In eight years, Selim the Grim grew the Ottoman Empire by seventy percent
Selim I sat on the Ottoman throne for only eight years, from 1512 to 1520. By his death the empire covered roughly 3.4 million square kilometres, seventy percent larger than when he took power, and it had swallowed Egypt, the Levant and the holy cities of Arabia in a single sweeping campaign.
Born in Amasya in 1470, a grandson of Mehmed II, Selim learned command as governor of Trabzon from 1487. In 1505 he led 450 men against a Safavid force of some 3,000 and drove it back to Erzincan, the first of four straight victories over Persia's new Safavid rulers. When his father Bayezid II favoured his elder brother Ahmet as heir, Selim rebelled; after losing his only battle, at Tekirdag in 1511, he tried again and, backed by the Janissaries, deposed his father in 1512. He then defeated Ahmet and had his captured brothers and nephews killed, a practice meant to prevent the civil wars that had plagued earlier successions.
His great rival was Shah Ismail, who had made Twelver Shia Islam Persia's state faith and was stirring unrest in Anatolia. At Chaldiran in 1514, Ottoman artillery and muskets overcame a more mobile Safavid army; Ismail was wounded, and Selim briefly entered Tabriz on 5 September.
The decisive turn came against the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt. Victories at Marj Dabiq in August 1516 and Ridaniya in January 1517 brought Syria, Palestine, the Hejaz and Egypt under Ottoman rule. Selim chose the humble title of Servant of the Two Holy Cities for Mecca and Medina, rather than their Ruler. Guarding the pilgrimage routes made the Ottomans the leading Muslim power and pulled the empire's centre of gravity from the Balkans toward the Middle East.
Later tradition went further. By the 18th century, his conquest of Egypt was romanticised as the moment the caliphate passed to the Ottomans, and popular memory crowned Selim the first rightful caliph of the Ottoman line. The tale of a formal handover from the Abbasid line, however, was invented afterwards.
Source: Selim I
