Cüneyd’den Şah İsmail’e kadar Şirvan mücadelesi: Tarihi ve milli arka plan

In this article, the struggle of the Safavids’ predecessors, the Karakoyunlu and Akkoyunlu units, to establish a centralized state is mentioned. It is known that the Shirvanshahs preserved their existence in one form or another throughout a long historical period, from the Oghuzs, Seljuks, Mongols, Teymurids, Akkoyunlu and Karakoyunlu states to the Safavids. In the article, the Safavid sheikhs’ Shirvan expeditions and their eventual end to the independence of this state are discussed in terms of both historical reality and national ideology. For this purpose, the Safavid Shirvanshah struggle was researched by referring to old sources and especially the works of recent historians. Although the Safavid Qizilbash State has been researched in many aspects, it is also a fact that some issues have been little or not sufficiently researched. In both Turkish and Azerbaijani historiography, the stubborn march of Savefi sheikhs Juneyd, Haydar and Ismail on Shirvan, the murder of the previous two sheikhs and the defeat of the last one by the Shirvanshah army, effectively ending the existence of this state, were attributed to revenge motives. However, the political situation of the XV-XVI centuries created the conditions for the Safavids to come to power in Eastern Anatolia, Azerbaijan and Iran, and the establishment of the state was linked to the elimination of the Shirvanshahs.