White Sheep Turkomans once ruled from Anatolia to Oman
The Aq Qoyunlu—“those with white sheep”—were a Sunni Turkoman confederation, culturally Persianate, that held eastern Anatolia from 1378 to 1508 and, under Uzun Hasan, spilled into Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Iraq, and even Hormuz’s Oman. Their banner’s white sheep, not a dinner totem, likely named them.
Byzantine writers notice them in the Bayburt country south of the Pontic Mountains by the 1340s. Tur Ali Beg, styled lord of the Turks of Amid, already held amir rank under Ilkhan Ghazan and besieged Trebizond without taking it. Founder Qara Yuluk Uthman Beg and other chiefs married Byzantine princesses. When Ilkhanid power faded in the mid-fourteenth century, the Oghuz tribes of the confederation summered in Armenian highlands along the upper Tigris and wintered between Diyarbakır and Sivas, locked in chronic war with their Qara Qoyunlu “Black Sheep” cousins.
Timur’s gift of Diyar Bakr in 1402 finally gave them a territorial base, yet Black Sheep strength still boxed them in until Uzun Hasan destroyed Jahān Shāh at Chapakchur in 1467. Uzun Hasan advertised himself as heir of Oghuz Khan through Bayandur Khan; in a 1470 letter to Şehzade Bayezid at Amasya he boasted that Bayandur, Bayat, and other Oghuz clans from Mangyshlak, Khwarazm, and Turkestan had come to serve him. Epic tradition often ties the Book of Dede Korkut to White Sheep patronage even when genealogies refuse to line up neatly.
Uzun Hasan's ambitions ran well beyond his Black Sheep rivals. He crushed the Timurid Abu Sa'id at Qarabagh in 1469 and sent the sultan's head to the Mamluk court in Cairo, backed a Timurid client who briefly held Herat in July 1470, and seized Baghdad along with lands around the Persian Gulf. Venice had promised help against the Ottomans as early as 1464 but never sent it, and he lost to them at Otlukbeli in 1473, though his state survived the blow.
After his death in 1478, his son Ya'qub ruled until 1490 but spent his first four years putting down seven pretenders and alienated many Turks, who drifted into the militant Safavid order. Civil war followed Ya'qub's death, and the realm splintered among rival sultans. Ismail Safavi defeated the confederation at Nakhchivan in 1501, and the last sultan, Murad, died at the hands of Qizilbash warriors at the fortress of Rohada.
Source: Aq Qoyunlu
