The Imperial Heyday 111
In this new image, nobility of lineage, hereditary unity, and religious purity
continued to play important roles in legitimizing the Ottoman sultans.32
Furthermore, the emphasis on Holy War was renewed, as the sultan was pre-
sented as the champion of the faith against both the Christians and the Shi’a
heretics of Iran.33 The mystic identification of the sultan with the Messiah or
with the “Pole of the world” does not seem to have lasted after the first decades
of Süleyman’s reign.34 But a new factor was introduced by Selim I’s conquest
of the Hijaz (through the annexation of Mamluk Egypt) and thus of the holy
cities of Mecca and Medina (1517). Almost simultaneously, the messianic
claims of the Safavid shah, Ismail, posed a challenge for the Ottoman sultan
that had to be answered, particularly so since a large part of the Anatolian pop-
ulation, being Alevi, was susceptible to these claims. This development created
a new dimension in the issue of Ottoman legitimacy: was the Ottoman sultan
also to claim the title of caliph, the protector of the holy cities? The rise of the
Seljuks and, later, the fall of the Abbasids as a result of the Mongol invasion
(1258) had led scholars such as al-Ghazali, Ibn Taymiyya, and Ibn Khaldun to
accept a much more flexible interpretation of the requirements for the caliph-
ate, essentially identifying the caliph as a ruler insofar as the latter followed
the Sharia and executed its precepts.35 Moreover, in practice the title of the
caliph had acquired an embellishing, regional meaning that allowed for its use
by regional rulers such as the early Ottomans and other dynasties in fifteenth-
century Anatolia and Iran.36
It is not surprising, therefore, that Ottoman literature on the caliphate
began to flourish at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Even before the
conquest of Egypt (but after Shah Ismail’s appearance), İdris-i Bitlisi had writ-
ten, in 1514, an essay in Arabic entitled Risâla f î al-khilâfa wa âdâb al-salâtîn
(“Treatise on the caliphate, and manners [i.e. advice] for sultans”), in which he
discussed the issue of the potentially simultaneous existence of more than one
caliph: his conclusion was that this is impossible, and to this effect he quoted
hadiths stating that, if people acknowledged two caliphs, one of them should
be killed. In his other works, he followed the idea that whoever carried out the
right guidance of his people, the establishment of order, and the management
32 Flemming 1988. The same values played a major role in Idris-i Bitlisi’s legitimization of
the Kurdish chieftains as presented to the Ottoman side: Sönmez 2012, 72ff.
33 A number of treatises on the virtues of Holy War were translated or composed during
Süleyman’s reign: see Yılmaz 2005, 66 and fn. 125; cf. Imber 1995, 147–149.
34 Although Süleyman’s Messianic claims had waned by the 1530s, a certain sense of histori-
cal moment did remain, as is also seen in imperial iconography; see Eryılmaz 2010.
35 See Rosenthal 1958, 38ff.; Sönmez 2012, 130ff.
36 Imber 1987 and 1992, 179; Sönmez 2012, 132–135.