The Qara Qoyunlu (Black Sheep Turkmen)

The Qara Qoyunlu (“Black Sheep”) were a confederation of Oghuz Turkmen tribes who ruled Azerbaijan, Armenia and Iraq from Tabriz between about 1406 and 1468, and under Jahan Shah (r. 1438–1467) most of western and central Iran as well. They filled the space Timur’s empire left in the west, fought his heirs for half a century, and were destroyed in 1467–1468 by their Turkmen rivals, the Aq Qoyunlu.

Black Sheep tribes around Lake Van

The name probably comes from a tribal emblem or from the colour of the confederation’s flocks; historians do not agree. In the fourteenth century the leading clan, the Baharlu, grazed their herds between Lake Van and Mosul and served the Jalayirid sultans of Baghdad as vassals. Under Bayram Khwaja and then Qara Muhammad (d. c. 1389) they became the strongest power in the region between Erzurum and Mosul, taking Mardin in 1384.

Then came Timur. His armies broke the Qara Qoyunlu in the 1390s and again in 1400, and their leader Qara Yusuf, son of Qara Muhammad, became a refugee together with the Jalayirid Sultan Ahmad. Both sheltered with the Ottoman sultan Bayezid, which helped bring on the Battle of Ankara, and then fled to the Mamluks in Syria. The Mamluk sultan held them in prison in Damascus, and a story told in the chronicles has the two exiles swear to divide the future between them: Iraq for Ahmad, Azerbaijan for Qara Yusuf.

Qara Yusuf takes Tabriz

Timur’s death in 1405 freed them. Qara Yusuf returned east and in October 1406 defeated Timur’s grandson Abu Bakr near Nakhchivan and entered Tabriz. On 20 April 1408 he beat Abu Bakr and his father Miran Shah, Timur’s son and governor of the west, at Sardrud south of Tabriz; Miran Shah was killed. The pact with Ahmad did not survive success. When Ahmad tried to take Tabriz in 1410, Qara Yusuf defeated him and had him killed, and the Qara Qoyunlu took Baghdad. The Jalayirid dynasty, whose rise is told in the Chobanids and Jalayirids, survived only in southern Iraq.

Qara Yusuf now ruled Azerbaijan, Armenia and Iraq. In 1420 Timur’s son Shahrukh marched from Herat to reclaim the west, and Qara Yusuf died in his camp in December 1420 just before the armies met.

Three Timurid campaigns and a vassal king

Qara Yusuf’s son Iskandar fought Shahrukh three times. Shahrukh defeated him in 1420–1421, again in 1429, and on a third expedition in 1434–1435. Each time the Timurid army went home to Khorasan and the Turkmens came back. On the third campaign Shahrukh tried a different solution: he recognised Iskandar’s brother Jahan Shah as ruler of Azerbaijan under Timurid overlordship. Jahan Shah was crowned in 1438, and Iskandar was killed by one of his own sons the same year.

Jahan Shah, “Padishah of Iran”

Jahan Shah respected Shahrukh while he lived. When Shahrukh died in 1447 and the Timurid princes fell to fighting, Jahan Shah began to expand. Between 1452 and 1453 his armies took Saveh, Qom, Isfahan, Shiraz and Yazd. In summer 1458 he went further and occupied Herat itself, the Timurid capital, for a few months. He withdrew when his son Hasan Ali rebelled in Azerbaijan and the Timurid prince Abu Sa’id advanced against him. Coins and inscriptions call him sultan, khan and “padishah of Iran”.

His family gave him as much trouble as his enemies. His son Pir Budaq, made governor of Shiraz and later of Baghdad, rebelled twice and was put to death in 1464. Hasan Ali spent years in prison for rebellion.

Jahan Shah was a patron and a poet. He wrote lyric poems in Persian and in Azerbaijani Turkish under the pen name Haqiqi (“the True”). He restored the eastern portal of the Friday Mosque of Yazd in 1457 and added a portal to the Darb-e Imam shrine in Isfahan. In Tabriz his wife Khatun Jan Begum endowed the Mozaffariyye complex, the building now called the Blue Mosque of Tabriz, finished in 1465.

Defeat by the White Sheep

The Aq Qoyunlu of Diyarbakr were the Qara Qoyunlu’s old rivals, and under Uzun Hasan they had grown strong. In 1467 Jahan Shah marched against him. Late in the campaigning season, camped in the hills near Muş in eastern Anatolia, his army had begun to disperse to winter quarters when Uzun Hasan made a surprise attack in November 1467. Jahan Shah was killed while trying to escape. His son Hasan Ali, released from prison to take the throne, called on the Timurid Abu Sa’id for help, but by 1468 Uzun Hasan had beaten him and taken Tabriz and Baghdad. The Qara Qoyunlu never recovered. Their story continues on the Aq Qoyunlu page.

Shi’ites or not

Older scholarship, following Vladimir Minorsky, described the Qara Qoyunlu as Shi’ite in sympathy and called them forerunners of the Safavids. Later historians are more cautious. Qara Yusuf, Iskandar and Jahan Shah all struck coins with the names of the first four caliphs, which a committed Twelver Shi’ite ruler would not have done, and Bosworth found no strong evidence for definite Shi’ite loyalties. What is clear is that Turkmen religion in this period mixed Sunni practice, devotion to Ali and the Prophet’s family, and popular Sufism, the same mixture from which the Safavid order drew its followers.

Turkmen rule and Iran

The Qara Qoyunlu ruled through tribal chiefs (beys) and princes who governed provinces and passed them from father to son, with Persian officials running finance and the chancery. Their state was the first of the Turkmen confederations to rule Iran from Tabriz, and its pattern of tribal power at the top and Persian bureaucracy beneath was taken over by the Aq Qoyunlu and then by the early Safavids.

For the city they ruled from, see our guide to Tabriz.