Şeyh Bedreddin
Şeyh Bedreddin was an Ottoman chief judge who led a revolt for shared property and was hanged in a market. He was the son of a frontier judge and a Greek Christian mother, born at Simavna near Adrianople, and educated in Konya, Cairo and Jerusalem in law and then in Sufism. He served as tutor at the Mamluk court in Cairo before returning to a state that had just been destroyed at Ankara. The Ottoman interregnum gave him his career. In the war between Bayezid's sons he attached himself to Musa, who made him kazasker - chief military judge, the senior legal office of the state - and he held it for about two years. Mehmed I defeated Musa in 1413 and exiled him to Iznik on a pension, which is a mild fate for the losing side's chief judge and suggests he was thought harmless. In 1416 risings broke out in western Anatolia and then in Rumelia led by his disciples, on a programme that mixed Sufi monism with the claim that land and goods should be held in common and that Muslims, Christians and Jews were to be treated as one. He escaped Iznik and took charge of the Rumelian rising. He was caught, tried by a jurist brought specially to rule that his blood was forfeit but his property was not, and hanged in the market at Serres in 1420. Nazim Hikmet wrote an epic about him in prison in 1936, which is why he is a figure of the Turkish left.
- Lived: 1359 CE – 1420 CE
- Nationality: Ottoman
- Roles: religious_leader, jurist
