Beylik of Dulkadir

The Beylik of Dulkadir was the Turkoman principality of the Taurus marches, founded by Zayn al-Din Qaraja of the Bayat tribe at Elbistan, whose town he took in 1337 with a Mamluk deputy's title from Sultan Al-Nasir Muhammad. For nearly two centuries the Dulkadirids ruled the Bayat, Afshar and Begdili clans from Elbistan after the Seljuks of Rum fell, holding Mamluk titles while the Ottomans rose in the west. Its very name is disputed, read as Dhu'l-Qadr the Mighty, as the Turkic Torghud, or as helmet-bearer, while Armenian scribes wrote Tulgharts and Persian ones Zulkadir. Burgundian and Bohemian travelers marveled at Dulkadir women who rode and fought like men, though the beylik's own law kept a sternly masculine order. The game ended when the gunpowder empires closed in: after the Battle of Turnadag in 1515 Selim the Grim conquered the beylik and demoted it to an Ottoman sanjak, closing the age of the Anatolian beyliks in the east.