The Making of Selim: Succession, Legitimacy, and Memory in the Early Modern Ottoman World

The father of the legendary Ottoman sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, Selim I ("The Grim") set the stage for centuries of Ottoman supremacy by doubling the size of the empire. Conquering Eastern Anatolia, Syria, and Egypt, Selim promoted a politicized Sunni Ottoman* identity against the Shiite Safavids of Iran, thus shaping the early modern Middle East. Analyzing a wide array of sources in Ottoman-Turkish, Persian, and Arabic, H. Erdem Cipa offers a fascinating revisionist reading of Selim's rise to power and the subsequent reworking and mythologizing of his persona in 16th- and 17th-century Ottoman historiography. In death, Selim continued to serve the empire, becoming represented in ways that reinforced an idealized image of Muslim sovereignty in the early modern Eurasian world.

H. Erdem Cipa is Assistant Professor of Ottoman History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is author of Yavuz'un Kavgası: I. Selim'in Saltanat Mücadelesi and editor (with Emine Fetvacı) of Writing History at the Ottoman Court: Editing the Past, Fashioning the Future.