yusuf, who had inherited the Black Sheep from his brother, could not fight him and did not try for long: he went west, to the Ottoman sultan Bayezid, and when Timur destroyed Bayezid at Ankara in 1402 he went south to the Mamluks in Cairo, who imprisoned him for a while at Timur's suggestion and then let him go.

This is the pattern of the period and it is worth naming, because it explains why these confederations were so hard to finish. A tribal confederation can be beaten out of a territory without being destroyed. The pastures remain, the tribes remain, the leader goes somewhere else and waits, and when the power that beat him dies — Timur died in 1405 — he comes back to a country where nothing has been built that can stop him.

Qara Yusuf came back. In 1406 he beat a Timurid army at Nakhchivan. In 1408, at Sardrud near Tabriz, he beat and killed Miran Shah, Timur's own son, and took Azerbaijan. He then took Baghdad from the Jalayirids, and in 1410 defeated and killed Sultan Ahmad Jalayir, who had been his ally against the Timurids until the two of them quarrelled over Tabriz. It did not end the Jalayirid line outright — a remnant held Basra until 1432 — but it did end their standing as the Ilkhanate's principal successor as a power, brought down not by an empire but by its own hired cavalry.

For the next thirty years the Black Sheep held Azerbaijan against the Timurids of Herat, who came west three times under Shah Rukh and each time took Tabriz and each time went home again, because holding Azerbaijan from Herat required a garrison Shah Rukh was not prepared to leave. In 1438 he settled it the other way: he recognised Jahan Shah, the son of Qara Yusuf, as his governor in Azerbaijan. It was a diploma from a Timurid to a Turkmen, and within a decade the Turkmen was the larger power.

Jahan Shah

Drafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 6: The Timurid and Safavid Periods (1986)peak

Jahan Shah ruled from 1438 to 1467 and was, for most of that time, the strongest Muslim ruler between the Ottomans and Herat. He is not much read about, and the reason is structural rather than historiographical: he lost at the end, to a man whose confederation lasted only thirty years longer, and everything both of them built was taken over by a dynasty that was better at explaining itself.

He began as Shah Rukh's appointee in Azerbaijan and stopped being one the moment Shah Rukh died in 1447. He took Sultaniyya and Qazvin, then Iraq — Baghdad in 1446 — then Fars and Kerman, then most of central Iran. In 1458 he took Herat itself, the Timurid capital, which is as far as a Kara Koyunlu army ever reached.

He could not keep it. His son rebelled in Azerbaijan behind him, and he had to turn round and go home, and the Timurid Abu Sa'id came back into Khurasan. That is the ceiling of this kind of polity, stated as plainly as the record allows: a confederation that can put a very large cavalry army anywhere in Iran cannot occupy two ends of it at once, because what holds the army together is the leader's presence, and there is one of him.

The territory at its widest ran from eastern Anatolia through Azerbaijan and Iraq to Fars and Kerman. Nobody has published a figure for it, which is the ordinary condition of a state that held its greatest extent for under a decade.

What he did not build was a succession. The confederation was held the way the Seljuks and the Mongols and the Ghurids had held theirs — as a family possession, divided at each death and fought over afterwards — and he spent a great deal of his reign fighting his own sons for it. In 1467 he took an army west against the White Sheep and was defeated and killed at Chapakchur.

Haqiqi

Drafted from Minorsky, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (1954)aside?What aside means

Jahan Shah wrote poetry. He wrote it in Azerbaijani Turkic and in Persian, under the pen-name Haqiqi, and a divan of it survives; Minorsky edited a selection from manuscript in 1954 and discussed the dialect it is in. The verse is mystical, in the tradition that runs from Nasimi, and it is the work of a ruling sultan rather than of a court poet writing for one.

The site's Karakhanid page had to argue that a Turkic literature existed at all in the eleventh century, against a habit of treating Turkic-speaking dynasties as patrons of Persian and nothing else. Jahan Shah is four centuries later and the argument is different: not whether Turkic literature existed, but that a Turkmen confederation usually filed as an interval between the Mongols and the Safavids produced a sovereign who was a serious poet in it.

He also built. The Blue Mosque at Tabriz, finished in 1465, is one of the great buildings of Iranian architecture — its tilework is the reason it has the name — and it survives in fragments after an earthquake and two centuries of neglect. The northern iwan of the Darb-i Imam at Isfahan was built under him in 1453 and carries tile decoration that has been the subject of a substantial modern literature about the geometry it uses.

Political weight and cultural output come apart everywhere, and usually they belong to different people — the patron and the poet, the sultan and the painter. Jahan Shah is the harder version, because he is both. The man who held Azerbaijan, Iraq, Fars and Kerman is the same man who wrote the poems, and the reason nobody reads them is not that they are bad. It is that his confederation lost, and losing confederations do not get anthologised.

