Introduction
Without considering his vast Persian-Arabic corpus and contemporary Aqquyunlu sources, many modern studies tend to draw a one-sided portrait of Idris-i Bidlisi.Footnote 1 A careful reader of these secondary sources can shed light on repeated errors and fictitious information that contradict the primary sources. These scholars generally reduce his role to the Ottoman‒Safavid or Sunni‒Qizilbash opposition to explain the active political phase that constituted only a short period in his life, instead of taking his whole life and activities into consideration. Many of the existing studies have some bias and try to paint a pro-Ottoman, anti-Safavid and Sunni image of him without taking into account his whole life and the works that he left behind.
However, a careful investigation of his whole life and his Persian-Arabic works, as well as some Aqquyunlu and Safavid sources, provide unique insights on a different and more realistic picture of Bidlisi. Numerous works and letters he wrote in Persian-Arabic from the period of his life when he lived in Aqquyunlu Iran to the time of his death in Istanbul make up the basic sources for this study. While his contemporary and official chronicler of Sultan Yaqub (1478‒90), Fazl Allah b. Ruzbihān Khunji, ignores him completely, Aqquyunlu sources such as Menakıb-ı İbrahim Gülşeni, which compiles the epics of Golshani, the Khalwati sheikh of his time, and Munshaat-e Maybodi, which compiles the letters of Qadi Husayn b. Muin al-Din Maybodi, the Qadi of Yazd, to the Aqquyunlu court elite provide valuable information on Bidlisi’s position in the Aqquyunlu palace and about his Sufi identity in the last two decades of the fifteenth century. On the other hand, in spite of his correspondence with some Safavid bureaucrats, early Safavid sources rarely mention him. Qadi Mir Ahmad Munshi Qumi’s Golistān-e Honar mentions his scribal talents only, while Hāfiz Husayn Karbalāi Tabrizi’s Rawdat al-jinān va jannat al-janān provides us with some information that helps us understand the world around Bidlisi in Iran. Sharaf Khan Bidlisi’s Sharafnameh should also be added to these primary sources. These primary sources reveal that in contrast to the pro-Sunni-Ottoman view of him, as a scholar who was involved in patronage relationships in every phase of his life, Bidlisi was not a Sunni. On the contrary coming from a Shiite-Nurbakhshi family, he attempted to seek Shah Ismail’s patronage more than once.
Based on these primary sources, which have never before been adequately studied, I plan to reveal the unknown aspects of his life, to correct the shortcomings in his modern historiography, and finally to question his existing image in Turkish historiography. If one introduces Bidlisi as an enemy of Safavid Iran based on his activities during the reign of Selim I (1512–20), one can easily conclude that he was an enemy of the Ottomans and a supporter of Shah Ismail (1501–24) upon reading his attempts to seek Shah Ismail’s patronage after losing Ottoman patronage. However, the issue is too complex to be reduced to sectarian opposition. A reading of the complete biography of Bidlisi reveals that it was not religion and sectarian belonging, but patronage relations that usually determined his relationships. The first four sections deal with his early life, education and the rank Bidlisi enjoyed in Aqquyunlu Iran, the following sections focus on his Rum/Anatolian sojourn, his attempt to create a new Ottoman ideology through his masterpiece of Hasht Behesht, his stay in Mecca to seek a new patron such as Shah Ismail, and his role in Ottoman‒Safavid conflicts. The last section touches upon his final years in Istanbul.
Early Life in Ray and Bidlis: 1457–70
The early life of Bidlisi in Iran and the world around him are worth an inquiry as they shaped his worldview, his bureaucratic identity and his Sufi background. Although many studies give Bidlisi’s place of birth in Bidlis, new data shows that he was actually born in the district of SulaqanFootnote 2 in Ray (central Iran), on 18 January 1457.Footnote 3 His father, Husam al-Din Ali Bidlisi, was among the respectable Sufis of Bidlis, and a follower and dervish of the Shiite-Nurbakhshi order. His father, the Nurbakhshi dervish, traveled all the way from Bidlis to Sulaqān to see Sayyid Muhammad Nurbakhsh, the master of the Nurbakhshi order. According to the archival sources, Sheikh Tāj al-Din Haji Husayn was Idris’ grandfather, and Mawlānā Majd al-Din al-Bidlisi was his great-grandfather.Footnote 4 His grandfather’s title of “sheikh” and great grandfather’s title of “mawlana” indicate that at least two generations of the Bidlisi family come from a longstanding Sufi tradition of Nurbakhshi order.
The political situation in Iran where Bidlisi was born was quite complicated in the fifteenth century. Following Timur’s death in 1405, eastern Iran (Khurasān-Herāt) was ruled directly by Timur’s successors, while the Qaraquyunlus, vassals of Timur, took control over Azerbaijan, Iraq-e Arab and Iraq-e Ajam, and the Aqquyunlus took control over Diyarbakir, Kurdistan and Armenia.Footnote 5 The political picture of the region of Ray, which was the center of the Sufi-Mahdist Nurbakhshi community, was also quite complicated in the second half of the fifteenth century.Footnote 6 The Qaraquyunlu Jahān Shah, who was appointed as the ruler of Azerbaijan by Shahrukh (1377–1447) from 1435 to 1436, took control of Ray and all of Iraq in 1452–53, and remained dominant over these lands until he was defeated and killed by the Aqquyunlu ruler Uzun Hasan. Therefore, at the time of Bidlisi’s birth in 1457 in Ray/Sulaqān, Iran’s new ruler was the Shiite Qaraquyunlu Jahān Shah.Footnote 7
Bidlisi’s father, Husam al-Din Ali, embraced the Nurbakhshi teachings and joined this order as a result of the early activities of the Shiite-Nurbakhshi order’s master, Sayyid Muhammad Nurbakhsh (d. 1465 Rayy/Sulaqān) around Kurdistan during the time of the Timurid ruler Shahrukh.Footnote 8 Husam al-Din Ali lived in an environment that was familiar with such Sufi orders as the Suhrawardiyya, Hurufiyya, Kubrawiyya and Nurbakhshiyya.Footnote 9 Idris was born near “Mahdi,” and lived there for a while. Afterwards, like many fellows of the order, Husam al-Din Ali left Sulaqān for Bidlis to teach the order’s doctrine in the years before 1465, when Sayyid Muhammad Nurbakhsh died.Footnote 10
