Selim I

Selim I ruled for eight years, doubled the size of the Ottoman Empire, and turned it from a Balkan and Anatolian power into the leading state of the Muslim world. He is called Yavuz in Turkish, usually translated as the Grim or the Resolute, and he took the throne in 1512 by forcing the abdication of his father Bayezid II with the support of the janissaries, then killed his brothers and their sons. His first war was ideological as much as territorial. Shah Ismail's Safavid state was propagating Shi'a Islam among the Turkmen tribes of eastern Anatolia, who were Ottoman subjects, and Selim's response included the massacre or deportation of tens of thousands of them before he marched. He met Ismail at Chaldiran in August 1514 and destroyed him with field artillery and janissary arquebusiers against cavalry that had none of either, fixing the Ottoman and Persian frontier roughly where the Turkish and Iranian border still runs. He then turned south, destroyed the Mamluk Sultanate at Marj Dabiq in 1516 and Ridaniya in 1517, and took Syria, Palestine, Egypt and the protection of Mecca and Medina. The Ottoman sultan was now the guardian of the holy cities and the dominant Sunni power, and later Ottoman writers dated the caliphate's transfer to this reign, though the claim was made long afterwards. He died of an infection near the place where he had deposed his father. His son was Suleiman the Magnificent, who inherited a position rather than building one. Selim is also remembered for the scale of the killing inside his own government: he went through seven grand viziers in eight years and executed most of them, and a Turkish curse wishing somebody may he be a vizier of Selim's was still in use centuries later. The empire he left was roughly three times the size of the one he inherited.

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