Language Unites and Divides: Persian and Turkish in the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Iran in the Early Modern Era
As a well-known anecdote from the beginning of the sixteenth century has it, both Shah Ismail I (r. 1501-24), the founder of the Safavid dynasty in Iran, and Qansu al-Ghawri (r. 1501-16), the penultimate Mamluk sultan of Egypt, composed poetry in Turkic, while their nemesis, the Ottoman sultan Selim I (r. 1512-20) was an excellent […]