During the time of Idris’ grandfather, the city of Bidlis was under the influence of the Shi’ite Qaraquyunlus and was governed by local notables like Mir Shams al-Din and Mir Ibrahim, who were Rojiki Kurds subject to Jahān Shah Qaraquyunlu.Footnote 11 After the defeat of Jahan Shah in 1467, his rival Uzun Hasan invaded Bidlis. Mir Ibrahim II surrendered the castle in 1470 and went to Uzun Hasan’s palace in Tabriz. He was accompanied by twelve notable families of the city, and among these Bidlisi’s family was the foremost. Before 1471–72, the family settled in Tabriz, an important Nurbakhshi center.Footnote 12
When Husam al-Din Ali settled in Tabriz, this former Ilkhanate capital was a center of sciences, culture and arts thanks to Uzun Hasan’s patronage, who attracted many prestigious scholars of the time, such as Jalāl al-Din Dawwāni and Mulla Jāmi, to his palace. Tabriz was a rival to Herat, Istanbul and Cairo as a center of science and letters.Footnote 13 Husam al-Din Ali was above all a respectable Sufi, a prestigious dervish who established relations with scholars and Sufi circles of the time under the protection of the Aqquyunlu palace.Footnote 14
Education in Tabriz: 1470–81
As a member of a respectable scholarly family of at least three generations, Idris-i Bidlisi gained his first madrasa education under his father’s supervision until he was twelve or thirteen years old while he grew up in Bidlis in the early 1470s. But it was in Tabriz that he would get the education that would raise him to the status of first mulla and then of mawlana. He was able to enter the bureaucratic class in the Aqquyunlu palace. In Tabriz he continued his education in prestigious madrasas like Nasiriya and Muzaffariya. Bidlisi was interested in astronomy and music as well as rational sciences.Footnote 15
In his autobiography, he names his father as his only master and spiritual guide.Footnote 16 Then he mentions a reputable hadith transmitter Mawlana Ibrahim-e Salmāsi (d. 1505–6) among his guides.Footnote 17 He stated that when he was only fourteen years old in 1471–72 in Tabriz that his general inclination was towards Sufism.Footnote 18 One of the first Sufi texts that Bidlisi read in Tabriz was the commentary by Shams al-Din Muhammad b. Ali Lāhici, who was elected as khalifa by Shah Ismail, wrote on Gulshan-e Rāz, which is accepted as an authority in this literature, and was one of the principal texts in circulation among Sufis of this period.Footnote 19
There is no doubt that Tabriz, a center for sciences and culture in the fifteenth-century eastern world and a frequent destination of great scholars of the period, contributed to Bidlisi’s educationand influenced his Sufi inclinations.Footnote 20 Among the sheikhs and masters in whose assemblies and halaqas he participated, Mullā Jāmi, Jalal al-Din Dawwāni, Qadi Isa Sāvaji, Sheikh Najm al-Din Masʻud and Ibrahim-e Golshani were the most famous, who scholarly and politically represented the Aqquyunlu world and politics in the second half of the fifteenth century.Footnote 21 Bidlisi’s education in Tabriz, no doubt with the influence of his father’s connections with the palace circles, would carry him on to an important career as a bureaucrat in Sultan Yaqub’s Hasht Behesht Palace.
In the Service of Sultan Yaqub: 1481–90
When Sultan Yaqub ascended the Aqquyunlu throne in 1478, Bidlisi was in his twenties and had completed his madrasa education in Tabriz. When Bidlisi chose bureaucracy as his career path, the Hasht Behesht Palace was witnessing a competition for power between the young sultan and the elite around him.Footnote 22 In his Manaqib-e Ibrahim Golshani, Muhyi-ye Golshani explicitly stated that Bidlisi was Sultan Yaqub’s divan secretary (munshi) in the Hasht Behesht Palace,Footnote 23 but he does not mention when Bidlisi started in this position.Footnote 24 The earliest record indicating his position as an imperial scribe is a fatihnameh (a victory proclamation) dated 1481, which Bidlisi wrote after the suppression of the revolt by Aqquyunlu Bayındır Beg.Footnote 25 This record indicates that Bidlisi worked as a young scribe in the Hasht Behesht Palace in Tabriz before 1481, when he was only in his twenties.
Bidlisi must have gone through a good training in chancellery in order to achieve the rank of an imperial scribe/secretary, which required a vast knowledge of literature and excellent scribal skills. Ottoman and Iranian intellectuals and chroniclers ranked him among the famous munshis of the time.Footnote 26 During the time Bidlisi spent as a scribe in the Aqquyunlu palace, he personally penned the correspondence between the Aqquyunlu, the Ottoman and Mughal sultans and Shirvanshahs. At the same time he started to collect the correspondence that formed his own munshaat (literary compositions).Footnote 27 Composing a munshaat was at the same time a way of proving his competence.Footnote 28
Throughout the time he spent under the patronage of Sultan Yaqub as a young scribe in Tabriz, Bidlisi navigated a world between an imperial bureaucrat and a dervish. The intellectual environment in Tabriz that shaped his worldview was quite important for understanding Bidlisi’s world. The world around Bidlisi and the circles in which he participated most often were those of Sufis, bureaucrats, scholars and poets.Footnote 29
As a talented scribe, Bidlisi wrote several works and won Yaqub’s favor as a young bureaucrat; in the spring of 1480 he penned his first work for the sultan in Persian, titled Risāleh-ye Rabi al-Abrār (Epistle on Holy Spring). It described the sultan’s summer residence in the Mughan pasture in Azerbaijan. Shortly after this, he penned Risāleh-ye Khazāniyya (Epistle on Autumn), which described Sultan Yaqub’s time in his winter quarters in Ārrān, aiming to prove himself as a productive and useful servant. The last work that Bidlisi presented to Sultan Yaqub, who remained his patron for ten years, was titled Risāleh dar Ilm-e Qiyāfat (Epistle on the Science of Qiyafat) and related to character analyses through human physiognomy. Footnote 30
Following Sultan Yaqub’s death from the plague in his winter residence in Qarabagh (December 1490), a struggle for power developed between Aqquyunlu princes and high officials. These conflicts were an expression of the longstanding competition and conflict between the military and the bureaucracy. In the process, Qadi Isa and Najm al-Din Masud, who were among the ruling elite and supporters of Bidlisi in the palace, were eliminated.Footnote 31 Golshani, Bidlisi’s spiritual guide, was also a target of attack.Footnote 32 The powerful men around Bidlisi, therefore, lost power.