Why there were two

Drafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 6: The Timurid and Safavid Periods (1986)aside?What aside means

The Kara Koyunlu and the Ak Koyunlu were not opposed for any reason a doctrine or a dynasty explains. They were two pastoral confederations competing for the same summer and winter pastures across eastern Anatolia and Azerbaijan, in country that will support a limited number of flocks, and everything else followed from that.

It shaped their politics entirely. Because they were competing with each other, each was available as an ally to anyone fighting the other: the Ak Koyunlu took Timur's side and were given Diyarbakır for it; the Kara Koyunlu took the Ottomans' and later the Mamluks'. Because their strength was mounted tribal manpower rather than revenue, both could win battles far from home and neither could garrison what it won. And because both were confederations rather than states, each was one succession away from coming apart, which is what happened to this one in 1467 and to the other in the 1490s.

The two names have obscured this for a long time. Black Sheep and White Sheep sound like factions in a quarrel, and the quarrel gets explained by dynastic ambition or by confessional difference — the Kara Koyunlu are often called Shi'i and the Ak Koyunlu Sunni, which oversimplifies both. The competition was older than either dynasty and would have existed without them.

That is the pattern the fifteenth century in this region actually has, and two much better-known things sit on top of it.

The first is Trebizond, whose last emperor's father married a daughter to Uzun Hasan of the Ak Koyunlu in the hope that a Turkmen confederation in western Iran would come west against the Ottomans.

The second is the Safavids. Isma'il took Tabriz in 1501 at the head of Qizilbash tribal followers — Turkmen, out of exactly this world, organised by a Sufi order rather than by a pasture dispute. The confederations were the material the Safavid state was made out of, and the thing Isma'il added was the one thing neither sheep ever had, which was a reason for the tribes to hold together that outlasted a defeat.

Herat, given back

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

In 1458 Jahan Shah invaded Khurasan and occupied Herat, which is the furthest a Kara Koyunlu army ever went. He then handed it back.

Why he gave it up

Browne records the sequence without explanation, and the explanation is structural. Jahan Shah took Herat from the Timurids and afterwards relinquished it to Abu Sa'id, who had spent the previous decade assembling what was left of the Timurid inheritance and was not going to accept the loss of Khurasan.

A confederation can win a campaign a long way from its pastures. It cannot garrison one. Holding Herat would have meant leaving Turkmen tribes in eastern Iran indefinitely, away from the grazing that was the reason they followed him, in a province with a Timurid claimant in the field. The arithmetic of the thing does not work, and Jahan Shah appears to have known it.

So he came back west with the prestige and without the city, having demonstrated that he could reach Herat and could not keep it.

Ten years of standing still

The decade after that is the contraction, and almost nothing happens in it that a chronicler thought worth recording, which is itself the fact.

Jahan Shah held Azerbaijan, the two Iraqs, Fars and Kerman. He built at Tabriz. He wrote. His son Hasan Ali quarrelled with him and was imprisoned. And on the western flank, in the country between Diyarbakr and Lake Van, Uzun Hasan of the White Sheep was doing what Jahan Shah's own father had done fifty years earlier — assembling tribes, marrying into neighbours, and waiting.

The Black Sheep did not deal with him and did not destroy him. There was no particular moment at which that decision was taken; it is simply what a large confederation does about a small one, until the small one is not small.

Caught hunting

On 30 October 1467 Uzun Hasan attacked, and the manner of it is the whole lesson.

He took Jahan Shah off his guard while the ruler was away from his army on a hunting expedition. The sources disagree about where: Browne, following Munajjim-bashi, puts the engagement near Khoy in Azerbaijan; the more usual location is Chapakchur, in the hills between Mush and Bingöl, three hundred kilometres west. Nobody has reconciled them.

What is not disputed is that the ruler of a state stretching from eastern Anatolia to Kerman was killed because he had gone hunting without his army, and that the state did not survive him by a year.

A year outside Baghdad

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

What Jahan Shah did after giving Herat back is the clearest illustration anybody could want of why these confederations do not last three generations.

He had gone east in 1458 and taken the Timurid capital. Six months later two things arrived at once: Abu Sa'id preparing to attack him from the Timurid side, and news that his son Hasan, imprisoned in Azerbaijan, had escaped and was in rebellion. He made peace with Abu Sa'id and went west, and the march is the detail to keep — twelve parasangs a day, something like forty-five miles, sustained long enough to cost him twenty thousand camels and ten thousand horses. That is the transport of a very large army, destroyed by its own commander in order to get home before his son could consolidate.

He put Hasan down. Then he moved his other son, Pir Budaq, out of the government of Fars and gave him Baghdad instead. Pir Budaq revolted in Baghdad. So Jahan Shah besieged his own son in his own second city for a whole year, took it, killed him, installed a third son in his place, and went back to Azerbaijan.

