Battle of Chaldiran, 1514: the gunpowder clash in Persia

Chaldiran was fought between two empires divided by religion, the Sunni Ottomans and the Shia Safavids. It was decided, in the judgment of the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, above all by Selim's handling of the battle and by his mobile guns.²

Background

At the start of the 16th century Ismail, the founder of the Safavid dynasty, built a new state in Iran based on Shia Islam. His preachers found a ready hearing among the Turkmen tribes of Anatolia, the Kizilbash, inside the Ottoman Empire itself, and the Ottoman government saw their loyalty to the shah as a direct threat.³

Ismail did little to calm his neighbor. After he defeated the Uzbeks in 1510, he had the skull of their ruler, Muhammad Shaybani Khan, made into a drinking cup and sent it to the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II.⁴

The threat turned into open revolt. In 1511 the rising of Shahkulu drew large numbers of Kizilbash in Anatolia, and in 1512, during the Ottoman civil war over the succession, the Safavid agent Nur Ali Halife seized the town of Tokat and had the Friday prayer read there in Ismail's name.⁵

That civil war ended with the victory of Selim, who forced his father, Bayezid II, to abdicate in 1512 and then disposed of his brothers and their claims. One of his nephews, Prince Murad, fled to Ismail's court, and an Ottoman envoy sent to demand his return was put to death.⁶ › Selim I

Selim prepared the war as a holy war. He obtained fatwas from the religious authorities approving a campaign against the Shia Safavids, and before he set out he had some 40,000 Kizilbash in Anatolia hunted down and killed, to secure the army's rear.⁷

Armies and commanders

Selim marched east in the spring of 1514 with an enormous army. Creasy, following the Ottoman records, puts it at 140,000 men at the review in Sivas, and Encyclopaedia Iranica gives the same figure at the frontier. Selim left 40,000 of them behind between Sivas and Kayseri, as a reserve against a Kizilbash rising or, as one Ottoman historian has it, for want of provisions, so that roughly 100,000 reached the battlefield, the figure given by the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi.⁸

Its strength was not only its size. The Janissaries in the center carried firearms, the army hauled a powerful train of artillery, and the wings were made up of the feudal cavalry of Anatolia, under Sinan Pasha, and of Rumelia, the European provinces, under Hasan Pasha. Selim himself took his place in the center, behind the Janissaries, with the cavalry of his household.⁹

Ismail's army was largely cavalry, the Kizilbash horsemen of the Turkmen tribes, armed with maces, bows and spears. Its size is uncertain: Encyclopaedia Iranica gives about 40,000, while the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi holds that the shah's army was at least as large as the Ottoman one, and that the battle opened with a charge by 40,000 of his elite horsemen. Ismail divided his horsemen into two wings, leading the right himself and giving the left to Muhammad Khan Ustajlu, the former governor of Diyarbakır.¹⁰

The battle in phases

The Safavids did not meet the invaders at the frontier. They fell back and wasted the country in front of them, burning crops and shelters, and the huge Ottoman army struggled to feed itself. The Janissaries grew mutinous. When an officer, Hamdam Pasha, urged the sultan to turn back, Selim had him executed on the spot, and when the Janissaries broke into open tumult he rode in among them and shamed them back into the ranks.¹¹

The two rulers fought with words as well. Selim sent letters taunting Ismail for avoiding battle; Ismail replied that the letters must have been written by a secretary who had taken too much opium, and sent a box of the drug with his answer.¹²

At last Ismail stood to fight on the plain of Chaldiran, near Khoy. Two of his commanders who knew the Ottomans, Muhammad Khan Ustajlu and Nur Ali Halife, urged him to attack before the enemy could deploy; the shah, persuaded by another adviser, refused, holding it unworthy to strike an unprepared enemy. Iranica judges that this mistake, which let the Ottomans prepare their defenses, proved costly.¹³

Selim, by contrast, ordered battle at once on arrival. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi says that he feared Kizilbash sympathizers in his own ranks if he waited. He drew up his cannon chained together in front, with the Janissaries behind a barricade of wagons in the center and light infantry, the azabs, screening the guns.¹⁴

On the morning of 23 August the Safavid horsemen charged both Ottoman wings. Ismail meant to ride round the guns and take the Janissaries from behind. On the Ottoman right, Sinan Pasha pulled his azabs straight back through the gun line, and the cannon fired into the pursuing horsemen. Muhammad Khan Ustajlu was among the first to fall, and the Safavid left was routed.¹⁵

On the other wing Ismail himself broke through. He drove in the Rumelian cavalry, and their commander Hasan Pasha was killed. For a time the Ottoman left was in confusion.¹⁶

Why did the Ottomans win the Battle of Chaldiran?

The crisis was settled by the guns and the Janissaries. Selim sent fresh troops to his broken left, the Janissaries came into action, and the Safavid cavalry, already spent, could not break infantry firing from behind its barricade. Ismail charged the Ottoman center more than once and was thrown back each time with heavy losses.¹⁷

Then Ismail fell, wounded, and the Ottomans closed in. Both the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi and Creasy tell how one of his companions, Mirza Ali, rode at the enemy crying that he was the shah, and was taken in his place while Ismail was lifted onto another horse and carried from the field. Iranica writes that the shah fled with some 300 followers; the Safavid army broke up behind him.¹⁸

The accounts agree on the main reasons for the defeat. The Ottomans had artillery, mobile guns that the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi counts among the decisive factors, against a largely cavalry army. Their Janissary musketeers stopped the cavalry charges that reached the line. Their guns and infantry stood behind a barricade, set up at leisure because Ismail chose to wait.¹⁹

Aftermath

The Ottomans took the Safavid camp, with Ismail's treasure and his harem, and Selim had the captured Safavid commanders put to death. Losses were heavy on both sides. Among the Ottoman dead, the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi counts the governor of Rumelia and ten provincial governors, sanjak beys, and Creasy fourteen sanjak beys.²⁰

Selim marched into Tabriz in early September, on the 5th by the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi's reckoning and the 7th by Iranica's. He stayed little more than a week and sent off artisans from the city to Istanbul. He meant to winter in the Karabagh and resume the war in the spring, but the scorched earth and the hardships of the march had worn his army out, and the Janissaries forced him to turn back.²¹ › The Greatest Battles of the Ottoman Empire

The campaign still paid. Diyarbakır and much of the Kurdish country of eastern Anatolia passed to the Ottomans, organized with the help of the historian Idris of Bitlis, and the Turkmen principality of Dulkadir was annexed.²²

The conquest of Dulkadir brought Selim into conflict with the Mamluk sultans of Egypt and Syria, its protectors. He turned on them next, beat them near Aleppo on 24 August 1516 and near Cairo in January 1517, and brought Syria and Egypt under Ottoman rule. Chaldiran had opened the way to the largest conquests of his reign.²³ › Battle of Mohács, 1526

Legacy and memory

For Ismail the defeat was personal. Iranica writes that he went into mourning and never again led his troops into battle, and that the bond between the shah as a semi-divine spiritual guide and his Kizilbash followers was broken.²⁴

For Iran the loss was strategic as well: the Ottomans now controlled the silk roads from Tabriz to Aleppo and to Bursa, and the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi writes that the spread of Shia influence in Anatolia was largely halted.²⁵

The war itself did not end at Chaldiran. According to the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, Selim took the fortress of Kemah on 19 May 1515 and, distrusting Ismail, had the envoys who brought the shah's peace letters imprisoned.²⁶

The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi credits the victory above all to Selim's generalship and to mobile guns that could be turned wherever they were needed. For other battles where guns met cavalry, see Mohács in 1526 and Nagashino in 1575.²⁷

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