Several letters in his compilations that he penned for Sultan Bayezid in the name of Baysunghur indicate that Bidlisi must have stood by Yaqub’s successor, Baysunghur Mirzā. When Yaqub’s son Baysunghur was killed in 1493 and prince Rustam Mirzā secured control over Tabriz, Bidlisi was expelled from the palace and lost his position. Bidlisi left for Shiraz to get away from this tumultuous environment. Another important reason for his choice of Shiraz was the presence of Dawwāni, the famous scholar and philosopher of the Islamic world, who had been under the patronage of Uzun Hasan and Yaqub and attracted many scholars from various parts of the Islamic world.Footnote 33
Bidlisi arrived in Shiraz around 1493 and spent some time with Dawwāni; he returned to Tabriz probably after Rustam Mirzā’s death in 1497.Footnote 34 Rustam Mirzā’s death followed by Ahmad Khān’s ascension to the throne (1497) gave Bidlisi the opportunity to return to the palace in Tabriz and find a new patron. For this purpose, he wrote a letter in verse to Ughurlu Muhammad’s son Ahmad Khān. This panegyric-like letter explicitly expressed Bidlisi’s petition for a new position and his expectation of patronage.Footnote 35 Bidlisi continued to participate in various scholarly assemblies with famous scholars organized in the capital of Tabriz under the patronage of Sultan Ahmad Aqquyunlu. The centrist policies followed by Bidlisi’s new patron Sultan Ahmad resulted in strong opposition from Aqquyunlu emirs. Sultan Ahmad was accused by courtiers of applying an Ottoman type of administrative system in a top-down manner and was soon killed in a battle with Ayba Sultan near Isfahan in December 1497.Footnote 36 Bidlisi once again lost his patron. During this time, which he defined as “idle,” he caught the plague in Tabriz in 1495.Footnote 37
Endless conflicts between the Aqquyunlu princes, Alvand Mirzā and Sultan Murad, in the competition for the throne after Sultan Ahmad’s short reign marked the Aqquyunlu history between 1498 and 1501. The power struggles and fragmentation provided a good opportunity for Ismail Safavi to rise to power. The twelve-year-old Ismail came to Erzincan in the spring of 1500 and, with his Anatolian and Syrian Qizilbash adherents who joined him there, moved to Shirvān and defeated Sultan Khalil. He then entered the capital Tabriz, and in the autumn of 1501 officially announced himself as the shah.Footnote 38
Bidlisi did not leave Tabriz right after the shah’s ascension to the throne in the autumn of 1501, as some believe. He was waiting to be employed at the shah’s palace, as indicated by the letter he wrote to Malik Mahmud Daylami, the former vizier of Sultan Yaqub, who served Shah Ismail in Tabriz. Bidlisi sought the mediation of his old friend at the Hasht Behesht Palace with the shah.Footnote 39 He managed to enter the shah’s service through his relationship with Daylami. He made numerous references to this short period in the palace in a letter he wrote to Shah Ismail when he was in Mecca in 1512.Footnote 40 These references prove that Bidlisi was in the Hasht Behesht palace in Tabriz after the city was captured by Shah Ismail and disprove Sharaf Khān’s baseless claim, followed by some modern scholars, that Bidlisi had refused to enter the service of the shah and had fled.
The instability that continued through the first few years of Shah Ismail’s reign prompted Bidlisi’s departure from his beloved Tabriz in 1502, where he had spent two-thirds of his life, leaving his parents, wife and children behind.Footnote 41 The chaotic environment in Tabriz triggered this decision.Footnote 42 His father advised him to go first to Mecca on hajj and then seek asylum in Bayezid II’s palace in Istanbul.Footnote 43
In contrast to the many Iranian scholars who left for India and Transoxania, Bidlisi turned to the Ottoman Empire. He stated that his real intention was to “double his hajj” by appearing at Bayezid II’s palace in Istanbul first. The Ottoman sultan was a generous patron of science and the arts. He established important relations between the Iranian and Ottoman scholars. He knew very well many scholars from Iran who had entered the Ottoman palace and service. He also had an acquaintance with Bayezid II through three letters he wrote, the first of which was written in 1481. His father, Husam al-Din Ali, also indirectly knew Bayezid II. Bidlisi wished to present a commentary he wrote on Qadi Nasr al-Din Bayzāwi’s Anwār al-Tanzil va Asrār al-Tawil (The Lights of Quran and the Secrets of Commentary) to Sultan Bayezid. Footnote 44
On the Way to Rum/Anatolia: 1502–4
Bidlisi wrote about his long and adventurous travels from Tabriz to Istanbul only in his Munāzarah-ye Ruzeh va Iyd (Contest Between Fasting and Feast). According to this work, Bidlisi left Iran in midsummer 1502, spent almost a year on the road, passing through Amasya, İstanbul and Sofia, and lived among Christian inhabitants in his last residence.Footnote 45 This place, which Bidlisi does not name, must have been the village of DupnichaFootnote 46 in the sanjak of Köstendil to the southwest of Sofia. After a while, he left this place with the intention of going to Istanbul. On his way to Istanbul he visited Sofia (1503), looking for an opportunity to present himself to the sultan. He wrote Munāzarah-ye Ruzeh va Iyd, in which he related his adventures from Tabriz to Sofia.Footnote 47 After about six months and after presenting this work to Sultan Bayezid on the occasion of the Ramadan feast celebration in Sofia, he left Sofia for Istanbul to execute the plans he had been working on for a long time. He appeared before the sultan in the winter of 1503‒4 and presented him with Mirat al-Jamāl (Mirror of Beauty), which Bidlisi had completed en route to Istanbul.Footnote 48
In Istanbul, the sultan tested Bidlisi’s skills by asking the palace scholars, like the Kadiasker Müeyyedzade Abdurrahman, for their opinion on his works. After passing this test, Bidlisi offered to write a history of the Ottoman dynasty in Persian in the chancery style. The sultan granted him the village of Dupnicha as fief in addition to a yearly stipend as a reward.Footnote 49 Bidlisi had finally found a patron who would pay him a stable salary for his service as a court historian.
