Battle of Chaldiran

The Battle of Chaldiran, fought on 23 August 1514 on a plain in north-western Iran, was a decisive victory of the Ottoman Empire under Sultan Selim I over the Safavid shah Ismail I. Ottoman guns and musketeers broke the Safavid cavalry, and the battle stopped the westward advance of the new Safavid state, handing the Ottomans eastern Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia. It opened four decades of intermittent war between the two empires.

Ismail I had been crowned shah in 1501 and had made Twelver Shia Islam its official faith. His most devoted followers, the Qizilbash, were mainly Turkoman fighters who regarded him as their spiritual guide, and many of them lived in Ottoman Anatolia. Selim, who seized the Ottoman throne in 1512 after a struggle with his brothers, saw the Qizilbash as a threat to his rule, since some had backed his rivals. He obtained a legal opinion from Sunni jurists condemning Ismail and his followers as heretics. Before marching east, according to the sources, he had some 40,000 Qizilbash in Anatolia put to death, and he tried to cut off the trade in Iranian silk.

Selim's campaign of 1514 was hard on his troops. Ismail, also threatened by the Uzbeks of Bukhara on his eastern frontier, laid waste to the land in the Ottoman path, and the army struggled for supplies across the rugged Armenian highlands. The janissaries grew restless, at one point firing at the sultan's tent. When Selim learned that Ismail had gathered his army at Chaldiran, he moved quickly to bring on a battle.

Estimates of the armies vary widely. The Ottomans are put at 60,000 to 100,000 men, with heavy artillery and thousands of janissaries armed with firearms; the Safavids at 40,000 to 80,000, almost all cavalry and without artillery. Selim placed his guns and musketeers behind a line of carts. The Safavid horsemen tried to avoid the guns in the centre by attacking the Ottoman wings, but the Ottoman artillery proved mobile and the Safavids suffered very heavy losses. Ismail was wounded and nearly captured, and several of his leading commanders were killed. Casualty figures for both sides are uncertain, ranging in different accounts from a few thousand to tens of thousands.

On 7 September the Ottomans entered the Safavid capital, Tabriz, plundered it and its treasury, and then withdrew, as the janissaries refused to campaign further. Selim's men captured members of Ismail's household, including his wives. Ismail never again led an army in person and largely withdrew from affairs of state. The Safavids learned from the defeat: under Ismail's son Tahmasp I, firearms and cannon became a regular part of their forces.

The Ottomans annexed eastern Anatolia, including much of western Armenia, and upper Mesopotamia. The battle was fought in Kurdish country, with Kurdish tribes on both sides, and afterwards many Kurdish chiefs transferred their loyalty to the Ottomans. The border remained contested until the Peace of Amasya of 1555, and the Safavids later regained some of the land under Abbas the Great, but the Treaty of Zuhab in 1639 fixed most of it on the Ottoman side. Freed from the eastern threat, Selim turned south and in 1516–1517 conquered the Mamluk Sultanate.

Our 1500 map shows the region just before the Safavid rise, and our 1530 map shows the Safavid Empire and the enlarged Ottoman Empire after Chaldiran. The modern battlefield lies in Iran, close to the border with Turkey.