Battle of Chaldiran
Selim I destroyed the Safavid army at Chaldiran on 23 August 1514, and the border he fixed is roughly the border between Turkey and Iran today. Shah Ismail had founded the Safavid state in 1501 and had made Twelver Shia Islam its official religion, converting a largely Sunni population by force. His following included the Qizilbash — Turkoman tribesmen from eastern Anatolia who regarded him as divine — and his propaganda was reaching Ottoman subjects, which is what made him intolerable to Selim rather than merely inconvenient. Selim executed or deported a large number of Anatolian Shia before marching. The battle was decided by technology. The Ottomans had matchlock janissaries and field artillery chained together in a line to break a cavalry charge; the Safavids had superb cavalry and neither guns nor an answer to them. Ismail's men charged the flanks and were shot down. He was wounded, and his wife was captured. Selim took Tabriz and could not hold it, because his janissaries refused to winter so far from home. The consequences ran deeper than the ground taken. Ismail never went to war again and reportedly never smiled after it, and the mystical claim to divinity that had held the Qizilbash together was broken. The Safavids adopted gunpowder in their turn. The Sunni-Shia division between the two empires hardened into a state boundary, and two centuries of intermittent war followed along it. Selim then turned south and took Egypt and Syria in two years. Iran has been a Shia state ever since, and the frontier drawn at Chaldiran has moved very little.
- Year: 1514 CE
- Category: Military
