The Battle of Chaldiran (Persian: جنگ چالدران; Turkish: Çaldıran Savaşı) took place on 23 August 1514 and ended with a decisive victory for the Ottoman Empire over the Safavid Empire. As a result, the Ottomans annexed Eastern Anatolia and Upper Mesopotamia from Safavid Iran.[3][4] It marked the first Ottoman expansion into Eastern Anatolia, and the halt of the Safavid expansion to the west.[18] The Battle of Chaldiran was just the beginning of 41 years of destructive war, which only ended in 1555 with the Peace of Amasya. Though the Safavids eventually reconquered Mesopotamia and Eastern Anatolia under the reign of Abbas the Great (r. 1588–1629), they would be permanently ceded to the Ottomans by the 1639 Treaty of Zuhab.
At Chaldiran, the Ottomans had a larger, better-equipped army numbering 60,000 to 100,000 and many heavy artillery pieces. In contrast, the Safavid army numbered 40,000 to 80,000 and did not have artillery. Ismail I, the leader of the Safavids, was wounded and almost captured during the battle. His wives were captured by the Ottoman leader Selim I,[19] with at least one married off to one of Selim's statesmen.[20] Ismail retired to his palace and withdrew from government administration[21] after this defeat and never again participated in a military campaign.[18] After their victory, Ottoman forces marched deeper into Persia, briefly occupying the Safavid capital, Tabriz, and thoroughly looting the Persian imperial treasury.[5][6]
The battle is one of major historical importance because it not only negated the idea that the murshid of the Qizilbash was infallible,[22] but also led Kurdish chiefs to assert their authority and switch their allegiance from the Safavids to the Ottomans.[23][24]
^Tucker, Spencer C., ed. (2010). A Global Chronology of Conflict: From the Ancient World to the Modern Middle East. ABC-CLIO. p. 483. ISBN978-1851096725.
^ abDavid Eggenberger, An Encyclopedia of Battles, (Dover Publications, 1985), 85.
^ abMatthee, Rudi (2008). "Safavid Dynasty". Encyclopaedia Iranica. Archived from the original on 24 May 2019. Retrieved 6 January 2019. Following Čālderān, the Ottomans briefly occupied Tabriz.
^Sebastian, Peter (1988). Turkish prosopography in the Diarii of Marino Sanuto, 1496–1517. University of London. p. 61.
^Keegan & Wheatcroft, Who's Who in Military History, Routledge, 1996. p. 268 "In 1515 Selim marched east with some 60,000 men; a proportion of these were skilled Janissaries, certainly the best infantry in Asia, and the sipahis, equally well-trained and disciplined cavalry. [...] The Persian army, under Shah Ismail, was almost entirely composed of Turcoman tribal levies, a courageous but ill-disciplined cavalry army. Slightly inferior in numbers to the Turks, their charges broke against the Janissaries, who had taken up fixed positions behind rudimentary field works."
^ abEncyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire, ed. Gábor Ágoston, Bruce Alan Masters, p. 286, 2009
^Ágoston, Gábor (2014). "Firearms and Military Adaptation: The Ottomans and the European Military Revolution, 1450–1800". Journal of World History. 25: 110. doi:10.1353/jwh.2014.0005. S2CID143042353.
^Roger M. Savory, Iran under the Safavids, Cambridge, 1980, p. 41
^Keegan & Wheatcroft, Who's Who in Military History, Routledge, 1996. p. 268
^ abKenneth Chase, Firearms: A Global History to 1700, 120.
^The Cambridge History of Iran, ed. William Bayne Fisher, Peter Jackson, Laurence Lockhart, 224;"The magnitude of the disaster may be judged from the fact that the royal harem with two of Ismai'il's wives fell into the hands of the enemy."
^Leslie P. Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire, (Oxford University Press, 1993), 37.
^Moojan Momen, An Introduction to Shiʻi Islam: The History and Doctrines of Twelver Shiʻism, (Yale University Press, 1985), 107.
^The Cambridge History of Iran, ed. William Bayne Fisher, Peter Jackson, Laurence Lockhart, 359.
^Martin Sicker, The Islamic World in Ascendancy: From the Arab conquests to the Siege of Vienna, (Praeger Publishers, 2000), 197.