At the end of that his realm ran from the Ottoman frontier to the two Iraqs, Kerman and the Persian Gulf — nearly the whole of Iran except Khurasan and the Caspian provinces. It is the largest thing any Turkmen confederation ever held, and it had been assembled and held together by a man who had spent the previous decade fighting his own children for it, and who had nothing to hand it to that would not immediately do the same.

He did not get the chance to find out. In 1466 he attacked Uzun Hasan, meaning to take Diyarbakr, and was surprised and killed by him while lingering behind his own army on a hunting trip. Two of his sons were taken prisoner and most of his senior nobles were killed with him. The chronogram composed for it makes the whole event turn on the killer's name.

The one substantial character sketch of him comes from the Ottoman historian Munajjim-bashi, whom Browne uses for this dynasty and who evidently disliked him thoroughly: a dissolute, immoral, bloodthirsty tyrant, inclined to heresy and atheism, who paid no attention to the sacred law, spent his nights until dawn in revelry and slept like a dog through the day, for which reason he was called the Bat. He was seventy, he had reigned thirty-two years, and he was buried at Tabriz.

That is a hostile Sunni Ottoman writing about a Shi'i Turkmen who had tried to take Herat, and it is not evidence about his character. It is evidence of something else, which is that the man who held more of Iran than anybody between Timur and Shah Isma'il left behind no account of himself that his own side wrote. His poetry survives, under the pen-name Haqiqi, and it is the only first-person thing there is.

One year

Drafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 6: The Timurid and Safavid Periods (1986)end

In the autumn of 1467 Jahan Shah moved west against Uzun Hasan of the White Sheep, wintered in the field, and was surprised near Chapakchur in the country between Mush and Bingöl. His army was scattered and he was killed.

What happened next is the clearest demonstration anywhere of what a confederation is and is not. Jahan Shah had ruled thirty years, held Azerbaijan, Iraq, Fars and Kerman, and had a son, Hasan Ali, who inherited a treasury, the fortresses and a claim. Within a year there was nothing. Hasan Ali could not hold Tabriz, could not raise the tribes his father had raised, was beaten, imprisoned by his own side and killed in 1469. Uzun Hasan took the whole territory.

A dynastic state loses a battle and continues; the administration keeps collecting, the garrisons stay in place, and a defeated king can raise another army from the same country. A confederation loses a battle and stops, because what it was in the first place was an agreement among tribal leaders that this family's fortune was the one worth following, and the battle is the evidence that it is not. Both confederations raised their armies from the tribes in them, and for neither of them does any source describe a revenue system in detail — and those two facts are the same fact.

The Black Sheep do not reappear. Some of the tribes are visible afterwards inside the Ak Koyunlu and then inside the Qizilbash, which is where the human material of both confederations ended up. But there was no restoration and no claimant. Ninety-four years of a power that at one point held Herat, and nobody afterwards thought its name was worth taking.

His father's grave

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

Uzun Hasan killed Jahan Shah, destroyed his confederation, took his provinces and his capital — and then buried him in his father's tomb.

The burial

Browne records it in a subordinate clause, the way the chroniclers did. Having put the captured Timurid Abu Sa'id to death, Uzun Hasan suffered Jahan Shah's body to be buried in the grave of his father Qara Yusuf.

It is worth stopping on, because nothing else about the Kara Koyunlu was preserved with that much care.

Qara Yusuf had spent his life being chased around western Asia by Timur, had sheltered with the Jalayirid Sultan Ahmad and then killed him, and had built the confederation his son enlarged. Putting the son into the father's grave is a statement about lineage made by the man who had just extinguished it — the courtesy one Turkmen chief extends to another, and an assertion that this was a family with a tomb worth being in, which Uzun Hasan's own family was in the process of becoming.

What did not survive

Everything else went.

There was no restoration and no claimant. Hasan Ali could not hold Tabriz for a year. The tribes reappear inside the Ak Koyunlu and then, thirty years later, inside the Qizilbash, which is where the human material of both confederations ended up — the same men, or their sons, following a Sufi order instead of a pasture agreement. Nobody afterwards thought the Black Sheep name was worth taking.

Ninety-four years, a state that reached Herat, and no successor willing to claim it.

And the poems

The one thing that came through is the least likely.

Jahan Shah wrote under the pen-name Haqiqi, in Turkish and in Persian, and the divan was not lost — it survived in manuscript, unread, until a twentieth-century scholar went looking and published it. A ruler who is a footnote in every political history of the fifteenth century turns out to have left a body of lyric verse by his own hand.

Set that beside what happened to his neighbour. Uzun Hasan, who beat him, has no comparable self-portrait in any eastern source at all; what survives of him is a Venetian ambassador's account of his table manners. Jahan Shah left several thousand lines in his own voice and is not read, because his side lost and losing confederations do not get anthologised.

The tomb was the courtesy. The poems are the accident.