152 • 9 FIREARMS, SLAVES, AND EMPIREShelps protect the individual citizen from official tyranny. The Ottoman bal¬
ance of power served a different purpose. The early sultans had encouraged
competition between the traditional leaders (the landowners and ulama)
and the men who had been recruited and trained under the devshirme sys¬
tem. When Suleyman the Magnificent appointed a succession of viziers all
taken from the devshirme, he tilted the balance in favor of that group. By
the end of his reign, neither the old aristocracy nor anyone else could check
the devshirme administrators' power. Matters grew worse under his succes¬
sors. A comparable imbalance occurred in the army, where the janissaries,
who used firearms, overpowered the horse soldiers, who did not. The janis¬
saries were emboldened, therefore, to demand the right to marry, to live
outside the barracks, to enroll their sons in the corps, to practice trades
other than fighting, and to neglect their training. By the late seventeenth
century, they were no longer effective defenders of the empire. The Ot¬
toman government took no more levies of Christian boys, and it phased
out the rigorous training schools for janissaries and administrators. Ap¬
pointment and promotion came to be based on family ties and favoritism,
in place of merit. Once the ruling class had called its members "slaves of the
[sultan's] gate"; now the Ottoman sultan was their servant, a captive within
his own palace harem.PERSIA UNDER THE SAFAVIDSLet us compare the Ottoman Empire with a contemporary Muslim state
less known or feared in the West, Safavid Persia. The Safavid dynasty grew
out of a militant Sufi order in Ardabil, a city in Azerbaijan. Initially Sunni,
the Safavids became ardently Shi'i after the Mongol conquest. The collapse
of Timur's empire after his death in 1405 led, in Persia, to many small dy¬
nastic states, most of them ruled by quarrelsome nomadic tribes such as
the Black Sheep and White Sheep Turcomans mentioned earlier. Led by
Shaykh Junayd (d. 1460) and protected by the Black Sheep Turcomans, the
Safavids began converting large numbers of Turks in Azerbaijan and Ana¬
tolia to Shi'ism. These Shi'i Turks came to be called kizilbash (red heads)
because of their distinctive headgear. When the Black Sheep Turcomans
betrayed Junayd and drove him out of Ardabil, he allied himself with their
White Sheep rivals, even though they were Sunni.
The Safavids grew in strength and numbers, even after Junayd's death,
until they challenged their new patrons. The White Sheep Turcomans pro¬
ceeded to kill or to lock up almost the whole Safavid family. By 1494 no
leader of the kizilbash revolutionaries remained free except a seven-year-