Writing Hasht Behesht as an Imperial Project
Bidlisi’s entry to the Ottoman palace coincided with the need for an imperial Ottoman ideology after the conquest of Istanbul in May 1453. In other words, Bayezid II’s desire to commission an official history in the style of Ilkhanid-Timurid historical writing was necessary for the dynasties’ claim of legitimacy as a Muslim ruler.Footnote 50
Bidlisi’s history of the first eight Ottoman sultans called Hasht Behesht (Eight Paradises), was quite ambitious, since it was an imperial project unique in its style. Bidlisi completed the text that the sultan had been eagerly waiting for in a short period of about thirty months. It was constructed by the use of legitimating tools of his predecessors, the Ilkhanid and Timurid historians, and promoted the propaganda of the Ottoman ideology. In other words, he reformulated the images of universal sovereignty of the Mongol-Timurid world for the legitimation of the Ottoman dynasty. Bidlisi, who witnessed the rivalry in Islamic legitimation between the Aqquyunlus and the Ottomans and then between the Safavids and the Ottomans, tried to construct the Ottoman ideology through concepts such as ghaza (holy war), khilafat, mujaddid (renewer of faith) and lineage (nasab), as well as symbols of worldly power such as sāhib-qirān (lord of the auspicious conjunction). He utilized all these concepts of worldly, religious and political legitimation to prove that Ottoman sultans were the Shadow of God on Earth, indisputable patrons and protectors of the Islamic world. In this respect, Hasht Behesht was not too different from the texts of Yazdi, Ruzbihān and Khwāndmir, which reflected the imperial claims and superiority of their Iranian patrons.Footnote 51
Considering the number of copiesFootnote 52 that were distributed as far afield as Mashhad, Isfahan, Qum, Tehran and Shamakhi, his history found a wide range of readers in Iran as well as the Ottoman Empire. This work, written in Persian for an Ottoman patron, was a milestone in Ottoman intellectual historical writing and was the most detailed dynastic history written up to then. Bidlisi’s contribution was not only his application of Ilkhanid-Timurid imperial notions to Ottoman history writing, but also his adaptation of the literary tradition of an Iranian munshi to Ottoman dynastic history, which had never been attempted before. Bidlisi became the conveyer of Persian chancellery-style history writing in the Ottoman Palace, which contemporary and later Ottoman chroniclers would use as a model. In the mid- and late sixteenth century, historians such as Celalzade and Âli referred to Bidlisi with respect and took him as a model for historical writing.Footnote 53
This new beginning in Istanbul would soon turn into a disappointment for Bidlisi. He faced some serious problems in the palace both during and after the writing of Hasht Behesht. A faction formed against him and promoted political propaganda to discredit him. It included, among others, Vizier Hadım Ali Paşa and Kadiasker Müeyyedzade Abdurrahman Efendi. The writing of a quite ambitious dynastic history such as Hasht Behesht and the connection with the sultan attracted their jealousy. The problems he faced in the Ottoman palace were not too different from the problems encountered by the scholars and bureaucrats in palaces in Herat and Tabriz, where struggles for superiority went as far as slander.Footnote 54
The sole basis of the activities of this faction aiming to discredit Bidlisi consisted of claims that there was too much praise for Iranian shahs in Hasht Behesht, and that most of it was copied from other works. When the sultan did not keep his promises to Bidlisi, Bidlisi did not write the preamble and gave up his work. Then he seriously considered the option of leaving Istanbul between 1506 and 1511. He was now through with writing an Ottoman dynastic history. The accusations and the slander completely blocked his possible progress in the bureaucracy and as a scholar. He knew he would not be given any positions as long as Hadım Ali Paşa and Müeyyedzade were his rivals. He asked for the sultan’s permission to go on hajj. But his opponents objected. He was not given permission and was virtually put on probation by the sultan. Bidlisi worked at the Ali Paşa Madrasa for 50 akçes per day for a while. His envious rival Kemalpaşazade, who started working at Bayezid’s madrasa in Edirne for 50 akçes after presenting his work, was no more privileged than Bidlisi. Considering that Kemalpaşazâde was given 30.000 akçes/day when he presented Bayezid with his Tevârih-i Âl-i Osman in 1510, three years after the completion of the eight volumes of Hasht Behesht, it can be better understood how Bidlīsī was subject to preferential treatment and his complaints and grievances that “he could not enjoy the blessings of the Rūm lands, that the doors of the treasury were not opened for him” were somewhat exaggerated.
In this five-year period, Bidlisi made contacts with princes and some figures in the palace circles and related his experiences to them. He also corresponded with his former friends in Iran. The most important among these was no doubt Sheikh al-Islam Amir Abd al-Wahhāb, who was a member of the former Aqquyunlu ruling elite under Shah Ismail’s patronage. In his letter to Amir Abd al-Wahhāb, Bidlisi openly admitted that he corresponded with some statesmen in the Tabriz palace between 1508 and 1511 on various occasions when he was in the Ottoman palace and that he expected protection from Shah Ismail. The correspondence with the Safavid Sheikh al-Islam was the first link in the contacts that he established with the Iranian side.Footnote 55
Interregnum in Mecca and Seeking Safavid Patronage: 1512–1514
Bidlisi managed to get permission to go on hajj at a time when Bayezid was occupied with his son Selim’s rebellion. His departure in September 1511, leaving his two children behind, also meant the end of an almost eight-year period in Istanbul for Bidlisi.Footnote 56 He left Istanbul on a ship in the autumn of 1511 and arrived in Cairo, where he met the envoy of the Mamluk Sultan al-Ghavri. He was treated well by the sultan during his time in Cairo and received pay grants from him. Bidlisi had an opportunity to participate in the intellectual circles in the palace of the Mamluk sultan. He presented Risāleh fi Asrār al-Siyām (Epistle on the Secrets of Fasting) on 21 December 1511 to the Mamluk sultan. After his short stay there, he went to Mecca. After completing his hajj duties, he settled there to execute his plans. He had completely turned against the Ottomans now. His experiences in Istanbul and the loss of the sultan’s patronage resulted in strong anti-Ottoman sentiments in his worldview. As a result, he first revised Hasht Behesht to add his experiences and to relay the changes in his mindset. Since he was no longer under Bayezid’s patronage, he redacted many parts of his book about the Ottoman dynasty and the courtier and made additions to give Shah Ismail, whose patronage he expected to secure, the role of the Renewer of Faith.Footnote 57 The remarkable changes he made were not in favor of the Ottomans at all. In this revision, for example, he did not include some parts of his book related to the sultan’s and his vizier’s military achievements and deleted all the panegyrics that he had presented to his relentless adversaries such as Müeyyedzade Abdurrahman and Hadım Ali Paşa. Instead he added some sections severely criticizing the sultan and his entourage. He also added a concise history of Aqquyunlu to Hasht Behesht to reassure readers that his masterpiece contained not only the history of Ottomans but also of Iranians.
