Qizilbash

Qizilbash or Kizilbash (Azerbaijani: قیزیلباش; Ottoman Turkish: قزيل باش; Persian: قزلباش, romanized: Qezelbāš; Turkish: Kızılbaş, lit. 'red head' Turkish pronunciation: [kɯzɯɫbaʃ]) were a diverse array of mainly Turkoman^[1] Shia militant groups that flourished in Azerbaijan,^[2]^[3] Anatolia, the Armenian highlands, the Caucasus, and Kurdistan from the late 15th century onwards, and contributed to the foundation of the Safavid dynasty in early modern Iran.^[4]^[5]

^ Babayan, Kathryn (1993). The Waning of the Qizilbash: The Spiritual and the Temporal in Seventeenth Century Iran. Princeton University. pp. 1–6, 41–47. "The Qizilbash, composed mainly of Turkman tribesmen, were the military force introduced by the conquering Safavis to the Iranian domains in the sixteenth century."
^ Cornell, Vincent J. (2007). Voices of Islam (Praeger perspectives). Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 225 vol.1. ISBN 978-0275987329. OCLC 230345942.
^ Parker, Charles H. (2010). Global Interactions in the Early Modern Age, 1400–1800. Cambridge University Press. p. 53. ISBN 978-1139491419.
^ Roger M. Savory: "Kizil-Bash". In Encyclopaedia of Islam, Vol. 5, pp. 243–245.
^ Savory, EI2, Vol. 5, p. 243: "Kizilbāsh (T. "Red-head"). [...] In general, it is used loosely to denote a wide variety of extremist Shi'i sects [see Ghulāt], which flourished in [V:243b] Anatolia and Kurdistān from the late 7th/13th century onwards, including such groups as the Alevis (see A. S. Tritton, Islam: belief and practices, London 1951, 83)."