Rural Order, Revolt And Messianism In The Early Sixteenth Century Anatolia: The Rebellion Of 1526-27

This thesis deals with the rebellion of 1526-27, the last episode of a series of seemingly religious-messianic uprisings in early sixteenth-century Anatolia. Seen as part of the Kızılbaş movement, the literature on the subject is insufficient. These uprisings are often regarded as an extension of the political-religious rivalry between the Ottomans and the Safavids but have not been thoroughly analysed in terms of social history. Additionally, studies emphasising the conflict between the Ottoman state centre and the nomadic Türkmens, primary adherents of the Kızılbaş movement, fail to surpass the limitations of the functionalist approach that assumes a causal relationship between sedentism/nomadism and religious orthodoxy/heterodoxy. In this thesis, we aim to fill a serious gap in Ottoman historiography regarding the relationship between rural rebel-lion and messianism, from a Marxist perspective. After introducing our central problematique in the first chapter, we critically examine various conventional, Weberian, and Marxian perspectives on pre-capitalist Ottoman rural society in chapter two. We conclude that the concept of tributary mode of production offers a more feasible framework for discussing class relations within the Ottoman social formation. In the third chapter, we analyse tahrir data to expose the relationship between the Türkmens of Bozok and the Ottoman tributary state. In chapter four, we focus on the process of fief allocation, which indicates the dynamics of intra-ruling class struggles on the control and division of rural revenue sources. In the last chapter, we revisit the rebellion of 1526-27, comparing it with late-medieval peasant uprisings in Eurasia.