Islam • 109that had inspired the very early Shiis, revering Ali as an in-
carnation of the divine, believing that their dead amirs had
gone into "occultation," and often revering their leader as the
Mahdi, who had returned to inaugurate a new age of justice.
The Bekhtashi dervishes in Anatolia had a broad popular fol-
lowing, and preached the imminent advent of a new order
that would sweep away the old religious norms. Similarly
iconoclastic was the Safaviyyah order in Azerbaijan, which
began as a Sunni tariqah but which by the fifteenth century
had been attracted by the gbuluww ideas, and who called
themselves Twelver Shiis. They believed that their leader was
a descendant of the Seventh Imam, and was thus the only le-
gitimate leader of the Muslim ummah. By the early sixteenth
century, Ismail, the pir of the Order, who may also have be-
lieved himself to be a reincarnation of the Hidden Imam,
would found a Shii empire in Iran.
When the Mongol states collapsed, the whole of Anatolia
was divided into small independent ghazi states, which, since
the late thirteenth century, had started to wrest towns and vil-
lages from the declining Byzantine Empire. One of the small-
est of these states was ruled by the Osmanli family, which
became increasingly powerful during the early years of the
fourteenth century. In 1326 the Osmanlis or Ottomans had
conquered Bursa, which became their capital; in 1329 they
had seized Iznik, and by 1372 they had seized the greater part
of the territory of Byzantium. They established a new capital
at Edirne (Adrianople), and reduced the Byzantine emperor
to a dependent ally. The secret of Ottoman success was the
discipline of its trained infantry, known as the "new troop"
(yeni-ciim or Janissary), a slave corps. Murad I (1 360-89) had
become the most powerful of the western Muslim rulers, and
by 1372 was ready to advance into the Balkans, attacking the
independent kingdoms of Bulgar and Serbia, the most impor-
tant power in the Balkan peninsula. In 1389 the Ottomans de-