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In the 15th century two Turkmen tribal confederations vied for control of Iraq. The first of these was the Kara Koyunlu, which since about 1375 had ruled the area from Mosul to Erzurum in eastern Anatolia as supporters of the Jalāyirids. After seizing Arabian Iraq, Kara Yūsuf turned the province over to his son Shah Muḥammad, who held Baghdad until 1433. He in turn was dispossessed by his brother Ispān (or Eṣfahān) until yet another of Kara Yūsuf’s sons, Jahān Shah (1438–67), took the city. He, his sons, and their deputies held Baghdad from 1447 to 1468, when they were ousted by their archrivals, the Ak Koyunlu (“White Sheep”) Turkmen confederation, led by Uzun Ḥasan (1457–78). Like the Kara Koyunlu, the Ak Koyunlu came from eastern Anatolia.
Although significant achievements in the arts are recorded from the first half of the 15th century, scholars generally reckon this period one of the darkest in the history of the area. Ak Koyunlu rule in Baghdad (1468–1508) for the most part appears to have been somewhat less turbulent than that of the Kara Koyunlu, though later the Pūrnāk tribe—whose chieftains controlled the city intermittently from 1475 to 1508—were pitted against the Mawṣillū tribe in Upper Iraq. After the partitioning of the Ak Koyunlu state in 1500, Arabian Iraq became the final foothold of the last Turkmen ruler, Murād (1497–1508, died 1514), until the Safavid conquest.
Both the Kara Koyunlu and the Ak Koyunlu governors of Baghdad were forced to deal with the messianic ultra-Shiʿi uprising of the Mushaʿshaʿ in Lower Iraq. In 1436 Muḥammad ibn Falāḥ, the founder of the Mushaʿshaʿ sect, made his appearance among the Arab tribes in the marshy regions around Wāṣit, conquered the town of Ḥawīza (modern Hoveyzeh, Iran), and mounted an expedition against Basra. His son ʿAlī took Wāṣit and Najaf, raiding Baghdad and attacking pilgrim caravans. Toward the end of the 15th century, this movement was brought under control temporarily by the Turkmen regimes.
The Safavids (1508–34)
In October 1508 Shah Ismāʿīl I, founder of the Shiʿi Safavid dynasty in Iran, entered Baghdad at the head of his Kizilbash Turkmen troops, driving out the Pūrnāk governor. Turning the city over to his chief of staff, he moved south against the Mushaʿshaʿ. As in the Turkmen period, tribal centrifugalism continued to dominate the politics of the region.
In Upper Iraq parts of Diyār Bakr—including Mosul and the Kurdish regions east of the Tigris—came under Ottoman control after the Safavids under Ismāʿīl were defeated by Sultan Selim I (1512–20) at the Battle of Chāldirān in 1514. Arabian Iraq, however, remained in Safavid hands, and the Mawṣillū chieftains, formerly confederates of the Ak Koyunlu, now in the service of the Safavids, rose to power in Baghdad between 1514 and 1529. One of them, Dhū al-Fiqār, in fact declared himself independent of the Safavids. The young Shah Ṭahmāsp I, the son of Ismāʿīl, retook Baghdad in 1529 and gave it to Muḥammad Sultan Khan Takkalū.
In 1533 Selim’s son, the Ottoman sultan Süleyman I (the Magnificent), set out on his campaign against “the Two Iraqs.” In November 1534 he took Baghdad from the Safavid governor Muḥammad Sultan Khan. The city was then integrated into the Ottoman Empire, except for a brief Safavid reoccupation from 1623 to 1638. Lower Iraq too was incorporated into the empire by the middle of the 16th century. As a result of the Ottoman conquest, Iraq underwent complete geopolitical reorientation westward.
John E. WoodsOttoman Iraq (1534–1918)
Ottoman Iraq was roughly approximate to the Arabian Iraq of the preceding era, though still without clearly defined borders. The Zagros Mountains, which separated Arabian Iraq from Persian Iraq, now lay on the Ottoman-Iranian frontier, but that frontier shifted with the fortunes of war. On the west and south, Iraq faded out somewhere in the sands of the Syrian and Arabian deserts. The incorporation of Arabian Iraq into the Ottoman Empire not only separated it from Persian Iraq but also reoriented it toward the Ottoman lands in Syria and Anatolia, with especially close ties binding the province (eyālet) of Diyār Bakr to the Iraqi provinces.
For administrative purposes Ottoman Iraq was divided into the three central eyālets of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra, with the northern eyālet of Shahrizūr, east of the Tigris, and the southern eyālet of Al-Hasa, on the western coast of the Persian Gulf. These provinces only roughly reflected the geographic, linguistic, and religious divisions of Ottoman Iraq. Most of the inhabitants of Mosul and Shahrizūr in the north and northeast were Kurds and other non-Arabs. The people of the plains, marshes, and deserts were overwhelmingly Arabic-speaking. Few Turkish speakers were to be found outside Baghdad, Kirkūk, and some other towns. Centuries of political upheavals, invasions, wars, and general insecurity had taken their toll on Iraq’s population, especially in the urban centres. Destruction and neglect of the irrigation system had restricted settled agriculture to a few areas, the most extensive of which were between the rivers north of Baghdad and around Basra in the south. As much as half of the Arab and Kurdish population in the countryside was nomadic or seminomadic. Outside the towns, social organization and personal allegiances were primarily tribal, with many of the settled cultivators having retained their tribal ties. Baghdad, situated near the geographic centre, reflected within itself the division between the predominantly Shiʿi south and the largely Sunni north. Unlike the case in Anatolia and Syria, Iraq’s non-Muslim communities were modest in size, but there was an active Jewish commercial and financial element in Baghdad, and Assyrian Christians were prominent in Mosul.