Ali Janbulad
Ali Pasha Janbulad was a Kurdish tribal chief from Kilis and a rebel Ottoman governor of Aleppo who wielded practical supremacy over Syria in. His rebellion, launched to avenge the execution of his uncle Huseyn ibn Janbulad by the commander Jigalazade Sinan Pasha in 1605, gained currency among northern Syria's Kurdish, Turkmen and Arab tribes and expanded to include local Syrian governors and chiefs, most prominently Fakhr al-Din Ma'n of Mount Lebanon and his erstwhile enemy Yusuf Sayfa Pasha of Tripoli. Ali formed a secret military alliance with the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand I, with the explicit aim of jointly destroying the Ottoman Empire and establishing the Janbulad family as the sovereigns of Syria.
Ali's burgeoning ties with several Celali revolt leaders, whose influence spanned central Anatolia, Cilicia and part of Mesopotamia, posed a major threat to the Empire at a time in which it was at war with Austria-Hungary in the west and Safavid Iran in the east. The prospect of a foreign-backed, wide-scale rebellion in the Ottoman heartland prompted Grand Vizier Kuyucu Murad Pasha to launch an expedition against Ali. The latter publicly maintained his loyalty to Sultan Ahmed I throughout his rebellion and his practical control of Aleppo was formalized with his appointment as beylerbey in September 1606. Murad Pasha's campaign against Ali was ostensibly directed against the Safavids to avoid Ali's mobilization; the latter realized he was the grand vizier's target only when Murad Pasha's army routed his Celali allies in Cilicia and approached his north Syrian domains. The grand vizier's army of Rumeli and Anatolian troops routed and mass executed Ali's rebel sekbans at the Amik Valley in October 1607, but Ali escaped, first to Aleppo then to the Euphrates valley. Through the mediation of his uncle Haydar ibn Janbulad and other representatives, he was pardoned by the sultan in 1608 and appointed beylerbey of Temeşvar several months later. Machinations against him by the local elites and Janissaries there compelled him to seek refuge in Belgrade in April 1609. Murad Pasha ordered his arrest there in the summer and he was executed in March 1610.
Family background
Ali was the grandson of Janbulad ibn Qasim al-Kurdi, the sanjak-bey of Kilis, part of Aleppo Eyalet. Janbulad suppressed brigandage in the district and took part in the 1571 Ottoman conquest of Cyprus during the war with Venice. He belonged to a family of Kurdish tribal chieftains based in the Kurd-Dagh west of Kilis and Aleppo. The family name Janbulad translates from Kurdish as "soul of steel". Janbulad and his family were rewarded for their military achievements with the hereditary governorships of the sanjaks of Kilis and Ma'arra. According to the historian William Griswold, the hereditary appointments to the militarily strategic and lucrative posts were "generous and represented considerable respect" by the Sublime Porte for Janbulad. He built at least one Sunni Muslim mosque in Kilis in 1562 before his governorship, and he or one of his family members built a bathhouse in the city.After Janbulad's death his lands were bequeathed to his sons Huseyn and Habib. A third son, Ahmed, was Ali's father. Huseyn was a sipahi in Damascus and inherited the tribal emirate of Kilis, which he shared on a rotational arrangement with Habib. He participated in the 1578 Ottoman campaigns against the Safavids in Georgia and eastern Anatolia. Three years later he was appointed beylerbey of Aleppo Eyalet, the first Kurd to attain the rank of beylerbey in Ottoman history and the first local to be appointed governor of Aleppo. In 1585 he was the lieutenant commander of Grand Vizier Sinan Pasha during the capture of Yerevan from the Safavid shah Mohammad Khodabanda. During his governorship Huseyn likely struggled against rivals seeking the post and accumulated debts. Not long after Yerevan, the Porte dismissed Huseyn and Habib from their Kilis and Ma'arra posts for unclear reasons, reassigning control of Kilis to a certain Kurd, Dev Sulayman. The authorities imprisoned Huseyn in Aleppo and sold his assets at a low price to pay back his debts and diminish his strength.
Upon his release Huseyn returned to Kilis and with his musketeers drove out Dev Suleyman and reclaimed his former hereditary lands. By 1600 he had accrued significant wealth and influence with the Porte, and a well-trained and well-compensated army of sekbans, as well as his Kurdish tribesmen and Turkmen and Arab tribal levies from northern Syria. Huseyn was reappointed beylerbey of Aleppo in July 1604. Aleppo was a particularly wealthy city and the revenues of its province amounted to about 3.6 million akces. Around one year later Huseyn was executed in Van by the order of the general Jigalazade Sinan Pasha for refusing join the campaign against the Safavids.
