Osman was chief of a band of semi-nomadic Turks who migrated to Anatolia in the 13th century.  Osman and his followers sought above all to become ghazi, or Muslim religious warriors.  The Ottomans’ location on the border of the Byzantine Empire afforded them ample opportunity to wage holy war and drove Ottoman expansion.  The ghazi ideal of spreading Islam by fighting infidels or heretics especially resonated with the steppe tradition and thousands joined the Ottoman cause as elite light cavalrymen.  

As warriors settled in frontier districts and pushed their boundaries forward, they took spoils and gathered revenues that enriched both the ghazi and central government.  Grants of land (timars) were given to each soldier, now called sipahi, as an annual payment for his continued loyal service to the Ottoman government.  Like European feudal knights, the cavalrymen were entitled to all the income of the land and the peasants of that land became serfs.   

The Qizilbash were cavalrymen who were from the seven Turkish tribes that supported Ismail, the primary founder of the Safavid Empire.  Shah Ismail’s father had instructed his Turkish followers to wear a distinctive red hat with twelve pleats in memory of the twelve Shiite imams and thus, they were known as the Qizilbash, or “red heads”.  The Qizilbash, whose Turkish roots associated military leaders with divinity, believed in the divine nature of Ismail as the Shiite “hidden imam” and enthusiastically and fanatically followed him into numerous conquests from Persia and into the Middle East.  

Later Safavid shahs took a more conventional Islamic ideology and gave Qizilbash officers and chiefs land grants (suyurghals) for their loyalty to the Safavid throne.  Like European feudal knights, the cavalrymen were entitled to all the income of the land and the peasants of that land became serfs.  As they were non-Persian in origins, Safavid shahs sought to limit the power of the Qizilbash by shifting Qizilbash chiefs from region to region, appointing other chiefs as governors, and assigning others as court administrators.