The Battle of Chaldiran

In Rajab 920 AH (August 1514 CE) the Ottoman sultan Selim I met the Safavid shah Ismail I on the plain of Chaldiran in eastern Anatolia, in the first great battle between the two empires that would dominate the Muslim east and west of the Iranian world for the next two centuries. The Safavids had risen swiftly in Iran under Shah Ismail, who made a militant Twelver Shi'ism the creed of his new state and whose appeal, carried by his qizilbash followers, was spreading among the Turkmen of Anatolia and threatening the Ottoman east. Selim marched against him to check that threat. The two armies met on the high frontier plain, and the battle turned on a decisive difference in the way they fought: the Ottomans had embraced gunpowder, fielding rows of cannon chained together as a barrier and ranks of Janissary infantry armed with matchlock muskets, while the Safavid strength lay in the headlong charge of their cavalry. The qizilbash horsemen flung themselves bravely against the Ottoman line, but the artillery and the firearms broke the charge, and the day ended in a heavy Ottoman victory. Selim entered the Safavid capital of Tabriz, though he could not hold it, and the battle checked the westward advance of Safavid power and its creed and fixed, in broad terms, the long frontier between the Sunni Ottoman and Shi'i Safavid worlds that would endure through many later wars. This scene depicts the field rather than the slaughter: the high eastern Anatolian plain under a haze over a distant lake, the Ottoman line of cannon and musketeers, and the red-capped Safavid cavalry charging against it, the opening of a rivalry between two Muslim empires. The framing is sober and careful: a war between Muslims of different creeds, told without polemic beyond what the history records.