80 | A Shaykh, a Prince, and a Sack of Corn
the social history of mysticism, which explores the social and political relations
of a Sufi order and its shaykh during their Ottomanization. The religious and
intellectual aspects of this transformation are beyond the limits of this chapter.
A Sufi’s Quest
Karamani was born in the first decades of the fifteenth century, in a village near
the town of Niğde in the Karaman region of Anatolia, hence his nickname “Kara-
mani.” He belonged to a prestigious family whose ancestry is reported to have
gone back to the first and second caliphs of Islam. Sources do not give any other
information about Karamani’s parents, but his prestigious lineage must have
provided him good connections and easy access to additional education. Kara-
mani decided to become a mulla (judge or religious scholar). While a student in a
madrasa, where Islamic law and other religious sciences were taught, he decided
to quit school and become a mystic.
What could have influenced Karamani’s choice? Around the time of his de-
cision, political turmoil ravaged central Anatolia thanks to the arrival of a new
political actor, the Ottomans. Following their incorporation of Amasya in 1387,
the Ottomans became heavily involved in regional politics. Their main rival for
domination of central Anatolia was another Muslim Turkish emirate, the Kara-
manid. The rivalry between the Ottomans and the Karamanids came to a tem-
porary halt when the former were defeated in 1402, by a Central Asian conqueror
named Timur (r. 1370–1405). Timur captured the Ottoman sultan and returned
the territories acquired by the Ottomans in Anatolia to their previous rulers.
After eleven years of internecine strife among Ottoman claimants to the throne,
they united and restarted expansion of their realm. The biggest obstacle to their
plans was again the Karamanids. A series of military confrontations took place
during this period, mostly resulting in the invasion and destruction of Kara-
manid lands by the Ottomans. These conflicts may have created a disdain for
worldly affairs in the heart of the young madrasa student. Or perhaps Karamani
did not see any safe future or a promising career in the Karamanid lands, and
seeking a Sufi master provided a perfect pretext to leave Karaman.
Another factor in Karamani’s decision might have been the increasing pop-
ularity of the Sufi orders among urban masses. One of the rising orders at the
turn of the fifteenth century was the Halvetiye. It was founded by the followers of
Ömer el-Halveti, who lived in the mountains of northwestern Iran in the four-
teenth century. When Karamani decided to take the path of the Sufis, the Halveti
order was trying to expand into Anatolia under the leadership of the charismatic
Seyyid Yahya-i Şirvani (d. 1463–1464). Seyyid Yahya’s Sufi lodge was in the Cas-
pian port town of Ba ku, the modern-day capita l of Azerbaijan. Karamani wanted
to become a dervish (Sufi disciple) of Seyyid Yahya and left Karaman for Baku in