The Battle of Chaldiran (1514)

The Battle of Chaldiran was fought on 23 August 1514 on a plain in north-western Iran, south of Maku, between the Ottoman sultan Selim I and Shah Ismail I. Ottoman cannon and musket-armed Janissaries crushed the Safavid cavalry, Selim briefly occupied Tabriz, and the Safavids lost eastern Anatolia for good. The defeat also ended the belief of Ismail’s followers that he could not be beaten.

Why Selim marched east

The conflict began in Anatolia, not Iran. Many of Shah Ismail‘s most devoted followers were Turkmen tribes living under Ottoman rule, and Safavid preachers kept winning converts there. In 1511 a pro-Safavid rising led by a holy man called Shahkulu swept across western Anatolia and killed an Ottoman grand vizier before it was crushed. When Selim seized the throne from his father Bayezid II in 1512, he treated the Qizilbash as a danger inside his own borders. Ottoman scholars issued legal opinions calling the Safavids heretics, and Ottoman chroniclers claim some 40,000 suspected Safavid sympathisers in Anatolia were killed or imprisoned. Historians regard that number as a conventional figure rather than a count, but the persecution was real.

Insults then passed between the two rulers. Selim’s letters, preserved in Ottoman collections, called Ismail a usurper and a heretic. A well-known story says Ismail answered with a box of opium, suggesting that the sultan’s secretaries must have written while drugged. In the spring of 1514 Selim set out from Istanbul with a large army.

A hard march across Anatolia

The Safavids did not defend the frontier. Instead they burned crops and emptied villages along the route, hoping hunger and distance would stop the Ottomans. It almost worked. By late summer the Janissaries were grumbling openly about the march. Selim pressed on, and Ismail, whose authority rested on never refusing a fight, came out to meet him on the open plain of Chaldiran.

The battle on 23 August

The two armies were built for different kinds of war. Selim drew up his infantry and guns behind a line of carts chained together, a field fortress the Ottomans had learned to use in the Balkans, with cavalry on the wings. Ismail had no artillery at all. His army was Qizilbash horsemen, brave and fast, who expected to win by shock and by faith in their leader.

Some chroniclers say Ismail’s commanders urged him to attack before the Ottoman guns were in position and that he refused. Whatever the truth of that story, the Safavid charge came against a prepared army. On one wing Ismail himself broke into the Ottoman cavalry and drove it back. On the other, the Qizilbash under Mohammad Khan Ustajlu rode into the guns and musket fire and were shattered; Mohammad Khan was killed. Ismail was wounded and his army withdrew from the field. Among the dead were several of the leading men of the state, including the sadr, Sayyed Sharif al-Din Ali Shirazi, and the shah’s deputy, Abd al-Baqi Yazdi.

How many fought and died

The numbers are uncertain. Ottoman and Safavid accounts each had reasons to inflate the enemy and shrink their own side. Modern estimates usually put the Ottoman army at about 60,000 or more and the Safavids at around 40,000, with some writers giving much higher figures for both. Casualty figures range so widely, from a few thousand to tens of thousands, that they are best treated as unknown. What is not in doubt is that firepower decided the day.

Selim in Tabriz

Selim marched to the Safavid capital and entered Tabriz in early September 1514. The Friday sermon was read in his name. Members of Ismail’s harem had been captured after the battle, and the sultan refused Safavid envoys who came to ransom them. He took craftsmen, artists and treasure from Tabriz back to Istanbul. Then, after only about a week, he left. The Janissaries refused to spend the winter on the Iranian plateau, and Selim could not hold the city.

What Chaldiran changed

• The frontier. In 1515–1516 the Ottomans took the Dhu’l-Qadr principality and Diyarbakir, helped by Kurdish chiefs who switched to their side. Eastern Anatolia was lost to Iran permanently.
• The Middle East. Free of danger from the east, Selim turned south and conquered the Mamluk sultanate, Syria and Egypt, in 1516–1517.
• Ismail himself. He never again led an army in person. For the Qizilbash, who had believed him close to divine, the defeat was a deep shock.
• Safavid warfare. Under Tahmasp I the Safavids began to use firearms and cannon, and they learned to avoid pitched battles with the Ottomans, relying on scorched earth instead.
• A long war. Ottoman–Safavid fighting continued on and off until the Peace of Amasya in 1555, and the border was not fixed until the Treaty of Zuhab in 1639.

Remembering the battle

A defeat might have been forgotten, but Chaldiran became part of Iranian memory. A century and a half later, a large wall painting of the battle was placed in the Chehel Sotoun palace in Isfahan, showing Ismail in single combat with an Ottoman champion. It turns the defeat into a scene of heroism, which is itself revealing about how the Safavids wanted to remember their founder. The painting is discussed on the page about Chehel Sotoun and its war paintings.