Al-Tikriti|97their legitimacy, their tentative moves proved wholly insufficient to match the
Safavid threat.
The Safavid revolution’s millennial vision, focused on the messianic Shah
Ismail, directly challenged Bayezid’s tenuous religious pretensions, especially
among Anatolian Türkmen, and provided the initial impetus for fresh initiatives
designed to legitimate sovereignty along confessional lines. As tense as relations
quickly became between adherents to such conflicting visions, no direct Otto-
man-Safavid conflict took place until after Bayezid’s son Selim I (r. 1512–1520)
seized the throne, claimed a vital imperial crisis, and launched a major mili-
tary campaign against Shah Ismail. Selim’s posthumous nickname of “Yavuz,”
originally signifying “wicked,” suggested a highly negative impression among his
subjects. Eventually, the name evolved into a radically different meaning: “bold,
heroic, resolute.” The evolution of this nickname from a negative to a positive
meaning implies a long-standing cultural initiative, eventually successful, to re-
habilitate the image of a widely despised ruler.
The second milestone, the 1516–1517 Ottoman conquest of Syria and Egypt,
marked the hostile takeover of a weakening Mamluk Empire by the aggressive
and expansionist Yavuz Selim. This conquest, following on the heels of Selim’s
1514 Çaldıran defeat of Shah Ismail and brief occupation of Tabriz, was to leave
an equally significant legacy for the Ottomans. Most importantly, it transformed
a majority Christian empire under Muslim rulers into a majority Muslim empire.
In addition, it incorporated for the first time a significant Arab ethnic popula-
tion into the empire while extending Ottoman control over valuable and presti-
gious cities like Aleppo, Damascus, Jerusalem, Cairo, Mecca, and Medina. This
opening of Ottoman horizons to the Arab world, and by extension to the Indian
Ocean, carried its own dramatic and parallel effect on imperial identity.
The Safavid challenge, followed by the incorporation of the Arab territories,
forced Ottoman elites to clarify what their empire stood for politically, religiously,
and socially. In the midst of mass dislocation during these two decades, debates
concerning Islamic identity, belief norms, and correct governmental practice
emerged, the conclusions of which came to dominate the subsequent ideologi-
cal orientation of what eventually evolved into the clearly Sunni Ottoman and
Shiɇi Safavid Empires. As a result, such developments within Ottoman Islamic
thought marked the beginning of a widespread age of confessionalization, had
significant repercussions for the empire’s subsequent cultural orientation, and
continue to influence religiopolitical discourse in the Middle East and Balkans
today.
Specifically, developments in Ottoman court and intellectual life during this
period were instrumental in the imperial elite’s gradual adoption of a new and
long-standing ideological vision. This imperial vision was framed as support for
sharia, which was in turn defined according to norms of what came to be known