Secondly, he tried to contact Shah Ismail in order to seek his patronage. His plan to return to Tabriz to enter Shah Ismail’s service, which he had envisaged while he was still under probation in Istanbul, bore its first fruit. He wrote a letter in verse to Shah Ismail in 1512. One of the most interesting aspects of his letter was its portrayal of Shah Ismail as an invincible hero claiming the Ottoman crown, and whose majesty shook the Ottoman Empire. His political polemics in favor of Shah Ismail and against the Ottomans are also quite interesting. However, it should be noted that before he entered the shah’s protection, Bidlisi presented him as the absolute ruler of the vast lands from the east to the west (Anatolia) and from the north to the south. He virtually encouraged him to conquer Istanbul, to seize “the throne and the crown of the Rum Kaiser,” and emphasized that he was ashamed of being under Bayezid’s protection. Bidlisi in this letter regarded Shah Ismail as the new owner of the throne in Istanbul, and presented himself as a convert to Shiism.
Bidlisi’s contradictory politics should be read as a search for a new patron due to the problems he faced in the political context of his period, rather than a betrayal. Bidlisi was in fact a shrewd observer who was aware of political developments. In the period that he stayed in Istanbul as a “prisoner” between 1506 and 1511, Bidlisi had directly and indirectly heard of three great victories of Shah Ismail, which reinforced the image of the shah as invincible, in an environment in which he was excluded both by the sultan and the palace circles and was not allowed to go anywhere, “like a prisoner.” Considering all these circumstances, it is easy to understand why Bidlisi wished to return to the patronage of Shah Ismail at the Hasht Behesht Palace.Footnote 58
This was typical of his time; he was not the only Iranian who had to depart upon being unable to find the patronage he expected. Iranian scholars, poets and artists who came for Ottoman patronage are known to have returned to Tabriz, Khurāsān and Central Asia after they could not find what they were looking for. Mehmed II’s courtier Sheikh Abu Ishaq Tabrizi, and his painter whose name is not known, returned to Tabriz when they lost his patronage. During the reign of Bayezid II, the Persian poets Beheshti and Kamal al-Din Abd al-Wāsi returned to Khurāsān when they lost the patronage of the sultan. Shaykh al-Islam Amir Abd al-Wahhāb, Bidlisi’s acquaintance from the Aqqoyunlu palace, went to Herat after Shah Ismail was enthroned, and returned to Tabriz upon Shah Ismail’s invitation after 1506. More examples are beyond the scope of this study.Footnote 59
A new change in Istanbul rendered it impossible for Bidlisi, who was looking for an opportunity to establish contacts with Shah Ismail, to go back to Tabriz and meet with the shah. Following a long struggle, Bayezid II had to hand the throne to his son Selim I in 1512. Bidlisi learned about this change on the streets of Mecca on the eve of his return to Iran.Footnote 60 When this change occurred in Istanbul, he had completed his revisions to Hasht Behesht in Mecca and had just started to write the epilogue, to which he said he would add all his experiences.Footnote 61 A while after Selim’s accession, there was another event that made him happy; he received a letter from Tacizade Cafer Çelebi, Bayezid II’s nişancı and his old friend in the palace, informing him of the events in Istanbul. An official invitation came some time after Cafer Çelebi’s letter. Selim summoned Bidlisi from Mecca back to Istanbul. After responding positively to the letters from Istanbul, Bidlisi left Mecca and changed his plans about going to Tabriz.
His sudden return to Istanbul must have surprised Shah Ismail, who expected him to come to Tabriz. In spite of this he would not contact Bidlisi to attract him to his side. Bidlisi was able to keep this contact with Shah Ismail secret and recorded his correspondence with the shah in his private munshaat.
Bidlisi went to Damascus on the Hijaz caravan. When he arrived at Konya, he met with Bābā Nimat Allah Nakhjivāni, an adherent of Ibn Arabi’s teachings from his father’s close circle. After that he left Konya in mid-autumn of 1513 and after two years was back in Istanbul in 1513‒14.Footnote 62
Under Selim’s Patronage: 1514
Upon his return to Istanbul in the winter of 1513‒14, Bidlisi appeared before Selim and “kissed his threshold.”Footnote 63 He found the capital that he had left in the early autumn of 1511 in virtual chaos in a very different atmosphere, where the young sultan had consolidated his power by eliminating all candidates to the throne and was in preparation for battle. He presented to Selim Hasht Behesht, which he had revised when he was in Mecca in 1513‒14, having added his preface in which he defended himself against the accusations of Sultan Bayezid and his entourage. He had also added parts of the reign of Bayezid, and the epilogue and indictment (shikāyatnāmeh) that he wrote during Selim’s reign. Another work he presented to the sultan was al-Ibā an al-mavāqi al-vabā (Avoidance of the Plagued Places), which he had completed during his stay in Konya.
As for the Safavid court notables with whom Bidlisi had correspondences to secure Shah Ismail’s patronage, there is no information on whether he resumed this contact or not. However, we know from the Bidlisi’s own personal reports that Shah Ismail sent a special envoy to him when Bidlisi was in Urmiya in the autumn of 1514 and tried to get in touch with him one more time after the Battle of Chāldirān.Footnote 64 It can be deduced from his writings between 1517 and 1520 that he regretted not going back to Iran.
This time Bidlisi would find himself in certain political projects of Sultan Selim, such as unifying the Kurds against the Safavids. The sultan had different reasons for summoning Bidlisi back. First, unaware of Bidlisi’s secret contact with Shah Ismail, Selim patronized the sciences and the arts just like his father Bayezid and his brother Ahmed. He had formed an intellectual circle around him that also included Iranian scholars and artists since before he took the throne. On the other hand, Bidlisi had written books and panegyrics for Selim when he was a prince in Trabzon. In this respect, it is not surprising that Sultan Selim summoned Bidlisi and took him under his protection. Second, in my opinion, Selim’s wish to make use of the experiences of a former Kurdish-Persian bureaucrat who had spent a major part of his life in Iran before his campaign there was the most important factor in summoning Bidlisi back to Istanbul.
