The Qizilbash

The Qizilbash were the Turkmen tribal warriors who followed the Safavid Sufi masters of Ardabil and carried Shah Ismail I to power in 1501. Named for their red caps, they formed the army and the ruling elite of the early Safavid state, fought each other in two long civil wars, and were brought under royal control only by Shah Abbas I around 1600.

Disciples of the Ardabil sheikhs

The Safavids began as a Sufi order founded by Sheikh Safi al-Din of Ardabil, who died in 1334 (see the Safaviyya Sufi order of Ardabil). In the fifteenth century the order’s leaders, Junayd and then his son Haydar, turned it into a militant movement with a large following among the Turkmen tribes of Anatolia and the Caucasus borderlands. These nomads and semi-nomads lived beyond the reach of Ottoman and Aq Qoyunlu tax collectors, and many held beliefs that mixed Sufi devotion, Shi’a reverence for Ali and older Turkic traditions.

Haydar, who died in battle in 1488, gave his followers their emblem: a red felt cap wound with a turban and rising in a baton with twelve folds or gores, for the twelve imams of Shi’a Islam. Their enemies, the Ottomans above all, called them qızılbaş, “red heads”, and the name stuck. The followers accepted it.

Warriors for a living saint

What bound the Qizilbash together was devotion to the head of the order, whom they called morshed-e kâmel, the perfect guide. For many, the young Ismail was more than a guide. His own Turkic poems, written under the pen name Khata’i, speak of him in terms that suggest a divine presence, and Qizilbash fighters went into battle without armour, trusting in his protection. In 1500 Ismail, then about thirteen, gathered several thousand tribesmen at Erzincan in eastern Anatolia. Within a year they had beaten the Aq Qoyunlu and taken Tabriz, as told in Shah Ismail I.

The Ottomans regarded the Qizilbash in their own lands as a dangerous fifth column. A Qizilbash rising in Anatolia in 1511, the Şahkulu revolt, alarmed Istanbul, and Sultan Selim I had large numbers of suspected sympathisers killed or deported before his campaign of 1514. Ottoman chroniclers give a figure of 40,000, which modern historians treat with caution. The defeat at Chaldiran that year ended the belief that Ismail could not lose, and Qizilbash zeal never fully recovered.

Tribes as the state

In the early Safavid state the great Qizilbash chiefs held most of the military and provincial posts. Each tribe had its leaders, its pastures and its fighting men, and governorships were in effect tribal fiefs. The court spoke Turkic as much as Persian. Persian-speaking bureaucrats, the “Tajiks” in Safavid usage, ran the treasury and chancery, and the tension between Turkmen soldiers and Persian administrators ran through the dynasty’s first century.

Two civil wars

The system worked badly when the shah was weak. After Ismail’s death in 1524 his ten-year-old son Tahmasp became a prize for the tribes. For a decade, from 1524 to about 1533, Rumlu, Ustajlu, Takkalu and Shamlu leaders fought for control of the young shah, and some of the fighting took place in the royal camp itself. Tahmasp emerged from it determined to rule himself, as described in Shah Tahmasp I.

A second round followed Tahmasp’s death in 1576. Qizilbash factions backed rival princes, helped kill Ismail II’s opponents and then, in 1579, murdered Mahd-e Olya, the powerful wife of the near-blind Mohammad Khodabanda. In 1587 an Ustajlu chief, Morshed Qoli Khan, put the teenage Abbas on the throne at Qazvin, expecting to rule through him.

Abbas and the taming of the tribes

Abbas had Morshed Qoli Khan killed in 1589 and spent his reign reducing Qizilbash power. He built a standing army of gholâms, slave soldiers of Georgian, Armenian and Circassian origin, and a corps of musketeers paid from crown lands; the details are in Shah Abbas’s military reforms. Gholams replaced tribal chiefs in many governorships. Abbas also called on men from every tribe to show personal loyalty to him as shâhsevan, “those who love the shah”, rather than to their tribal leaders.

The Qizilbash did not disappear. Tribal contingents still made up much of the army, and families such as the Shamlu and Zulqadr kept high office through the seventeenth century. But they no longer decided who ruled. By then “Qizilbash” was often used loosely for the whole Turkic military class of the empire.

A long afterlife

Two later dynasties came out of Qizilbash tribes. Nader Shah was an Afshar, and the Qajars, who ruled Iran from 1789 to 1925, took their name from the Qajar tribe that had marched with Ismail. In Anatolia, the descendants of Qizilbash communities who stayed under Ottoman rule became the Alevis of modern Turkey, and the word Kızılbaş was long used of them, often as an insult. In Afghanistan, the Qizilbash of Kabul descend from soldiers settled there by Nader Shah.

Historians now treat the Qizilbash less as fanatical tribesmen and more as a political class with its own interests. Kathryn Babayan’s work on their beliefs, and Masashi Haneda’s on their military organisation, show a movement whose messianic religion was gradually tamed into the Twelver Shi’ism of the state (see Twelver Shi’ism becomes Iran’s state religion).