Who were the Türkmen of Ottoman and Safavid lands? An overlooked early modern identity

Abstract

Abstract This essay examines the history of the term Türkmen in western Asia, and asks how its significance changed with the spread of Ottoman and Safavid power in the early modern era. Although it always maintained its core connotation of uncouth tribes, the meaning of the term became more complex (and at times conflicting) after the Mongol period, a dynamic which this paper highlights by comparing it to the Oghūz identity. Poets and court historians developed novel ways of deploying both terms to explain the political dominance of Turkish speakers in the region. When Türkmen gained new import as a political label during the Aq Quyūnlū period, it came to have two contradictory connotations: tribal rebellion and the state-building aspirations of the Anatolian Türkmen dynasties. Both were marginalized by the subsequent establishment of Ottoman and Safavid power in the 16th century. However, the term continued to be widely used to describe Turkish-speaking tribes in the region, and manuscripts from the Caucasus version of the Köroğlu epic tradition show how it came to represent an autonomous tribal alternative to the new imperial status quo of the 17th century.