It can be observed that his opinions about the Safavids and Shah Ismail, whose service he almost entered, had changed with the reign of Selim. He became more radical in this respect and denounced the shah, whom he had heaped with praise in his letter written only a year before. He had adapted himself to the worldview of his new patron out of a sense of opportunism. The epistles and the letters that Bidlisi penned in the name of Sultan Yaqub, Sultan Bayezid, Mamluk Sultan Ghavri, Shah Ismail and Sultan Selim demonstrate that he always changed his views in an opportunistic manner to reflect those of his new patrons or patron candidates. Bidlisi’s political and religious views were transformed with the reign of Selim. The works he produced in this period show this transformation and show that he did not follow the Nurbakhshi teachings of his father,Footnote 65 or his Shiite-Nurbakhshi teachings.Footnote 66
During his Iran campaign Bidlisi would accompany Selim as a former Persian bureaucrat and historian, taking the position of an adviser to Selim. Bidlisi is the first and only chronicler to mention that before the Iranian campaign Selim had sent his scribes all over Anatolia to make a list of Qizilbash adherents of Shah Ismail for execution.Footnote 67 Just after the victory in Chāldirān on 23 August 1514, Bidlisi first sent a fatihnama to the Kurdish notables and informed them of the new situation.Footnote 68 Among the Ottoman delegation sent to Tabriz to take control of the Safavid treasury and the property of the shahFootnote 69 was Bidlisi. He was mostly occupied with collecting the books his father had left behind when he was in Tabriz, where he wanted to stay.Footnote 70 He was looking for a position in the Ottoman administration in occupied Tabriz. The Ottoman occupation of Tabriz was short due to a rebellion by the janissaries and the opposition by the viziers; the army moved from Tabriz to Qarabagh on 15 September.Footnote 71
Selim’s Propagandist among the Kurds: 1514–16
When the army was around Marand, the sultan sent Bidlisi to the region of Urmiya in Azerbaijan.Footnote 72 He stayed in the region as one of the chief elements of the sultan’s new Iranian policy and was assigned the task of rallying all the Kurdish notables from Urmiya and Ushni (Ushnaviya) in Iran to Amid and Malatya in Anatolia as allies of the Ottomans. In the autumn of 1514 he arrived at Urmiya, which was one of the central bases for the far-flung propaganda activities. He established this policy on two main bases: to focus on the Sunni Kurdish notables who were the victims of Shah Ismail’s policy of violence and whose lands the shah had seized, and to carry out religious propaganda on them. He used spies to report on Shah Ismail’s policies and the attitudes of Sunni Kurdish governors. Just after his arrival in Urmiya, Bidlisi heard the news of Shah Ismail’s arrival at Tabriz (September–October 1514). The shah sent one of his men to Urmiya after Bidlisi with the purpose of “winning him over, to make him an apostate and to divert him out of his path.”Footnote 73 Shah Ismail had aimed to restart the communications that they had started in Mecca in 1512, which had been discontinued for various reasons, but he could not get the result he wanted.Footnote 74
As a propagandist on behalf of the sultan to unify the Sunni Kurds from Bidlis to Urmiya against the Safavids, Bidlisi maintained his activities in the lands now belonging to the Safavids. The areas where Bidlisi conducted his propaganda activities were actually autonomously administrated by local Kurdish rulers from Bidlis to Urmiya and Maragha. Principalities such as Bidlis, Hisnikayf, Khizān, Āgil, Chamishgazak, Palu, Jazira, Hakkari, Shirvān, Mahmudi, Bābān, Sorān, Ārdālān, Mukri, Brādost had these de facto rulers since before the invasion of Safavids at the very beginning of the sixteenth century. These Kurdish principalities on the Ottoman‒Safavid border owed their existence to the diplomatic policy they followed, not trusting either side by any means, and appeasing and getting along well with both sides. For instance, Sasun emirs tried to “get along well with the sultans of the Aqquyunlus, Qizilbash and Ottomans who had always attacked Kurdistan and keep their lands away and safe from the attacks of these great sultans,” says Sharaf Khan, the author of Sharafnāmeh. Footnote 75 Amir Sharaf, the ruler of Bidlis, also followed a policy of abiding by and seeking protection from both the Ottomans and the Safavids, even after he fought on the Ottoman side against Shah Ismail and recaptured his lands as a result of Bidlisi’s propaganda.Footnote 76 The fact that all Kurdish notables including Malik Khalil of Hisnikayf and Amir Sharaf of Bidlis accepted khilʻat (honorific gift) and presents sent by Shah Ismail while on the other hand fighting against him can be interpreted in this framework. To put it more explicitly, in addition to Kurdish emirs who were constantly on the Safavid side, many Kurdish local rulers could side sometimes with the Ottomans, and at other times with the Safavids, able to rapidly change sides. The search for an ally against neighboring tribes in particular was another factor in their changing sides.Footnote 77
In accordance with their customary policy, most of the Kurdish local rulers, among them the rulers of Bidlis, Chamishgazak, Hisnikayf, Jazira, Palu, Sasun and Khizān, had paid homage to Shah Ismail in 1507 for their survival. For their loyalty, Shah Ismail issued an edict assuring that the local Kurdish rulers had the right to administer their own ancestral lands. However, this de facto status of Kurdish principalities under the Safavid Iran would not last long. After a while, due to inducements from the Safavid ruler of Diyarbakr, Khan Muhammad Ustajlu, Shah Ismail arrested all of these local rulers and took some of them with him to Iran as hostages. Soon he sent his troops to invade Kurdistan. Instead of hereditary heirs, Shah Ismail appointed the Qizilbash ones. For instance, Rustam Bag, the ruler of Chamishgazak, and Sharaf Khān, the ruler of Bidlis, were replaced by Nur Ali Bag and Kurd Bag Sharaflu, the Safavid Qizilbash commanders. The political situation of the Kurdish principalities at the time when Bidlisi was conducting his propaganda is not vague; these lands spanning from Urmiya, Maragha and Miyānduāb to Arapkir and Kharput were under the administration of Safavid Qizilbash commanders.Footnote 78
Shah Ismail’s harsh policy against the local Kurdish rulers and appointment of the Qizilbash commanders as the licit ruler of Kurdish hereditary lands, facilitated Bidlisi’s propaganda on the ground and paved the way for Bidlisi to reach agreements with these deposed Kurdish rulers.Footnote 79 Having been aware of the political structure of area, in his propaganda Bidlisi gave priority to these rulers who were afflicted by Shah Ismail’s harsh policy. He first conferred with Sultan Husayn, the Kurdish governor of Imadiya in Iran, Shah Ali and Amir Badr al-Din b. Amir Shah Ali, governors of Jazira, and their cousin Amir Saydi Ahmad, and made them subjects of the sultan; he then delivered the khutbah (sermon) in the name of the sultan in Imadiya and Jazira.Footnote 80 After his activities there, he moved on to the area of Hisnikayf, Siird, Khizān and Bidlis in Iran. He arranged a meeting with Malik Khalil Ayyubi, the local ruler of Hisnikayf, Amir Sharaf al-Din, ruler/governor of Bidlis, Amir Dāvud, governor/ruler of Khizān, Ali Bag, ruler of Sasun, Abdal Bag, ruler of Namrān, and Izz al-Din Shir Bag’s son Amir Malik Abbas, ruler of Hakkari. He secured their full support in obedience to the sultan and alliance against the Safavids.Footnote 81 The impetus behind this swift agreement was that Bidlisi had promised to give their ancestral lands back to the old owners. This suggestion led to the strategic partnership of local Kurdish rulers with Ottomans, but only temporarily.
