The Aq-Qoyunlu, to use their proper name, were a confederation of some 50 Turkish and Kurdish clans centred on Azerbaijan that had come into existence by the mid-14th century, the principal of which were the Bayandur, Purnak and Mowsillu. Despite the death in 1435 of their first great leader, Qara Yoluk, in battle against the rival Black Sheep Turks (the Qara-Qoyunlu), their power continued to grow throughout the 15th century until they controlled much of Persia, reaching its apogee under Qara Yoluk’s grandson Uzun Hasan, commonly called the ‘Little Turk’ in western sources (to distinguish him from the ‘Grand Turk’, i. e. the Ottoman sultan), who reigned 1466-78. In this time they fought victoriously against both the Mamluks and the Ottomans, being decisively defeated by the latter only at Otluk Beli in 1473. Following the death of Uzun Hasan’s son and successor Yaqub in 1490 dynastic struggles resulted in the collapse of Aq-Qoyunlu power, and the eventual overthrow of their sultanate by the Safavids in 1503.
From the Aq-Qoyunlu sultanate’s early days its military forces were provided by the contingents of its confederate clans, with the clan chieftains generally maintaining their own nuclei of trained and paid soldiers, such as the sultan too maintained on a much grander scale. Caterino Zeno, one of several Venetian visitors to Persia in the 1470s, describes Uzun Hasan’s royal standing army in 1472 as his porta, which Minorsky suggests is probably in this instance a translation of the Persian dar-i khana or Turkish qapu (see page 8), or even the Mongol qahulgha. By most accounts this central army appears to have comprised some 20-25,000 cavalry plus infantry: Contarini, another Venetian, was told that in 1475 Uzun Hasan campaigned with ‘upwards of 20,000 [cavalry], or taking the good and the bad together, upwards of 25,000’, plus infantry who ‘might have amounted to 10,000’ (though he was told in addition that ‘great numbers’ of infantry also remained behind). Josafa Barbaro, one of his informants, himself reported in 1475 that Uzun Hasan ‘had
In all, as far as I could estimate, between 20,000 and 24,000 good horsemen; and the rest that came for the furniture of the camp were about 6,000 men’. Against the Georgians in 1477 he is again reported to have led 20-24,000 cavalry, plus ‘about 11,000’ infantry, and the usual Turcoman entourage of women, children and livestock, which elements Barbaro enumerated in a muster of 1474 as comprising 15,000 women, 11,000 children, 6,000 tents, 30,000 camels, 9,000 mules and asses, 25,000 draught-horses and pack-horses, 31,000 cattle, and a menagerie of hunting dogs, falcons, hawks and leopards. The military element on this latter occasion consisted of 15,000 ‘soldiers of the sword’, who were seemingly slaves (probably the boy-nokars referred to below), 2,000 armed herdsmen and the like, 1,000 archers (probably the sultan’s own tip, or bodyguard, since Barbaro records that at least 10,000 of the rest were also archers), plus other unspecified troop-types ‘so that in all there might be about 25,000 good horsemen’. In addition there were 3,000 bowarmed infantry, and a support echelon that included cobblers, smiths, saddlers, fletchers, victuallers and apothecaries.
In addition to the royal army, under Uzun Hasan at least there were also provincial armies of similiar proportions based in Pars, Baghdad and Diyarbekr, plus smaller forces in Kerman, Isfahan, Qazrin and elsewhere. The full details of the organisation of one of these provincial armies (that of Uzun Hasan’s second son Khalil, governor of Pars), as recorded by Jalal al-Din Davani in 1476, provide us in addition with a good idea of the composition of the central army itself He enumerates the officers as amir-i a’zam (supreme amirs), amir-i kabir (great amirs), and ordinary amirs, plus officers with the rank of tuvaji, a title that probably meant ‘public crier’, whose duty was to shout orders to the troops, in addition to which they had a general responsibility for the men and their equipment. Other ranks were comprised of three different categories of soldier, these being: the pushan-dar or pushan-push, meaning ‘clad in armour’ or ‘men in armour’ (what we would call men-at-arms); the tirkash-band, meaning ‘those wearing quivers’ (i. e. archers, by inference lighterarmed than the pushan-push), who provided the largest part of the army; and the qullughchi, who were armed servants or attendants like the Ottoman oghlan or kul. The Encyclopedia of Islam says that the last category might have been slave-soldiers, i. e. mamluks; Davani does not himself clarify whether they were foot or horse, but Zeno in 1472 refers to mounted attendants who are doubtless qullughchi. The first two categories were certainly cavalry and were both called by the generic term nokar, derived from the Mongol nokor meaning ‘friend’ or ‘companion’, so as to distinguish them from the qullughchi. Organisation followed the Timurid/Tartar tradition, the basic unit being the qoshun (Mongol khoshun), officially of 100 men but sometimes seemingly numbering as few as 50.
Davani himself mistakenly gives the right wing total as 9,154 men. He also says that 3,944 of the centre and 5,802 of the left wing were nokars, when the actual totals are 3,946 and 5,652.
World History
