Why was Selim I called the Grim?
Selim I (1470 to 1520), Ottoman sultan from 1512, is remembered as Yavuz, usually rendered "the Grim", for his stern rule, the way he took the throne from his father and his readiness to shed blood: he had his brothers and their sons put to death. He was also a soldier of the first rank. In eight years he broke Safavid Persia at Chaldiran in 1514, conquered Mamluk Syria and Egypt in 1516 and 1517, and became guardian of Mecca and Medina, roughly doubling the size of the empire he left to his son Suleiman.1
Selim I reigned for only eight years, but in that short time he changed the map of the Middle East. He broke the power of Safavid Persia in the east, swept away the Mamluk sultanate of Syria and Egypt in a single year, and brought the holy cities of Islam under Ottoman protection. His resolve, and his readiness to shed the blood of his own family to secure the throne, earned him the name by which the Turks still know him: Yavuz, the Stern or the Grim.2
Early life
Selim was born in 1470 at Amasya in northern Anatolia, where his father, the future Sultan Bayezid II, was then governor. The TDV encyclopedia of Islam, the standard Turkish reference work, names his mother as Ayşe Hatun, a princess of the Dulkadir dynasty that ruled a Turkmen principality on the Mamluk frontier. As a boy he was given a private tutor by his father.3
Rise: the prince of Trabzon
In about 1487 Selim was made governor of Trabzon on the Black Sea, the frontier province facing Georgia and the Turkmen lands to the east. He held it for more than two decades. There he watched the rise of the Safavids, a militant Shia order that had made itself master of Iran under the young Shah Ismail, and whose missionaries were winning over the Turkmen tribes of eastern Anatolia.4
Bayezid preferred to avoid war in the east, even when Ismail's army crossed into Ottoman territory in 1507. Selim did not. On his own authority he ordered retaliatory raids into Safavid lands, and the TDV records a victory over the king of Georgia in 1508. At his request his son Suleyman was given the governorship of Kaffa in the Crimea.5
Rise: the war for the throne
In 1510, as the succession question grew urgent, Selim left Trabzon without permission and crossed to Kaffa; he was later given a governorship in the Balkans. In August 1511 he marched against his father, whose army defeated him and forced him back to the Crimea. But Selim had what his brothers lacked: the support of the Janissaries, who shared his wish to return to the aggressive conquests of Mehmed II. In April 1512 the Janissaries brought him to Istanbul and forced Bayezid to abdicate. Selim became sultan on 24 April 1512; his father died a few weeks later.6
Then he cleared the field. His brother Korkud was captured and executed, and Ahmed, who had taken up arms, was defeated at Yenişehir on 15 April 1513 and killed. Britannica records that Selim put to death not only all his brothers but all seven of their sons, and four of his own five sons, leaving only the ablest, Suleyman, as heir. No rival claimant was left around whom his enemies could gather.7
Campaigns: against the Kizilbash
Selim turned east at once. The Kizilbash, the Turkmen followers of the Safavid shah, had risen in revolt in Anatolia during the civil war, and he answered with terror. Britannica speaks of thousands of tribesmen and missionaries massacred; the Encyclopaedia Iranica says Selim ordered the execution of upwards of 40,000 Anatolian Kizilbash before the campaign began. He also tried to cut off the export of Iranian silk into his empire.8
Campaigns: Chaldiran
Armed with religious rulings sanctioning war against the Shia shah, Selim set out on 20 March 1514. Iranica estimates his army at about 140,000 by the time it reached the frontier, Britannica at more than 100,000. The march was brutal. Ismail retreated before it, burning the country, and when Hamdam Pasha, governor of Karaman, came to the sultan on behalf of his fellow officers to urge a return to Istanbul, Selim had him executed on the spot.9
The armies met on 23 August 1514 on the plain of Chaldiran, northeast of Lake Van. Ismail, who had perhaps 40,000 men by Iranica's count and 20,000 by Britannica's, rejected advice to strike before the Ottomans were ready, thinking it cowardly to attack an unprepared enemy. Selim placed his Janissaries in the center behind a barricade of gun carriages. The Safavid cavalry broke the Ottoman left, then hurled itself at the center, and was shot to pieces by musket and cannon. Ismail fled the field with a few hundred men.10 › Battle of Chaldiran, 1514