Judging by the reports written in Persian and sent to Selim, Shah Ismail “lost his dominance over all rulers of Kurdistan and Persia, from Gilan to Shirvan, from Shiraz and Isfahan border to Diyarbakir.”Footnote 82 According to Bidlisi’s report, the Qizilbash were weakened and all Kurdish and Arab tribes in the region submitted to the sultan and were eager to take their lands back from the Safavids according to Bidlisi; few Kurds sided with the shah, while numerous Kurds sided with the Ottomans; in short, he falsely emphasized that the situation had developed unfavorably for Shah Ismail. However, this optimistic picture drawn by Bidlisi was simply an exaggeration on his part to impress the sultan and bring his armies to the region as soon as possible. In reality, there is no information on Shah Ismail’s loss of power in the region, and it should not be forgotten that the information he gave was about lands where he was not present but about which he learned via his men and spies, as well as information about the alliance of the Kurdish amirs with the Ottomans; these were misrepresentations on his part.Footnote 83 There is no information to support or refute these claims in Safavid chronicles. On the other hand, Bidlisi himself refutes these claims, as he admits in another report written in 1516 that Shah Ismail and his army were better in terms of morale, and were in a stronger and more advantageous position.Footnote 84
The struggle between the Ottomans and the Safavids over the Kurds was marked by a religious competition. Bidlisi presented this struggle as a battle of Sunni Kurds against “deviant and faithless Qizilbash” Safavids. He knew well that he should use religious rather than political means in provoking the Kurds against the Iranian shah.Footnote 85 He must have predicted that he would not have much effect on the Kurds, who followed a pragmatic policy in a bipolar world.
However, using religion in this strategic partnership with the Kurdish notables by promising them that they would take back their hereditary lands could only lead to short-term results. Therefore, he described the sultan as a mujāhid (warrior), his soldiers as ghāzi (warriors for the faith), and his enemies as heretics (mulhid) and infidels (zindiq), in order to hide his political motivations.Footnote 86 A careful reading of his reports reveals how he carried out religious arguments and embedded the issue in a religious context in a fetva, defining those Kurds who accepted the Ottoman alliance as ghāzi and mujāhid, those who submitted to Shah Ismail as Qizilbash, “deviant” (murtad) and “faithless.”Footnote 87
Religious propaganda wars were being fought in the borderlands over which the Safavids and the Kurds were dominant. Bidlisi’s religious propaganda over the Kurds soon found a response from the Safavid side. Shah Ismail had chosen a propagandist from among the Tabriz sheikhs who could carry out religious counter-propaganda just like Bidlisi in the Kurdish lands for Shiism.Footnote 88
In the post-Chaldiran era and as a result of his activities for about two years (summer 1514–spring 1516), Bidlisi was able to get many Kurdish notables from Urmiya to Chamishgazak, such as the rulers of Hisnikayf, Sasun, Bidlis, Bokhti, Imādiya, Zirqi, Mardisi, Āgil, Khizān and Chamishgazak, on his side in the war against Shah Ismail and secured their submission to the sultan, albeit for a short period. As a result of the strategic partnership with the Kurdish rulers, Diyarbakir and Mardin were taken back from the Safavids (1515–16) by Selim. While Bidlisi relayed the situation to Selim in a more positive light, the Kurdish notables from Kurdistan responded to the grants sent by the shah with presents, showing that Bidlisi’s propaganda was not as effective as he pretended.
As promised by Idris-i Bidlisi to Kurdish principalities allied with Ottomans, the autonomous districts, called Kürt hukumeti, were set up. They paid neither tribute to the central treasury nor performed regular military service in the army; also their land was not put into the timar system. The remainder of the province was divided into some twenty sancaks, some of which were governed by centrally appointed sancakbeyis, while in others, called ocaklik or yurtluk, governorship remained in the hands of the Kurds. It should be noted that the status of some yurtluk/ocaklik governorships, such as Chamishgazak, Hisnikayf and Bidlis, underwent several changes as time went by and some of them were integrated into the Ottoman sanjak system.Footnote 89
As for the status of the Kurdish principalities, first it can be said that Bidlisi’s role in unifying the Kurds against the Safavids is somewhat exaggerated. These Kurdish notables were not against Shah Ismail. They wanted to be on the side of the Ottomans because they had been the target of violent policies by Shah Ismail and would go into a strategic partnership with Bidlisi in order to secure their hereditary lands after Shah Isma’il’s defeat at Chaldiran. The Kurds simply wanted to regain their lands from the Safavids and did not care about sectarian differences. They had an unchanging policy of striking a balance between the two sides to maintain their autonomy. Kurds who were allied with the Ottomans suffered when their lands were occupied by Uzun Hasan. They submitted to Shah Ismail when he later appeared on the scene.
