campaign of expanding his territory at the expense of the rival Kara Koyunlu dynasty. Hasankeyf was one of the first towns to acknowledge Uzun Hassan's suzerainty, in an agreement signed by the Ayyubid emir in 1455. While Uzun Hassan managed to extend his influence throughout much of the Diyar Bakr and Jazira during the 1450s, the Ayyubid emir of Hasankeyf rebelled in 1460, attempting to take control of Siirt. Uzun Hassan responded by attacking Hasankeyf in 1461; he finally captured the town in 1462 after a six-month siege. It seems that Uzun Hassan then appointed his son Zeynel as governor of Hasankeyf. Aq Qoyunlu territory expanded further following their defeat of the Kara Koyunlu in Iran (1467–69), and Uzun Hassan moved his capital to Tabriz. However, Hassan followed up these successes with a disastrous campaign against the Ottoman Empire. Hassan's army of light cavalry was routed by Mehmed II's Ottoman forces, armed with rifles and cannon, at the Battle of Otlukbeli near Erzincan in August 1473. While Uzun Hassan survived, his son Zeynel Bey was killed in battle. In commemoration, the Mausoleum of Zeynel Bey was erected in Hasankeyf in about 1474 on the orders of either Uzun Hassan, or Zeynel's elder brother, Khalil. The shrine is currently moved to a new location to avoid inundation by the rising waters of the nearby dam. Safavid Empire (1504–1514/1517) In 1504, during the reign of king (shah) Ismail I (1501–1525) the Safavids founded the short-lived Diyarbakr Province, which consisted of six districts, including Hasankeyf. Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic In 1514/1517, the Ottomans took Hasankeyf and the rest of the Safavid Diyarbakr Province. In his 1614 History of the World, Walter Raleigh places "the Citie of Hasan-Cepha, otherwise Fortis Petra", upstream from the island of Eden, which he believed lay in the Tigris, based on his reading of Andreas Masius's De Paradiso Commentarius. Demographics While villages surrounding the town are almost exclusively Kurdish, the native Muslim population of the town used to be composed of Arabs, speaking a dialect of Arabic that neither resembles that of Siirt nor Midyat. Until the 1980s, Armenian, Assyrian and Arab Christian families lived in the cave houses by the river. Many of these families immigrated to France, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland as the Turkish government's conflict with the PKK escalated during the 1980s. During the same time period, Kurds from nearby villages started settling in the