Campaigns: Tabriz and Dulkadir
In early September Selim entered Tabriz, the Safavid capital, unopposed. But he could not stay. The scorched country could not feed his army, and the Janissaries, short of food and plunder, forced him to turn back to winter quarters at Amasya after about a week. Chaldiran did not destroy the Safavid state, yet it broke the shah's aura: Ismail never again led his troops into battle, and his successors avoided open war with the Ottomans for a century.11 › The Greatest Battles of the Ottoman Empire
Selim used the victory to finish what was left of the independent Turkmen east. In 1515 he took the fortress of Kemah, annexed Diyarbakır and the surrounding lands, and destroyed the Dulkadir principality, whose ruler Alaüddevle, his own mother's kinsman, was killed in battle in June. The Dulkadirs had been clients of the Mamluk sultan in Cairo, and their fall brought Selim face to face with the Mamluks.12
Campaigns: the conquest of Egypt
The Mamluk sultanate of Egypt and Syria was in decline. In 1516 Selim marched into Syria, and on 24 August, at Marj Dabiq north of Aleppo, his army of disciplined infantry, cavalry and artillery routed the Mamluk army of Sultan Qansuh al-Ghawri. Many Mamluk officials changed sides in return for promises of office, and the cities of Syria, Damascus and Jerusalem among them, opened their gates.13
Selim pressed on into Egypt. On 22 January 1517 he defeated the new Mamluk sultan, Tumanbay, at Ridaniya outside Cairo and took the city. Tumanbay was captured and, the TDV records, hanged at the Bab Zuwayla gate on 13 April. In Cairo the sharif of Mecca sent Selim the keys of the holy city, acknowledging him as protector of Mecca and Medina and as the leading ruler of the Muslim world.14
The later story that the last Abbasid caliph formally handed the caliphate to Selim is doubtful; the Ottoman sultans did not claim the title in earnest until the late 18th century. What Selim did gain was immense. In a single year he had roughly doubled the size of the empire, adding the lands of the old Islamic heartland, the revenues of Egypt and control of the trade routes between the Mediterranean and the East.15
Character and command style
The TDV describes Selim as of medium height, with a stern brow, a round face, an aquiline nose and a long, thick mustache but no beard, and as a man who dressed simply, hunted and was a skilled archer. He was harsh and quick to shed blood, but kept his word and was courteous in speech. He also wrote poetry, chiefly in Persian, the language of his Safavid enemies, and his Persian divan survives.16
As a commander he was relentless. He drove his armies across vast distances, from Lake Van to the Nile, and suppressed any hesitation among his officers, as Hamdam Pasha discovered. He trusted the new weapons, putting Janissary musketeers and artillery at the heart of his battle line, and he let speed and firepower do what the cavalry charge had done for his ancestors. The Janissaries who had made him sultan could still check him, as they did at Tabriz, but, as Britannica puts it, it was he who dominated the government.17
Death and legacy
Selim spent his last years in Istanbul, organizing his conquests and, the TDV says, preparing a fleet against the Knights of Rhodes. In July 1520, traveling from Istanbul to Edirne, he fell ill near Çorlu in Thrace, with a large swelling that the TDV suggests was probably plague, and died there on 22 September 1520, about 50 years old. Suleyman built a mosque over his tomb in Istanbul, known today as the Yavuz Sultan Selim Mosque.18
His legacy was the empire he handed on. Britannica observes that Suleyman came to the throne in a position unequaled by any sultan before or after, unopposed, rich with the revenues of the Arab world and in command of the state machine. Within six years Suleyman took Belgrade and Rhodes and destroyed the Hungarian army at Mohács. The frontier that Chaldiran drew between the Ottomans and the Safavids still roughly marks the border between Turkey and Iran.19 › Suleiman the Magnificent