There are more examples of Kurdish mistrust of the Ottomans and how they could not afford to continually submit to one side.Footnote 90 As Bidlisi pointed out, Kurds could submit to the Safavids when the Ottoman influence in the region became stronger.Footnote 91 This situation can be understood more clearly through the dissolution of this allegiance established by Bidlisi, and many Kurdish rulers such as Sharaf Khan, the ruler of Bidlis, positioned themselves closer to the Safavids at times and to the Ottomans at other times, in accordance with their own political and strategic interests. This was always the case, as I have shown. The announcement of Sharaf Khān (d. 1533), Selim’s former ally, as governor of Kurdistan by Shah Tahmasb, and the shift in the loyalty of Zaynal Bag, the Kurdish ruler of Hakkari who had been loyal to Kanuni Sultan Süleyman, to Shah Tahmasb, aptly summarizes this policy of survival and not trusting one side only.Footnote 92 One of the reasons for the killing of Sharafnāmeh’s author Sharaf Khan, who had taken over his ancestral lands (Bidlis) upon the invitation of the Ottomans while he was under the patronage of Shah Tahmasb, was the suspicion that he was connected with the Iranian side.Footnote 93 The loyalties of the Kurdish notables changing between the Iranian and Ottoman worlds has been well documented.Footnote 94
On the other hand, although Bidlisi was the child of a Kurdish family who was born and had lived in Iran until his forties, he did not have enough political influence to have a direct impact over the Kurdish lands and principalities. His family was notable in Bidlis for their scholarship and as sheikhs, but not as a family with political influence like the rulers of Bidlis. Therefore, he was not influential enough to unite the Kurdish notables. In this alliance, which can be defined as a strategic partnership and opportunism, the real determinant was the promise to give the Kurdish rulers the lands that they had lost.
Following these events, Bidlisi was around Diyarbakir and Bidlis for a while, occupied with matters such as establishing Ottoman administration in all newly conquered lands, as well as setting up a network of Sunni madrasas to eradicate all Safavid religious influences in the region.Footnote 95 When he was there, both the affinity between the sultan and Bidlisi and the interest of the Kurdish rulers/notables such as Bidlis, Sasun, Khizānand Jazira in Bidlisi made the governor of Diyarbakir, Bıyıklı Mehmed Paşa, jealous and led to an administrative crisis between them. These events took place between October and November 1516. At that time the sultan had left Istanbul for his Egyptian campaign and had arrived in Damascus. Upon hearing about this dispute, he sent a firman to Bidlisi to summon him. Bidlisi, who seemed to have lost this competition for dominance in Diyarbakir, met Selim in Damascus. He encouraged the sultan to go on a new campaign to Iran, following his victories against the Mamluks. He stayed with the sultan in Cairo for a while; he even worked on a translation for him. Bidlisi did not leave the sultan’s side throughout the time be traveled from Damascus to Cairo, and he secured a privileged position in which he even advised the sultan; but this intimate relationship with the sultan was soon overshadowed in Cairo. There was a dispute between Bidlisi and the sultan on the administration of newly conquered lands. He presented Hayāt al-Hayawān, which he had translated, along with his panegyric of one 157 verses titled Qasideh-ye Misriyya, which included his criticisms such as the selling of the qadiship, the appointment of unqualified people to administrative positions, the plundering and killing of the former Mamluk military class in contrast to the promises that were made, which he considered innovation (bidat). Bidlisi gave some advice to the sultan in his panegyric, and accused the figures around him of disregarding the shari’a and kanun. His criticism of unjust practices and administrative problems in the panegyric angered the sultan, who ordered Bidlisi to go to Istanbul with the navy. His dismissal ended his three-year adventure in the political field. Upon this order, Bidlisi had to leave Cairo, where he had stayed for about six months.Footnote 96
Final Years in Istanbul: 1517–20
Bidlisi returned to Istanbul in the autumn of 1517 after three and a half years away, in a negative as a result of the failure to secure the position he deserved. His expectations were high when he first entered the Ottoman palace and he was confident in his writing and his abilities in literary construction. In this respect, he could have secured a high rank among writers in the Ottoman palace. Although he reminded the sultan that his share of property and position in the conquered lands was great, he did not get what he wanted from the sultan’s victories against the Safavids in 1514–16 and the Mamluks in 1516–17. Nothing had changed for him since he experienced the same end as he had during Bayezid II’s reign. Hence, the lines “I was wretched in the hands of foes in Rum, Damascus, and Diyarbakr” in Qasideh-ye Misriyya, which he wrote in Cairo in 1517. He also describes in this text the arguments and polemics he had with Hadım Ali Paşa and Müeyyedzade in Rum, with Bıyıklı Mehmed Paşa in Diyarbakir, and the scholars and the sultan in Cairo on the defects of the existing system and the practices that he considered innovation (bidat).
In his final three years, he led a dervish-like life occupied with scholarly activities. In his commentary on Mullā Jāmi’s Chahal Hadith (Forty Hadiths), which he started during the last period of his life, he hinted at his regrets for leaving scholarly activities aside and getting involved in political projects.Footnote 97 He expressed the same sentiments in the Haqq al-Yaqin commentary. He also left his Selimşahnâme in the form of unfinished drafts. While he was living in Istanbul, Selim, “for whom he had spent his life’s capital,” died on 21‒22 September 1520. Two months after Selim’s death, on 17 November 1520, Bidlisi, who was sixty-three years old, also passed away. He left behind two sons; one (Abolfazl) rapidly climbed the ladder of his bureaucratic career and was appointed in the Ottoman bureaucracy as a financial officer of Rumeli within a short time, and the other (Abolmavāheb) joined the Ottoman military. The draft of Selimşahname was completed by his son Abolfazl years later.Footnote 98
Conclusion
Idris-i Bidlisi, who came from an Iranian background and a Shi’ite-Nurbakhshi family, lived in a quite tumultuous period between the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth century. Throughout his life he traveled across a wide area for political and cultural projects, for example Ray, Tabriz, Baku, Shirvan, Shiraz, Sofia, Istanbul, Cairo, Mecca, Konya, Diyarbakir and Bidlis, where he resided. At a time when the mobility of Sufi/dervishes and scholars between the Ottoman and Iranian worlds created an cultural interaction, Bidlisi, like all his predecessors coming from the Persian world, functioned as a bridge and carried the Iranian cultural and political traditions into the Ottoman world. In other words, through the works he produced he advocated the knowledge and practices of his own world that was shaped in the intellectual circles of Iran, where he spent two-thirds of his life.
He was a product of a complex political conjuncture and the patronage relations he established with the Aqquyunlu, Safavid, Ottoman and Mamluk dynasties. In line with the nature of patronage relations, even when he entered or tried to enter the circles of dynasties that were enemies, as in the instance of the Ottomans and the Safavids, Bidlisi was able to be integrated into their politics without difficulty. In acquiring positions within two rival governments, he did not follow a sectarian identity (Sunni vs. Shii) but sought patronage and pay that determined his pragmatic approach. Modern readers can see such shifting loyalties to different dynasties as unusual but this was an important feature of the shifting identities of elites in the borderland. Therefore, the image of Bidlisi, who has been misunderstood by modern scholars, must be placed in his own time and conjuncture.
