Baa, Baa, Black Sheep. Or White?

Mehmed II took Constantinople in 1453. A reasonable question, if you have been following the eastern end of this story, is what the Ottomans were doing in Erzurum at the time. The answer is nothing whatever. They would not arrive for another sixty years.

Eastern Anatolia in the fifteenth century belongs with its eastern neighbours—the Caucasus and Mesopotamia—rather than with Anatolia proper, and it belongs, at that particular moment, to the sheep.

The Oghuz Turks who came west from Central Asia, pushed along by the Mongols behind them, settled the Armenian highlands and the country south of them in two tribal confederations: the Kara Koyunlu and the Ak Koyunlu. The names are transparent enough—koyun is sheep, -lu the suffix of possession: those with the black sheep and those with the white.

Why those colours, nobody knows. One account has it that the flocks really were of different fleece. Another puts the colours on the battle standards. A third holds that the sheep are beside the point: in Turkic usage colours double as compass directions, kara for north and ak for west, so the names would record not livestock but which quarter each group came in from. The third explanation is the only one that accounts for why these two colours rather than any others, which is a point in its favour and has not been enough to win it general acceptance.

They were not, in any case, neighbours for long. The Kara Koyunlu held eastern Anatolia and Tabriz until 1467, when Uzun Hasan destroyed them and the Ak Koyunlu took over. Thirty-odd years later Shah Ismail destroyed the Ak Koyunlu in turn, and out of the wreckage came Safavid Persia. Turks all of them, and all of them takers-up of Persian culture, though not of the Persian language.

The Safavids repay a moment’s attention, because the dynasty is named after a man who had nothing to do with the faith it went to war for. Sheikh Safi-ad-din (1252–1334) founded a quiet Sufi order at Ardabil and was himself a Sunni of the Shafi’i school. It was his descendant Sheikh Junayd, a century and a half later, who militarised the order and gathered the Turkoman tribesmen around it; under the next sheikh, Haydar, they acquired their red caps and the name Qizilbash, and over several generations the order drifted into an unorthodox Shi’ism of its own devising. A Sunni brotherhood turned into the banner of a Shi’a empire, and historians are still arguing about which sheikh to blame.

What follows is two centuries of Ottomans against Safavids. Both Turkish, both heirs to the same Persianate court culture, and separated ideologically by nothing except the branch of Islam: Sunni in the west, Shi’a in the east. The wars were more or less continuous, and the treaties that punctuated them regularly included a clause by which each side undertook to stop insulting the other’s faith during sermons and prayers—a provision that tells you both how bitter the quarrel was and how precisely it was understood.

Erzurum’s role in all this was to be the prize. Selim I took the city in 1514, after Chaldiran, and made it a sanjak under the governor-general at Diyarbakır. In 1533 it became a governor-generalship in its own right, the timar system of military landholding was introduced, and from 1590 it was an eyalet. Ottoman administration, in other words, reached Erzurum under Suleiman—at about the time he signed the Peace of Amasya with Shah Tahmasp, which handed eastern Anatolia, western Transcaucasia and Mesopotamia to the Ottomans, left Erzurum in the buffer zone and declared Kars neutral.

Shah Abbas then took the lot back, and it was 1639 before Murad IV recovered most of it. The Treaty of Zuhab settled the border—roughly where Türkiye’s eastern frontier still runs—and also guaranteed Persian Shi’a pilgrims free passage to the shrines left on the Ottoman side.

Five owners in two centuries, then: black sheep, white sheep, Ottomans, Safavids, Ottomans again. Erzurum had been changing hands at about that rate since Urartu, and went on doing so; the Russians took it three times in the nineteenth century alone. The sheep were gone long before that, and nobody had ever established what their colours were for.