Rebellion
Control of Syria
Ali acted as a stand-in for his uncle Huseyn while the latter was fighting on the Safavid front. He had already established a reputation across Syria as "an experienced leader, an able, generous man" according to Griswold. His rebellion against the Ottoman authorities was expressly launched as a bid to avenge his uncle, whom he declared to have been unjustly executed; he insisted that he was not revolting against the sultan, but rather fighting as a loyal subject against the sultan's advisers and viziers—not least Jigalazade Sinan Pasha—whom he collectively accused of injustice. His cause for revenge gained wide currency among his Kurdish tribal kin and more generally throughout Syria. He engaged in a six-month struggle against local opponents in northern Syria and became the unofficial power in Aleppo. In May 1606 he had lodged a formal request to the imperial government for the governorship of Aleppo and a vizier post in Constantinople and pledged 10,000 troops to the Ottoman campaign against the Safavids.The Porte responded to Ali's activities by encouraging and providing assistance to the beylerbey of Tripoli, Yusuf Sayfa, a natural opponent of Ali. As a result, Yusuf, a Kurdish chieftain with a local power base in his province and a career Ottoman official, sensed a dual opportunity: he could neutralize the Janbulads, whose hegemony he feared, and in the process gain significant prestige with the sultan for suppressing Ali without the costly intervention of an imperial army. The Porte agreed to Yusuf's request to head a campaign against Ali and promoted him to serdar of Damascus. In a short battle near Hama on 24 July, Ali routed Yusuf's forces, which included the armies of Tripoli, Damascus and Hama, and put Yusuf to flight. While Yusuf escaped to Tripoli, the bulk of his allies joined Ali, who financially rewarded them to ensure their loyalty. He proceeded to plunder the countryside of Tripoli. To destroy Yusuf's remaining influence in Syria, Ali formed an alliance with Fakhr al-Din Ma'n, a Druze chieftain in Mount Lebanon and sanjak-bey of Sidon-Beirut and Safad, who was Yusuf's in-law and principal rival. One of the commanders of the Damascus Janissaries, Kiwan ibn Abdullah, seeking to undermine a rival Damascene commander, encouraged Fakhr al-Din to accept's Ali entreaty.
Ali and Fakhr al-Din met in the northeastern Beqaa Valley, at the source of the Orontes River, and devised plans to capture or kill Yusuf. Their first target was Tripoli, the principal source of Yusuf's wealth and strength, against which Ali dispatched his paternal first cousin Dervish ibn Habib, who captured the city. Although Dervish seized the valuables stockpiled in the inner citadel of Tripoli's castle, Ali strictly forbade the city's plunder in a bid to demonstrate to its inhabitants that his rule would be mild and generous. The minor emirs and sheikhs of Tripoli and its hinterland joined Ali, whose forces swelled to about 60,000 fighters. Yusuf had escaped to Damascus where he raised an army out of its imperial garrisons. On their pursuit of Yusuf, Ali and Fakhr al-Din captured Baalbek, the headquarters of a locally powerful Shia Muslim chief and old ally of Yusuf, Musa al-Harfush. They cautiously kept Musa on side, sending him to lobby military factions in Damascus to abandon Yusuf, but forced him to step down from his chieftainship in favor of his kinsman Yunus al-Harfush. They proceeded south through the Beqaa Valley and recruited a certain Ahmad of the Shihab clan based in Wadi al-Taym. Fakhr al-Din maintained his control of the Mediterranean ports of Acre, Haifa and Caesarea.
With northern and central Syria under his control, Ali demanded from the beylerbey of Damascus, Seyyed Mehmed Pasha, control of certain areas of Seyyid Mehmed's eyalet under Ali and his allies: he sought the Hauran for Amr al-Badawi, chief of the Bedouin Mafarija tribe of Jabal Ajlun, the southern Beqaa Valley to the Bedouin chief Mansur ibn Bakri Furaykh, and the restoration of Kiwan ibn Abdullah to his Janissary post–all of Ali's requests were rejected, though he demonstrated to his allies among the southern Syrian emirs and chieftains the benefits of his rule. Meanwhile, Ali issued excuses for his failure to remit taxes and continued to publicly assert his allegiance to the Ottoman sultan, whose government, unable at the time to rein in Ali's power, sent an envoy named Mehmed Agha with a pardon for Ali. The Kurdish chief may have interpreted the pardon as an imperial pass to continue his rebellion in Syria. Although control of Damascus would seal his paramountcy in the Syrian region, Ali was mindful of the city's distance from his Aleppine power base and its importance to the Porte as the Empire's main marshaling point for the annual Hajj pilgrimage caravan to Mecca. As such, instead of a full-scale assault, he resolved to pressure the city to surrender Yusuf to him. Aware of the internal divisions among the Ottoman military factions in Damascus, Ali and Fakhr al-Din besieged the city. A skirmish was fought on 30 September 1606, in which the Damascenes were bested. The defeated troops retreated behind the city walls, refusing to hand over Yusuf. Ali ordered a three-day plunder of the city's suburbs; to avoid Damascus experiencing the same fate, Yusuf and the Damascene authorities, led by the kadi, and local merchants bribed Ali 125,000 gold piasters to withdraw. Ali agreed and further opened Damascus to free trade with foreign merchants.
Meanwhile, Yusuf had escaped and taken refuge in Hisn al-Akrad near Homs. Ali and Fakhr al-Din proceeded north to besiege him, compelling Yusuf to sue for peace. The three leaders formed an alliance sealed by marital ties. Together they held absolute control of Syria, with Ali the strongest of the three. Nonetheless, Ali's supremacy over the eyalets of Aleppo, Tripoli and Damascus was reliant on his control of the Syrian emirs. Closer to his territorial power base Ali had the absolute loyalty of his Janbulad clan, followed by the Kurdish tribal beys and the nomadic Arabs of Kilis and Azaz. With the prospect of a full-scale civil war brewing in Anatolia and in the face of Ali's practical control of Syria, the Porte acceded to his request for the governorship of Aleppo, appointing him in September; his request for a vizierate was ignored. Ali practically proclaimed his sovereignty by having the Friday prayers read in his name, and likely minting coins as well.