Ahmad Beg

Ahmad Beg or Ahmed Beg (1476 – 14 December 1497) was a ruler of the Aq Qoyunlu. Through his father Ughurlu Muhammad he was a paternal grandson of Uzun Hasan, while through his mother Gevherhan Hatun he was a maternal grandson of Mehmed the Conqueror. He was also a son-in-law (damat) to Bayezid II.

Name He is known as Ahmad Göde or Gövde Ahmad (; ).

According to Turkish sources, he got the nickname göde due to his short height.

He is mentioned in contemporary sources as Ahmed Mirza, Ahmed Padishah

Family Göde Ahmad married his maternal first cousin Aynışah Sultan, a daughter of Sultan Bayezid II, in 1490.

Woods identifies Ughurlu Muhammad's mother, and thus Ahmad's paternal grandmother, as an unnamed daughter of Dawlatshah Bulduqani of Eğil. Ughurlu Muhammad had previously married a daughter of his maternal uncle Isa II Bulduqani; Woods records three children from that marriage, Mahmud, Husayn and an unnamed daughter, who were Ahmad's paternal half-siblings.

Ottoman genealogical works cited below give Ahmad and Aynışah a son and two daughters: Neslihan Hanımsultan; married to her cousin Şehzade Alaeddin Ali, son of Şehzade Ahmed, himself one of Aynışah's half-siblings. She had a daughter, Hvandi Sultan. Hanzade Hanımsultan; married in 1508 to Yahyapaşaoğlu Bali Bey, the eldest son of Yahya Pasha. Fodor independently identifies Bali's 1508 bride as a daughter of Ahmad and Aynışah, and establishes that Aynışah married Yahya Pasha after Ahmad's death; Bali therefore married his stepmother's daughter. The union was a failure, as the couple lived in separation and the princess, per a report of her behaviour to Sultan Selim in 1516, engaged in a string of scandalous acts. Caught committing adultery with a man at Skopje, who was killed along with six members of her household, she then relocated against permission to Istanbul where she took a young Quran reciter, known as Dellakoğlu Bak, as a lover, bearing him a daughter who died aged approximately six months. Upon his death of malaria at Babaeski, en route from Edirne to Istanbul, she found a new companion in his brother. The letter's author, most likely Selim's son and her own cousin, the future Suleiman the Magnificent, then based at Edirne, credited her acts to the help of her "boundless and unparalleled" wealth and several named procuring servants. Sultanzade Zeyneddin Bey (May/June 1497 – 1508).

Separately, Woods's reconstruction of the Aq Qoyunlu dynasty records a son of Ahmad named Zaynal b. Ahmad b. Ughurlu Muhammad, who briefly ruled in Diyarbakır after Alvand's death in 1504/5. Bosworth likewise lists Zayn al-'Abidin b. Ahmad b. Ughurlu Muhammad as ruler in Diyar Bakr from 1504 to 1508.

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