On 23 August 1514 the army of the Ottoman sultan Selim I met the army of the Safavid shah Ismail I on the plain of Chaldiran, on the Ottoman road to Tabriz. Selim had cannon chained together and janissaries with firearms posted behind a barrier of carts. The Safavid horsemen broke one Ottoman wing, but artillery and musket fire threw them back. The Turkish encyclopedia and Creasy have Ismail wounded and saved from capture only when a companion cried out that he was the shah; two Italian narratives say he was not there. Selim took the Safavid camp and Tabriz, but his troops would not winter in Persia. Diyarbakır and the Kurdish lands passed under Ottoman rule.
Battle of Chaldiran, 1514: the gunpowder clash that split the Middle East
23 August 1514 · 512 years ago
The Ottoman Empire won a decisive victory at Chaldiran in 1514, when its cannon and musket-armed janissaries crushed the Safavid Persian cavalry in what is now north-western Iran.
Read the full story of Battle of Chaldiran, 1514: the gunpowder clash that split the Middle East ›Battle of Kraśnik, 1914: Austria-Hungary's first victory
23 August 1914 · 112 years ago
Near Kraśnik, on the border between Austrian Galicia and Russian Poland, the Austro-Hungarian 1st Army under Viktor Dankl fought the Russian 4th Army early in World War I. Austria-Hungary won, its first victory of the war, and Dankl was briefly hailed as a national hero.
Read the full story of Battle of Kraśnik, 1914: Austria-Hungary's first victory ›The Battle of Stalingrad, 1942-1943: the tide turns
23 August 1942 to 2 February 1943 · 84 years ago
The Soviet Union won the Battle of Stalingrad, which ended in February 1943. The German 6th Army was encircled by Operation Uranus and destroyed, with about 91,000 survivors taken prisoner.
Read the full story of The Battle of Stalingrad, 1942-1943: the tide turns ›Also on this day
1914: the British Expeditionary Force fought the Battle of Mons on the canal line through Mons in Belgium. Its commander, Sir John French, reported that at about 3 p.m. on that Sunday "reports began coming in to the effect that the enemy was commencing an attack on the Mons line". The British official history puts British casualties at just over 1,600 killed, wounded and missing and says the action delayed the German advance by a whole day.1
