Chaldiran, Battle of

The Battle of Chaldiran or Chaldoran occurs on August 23, 1514, and ends with a decisive victory for the Ottoman Empire over the Safavid Empire.

As a result, the Ottomans annex eastern Anatolia and northern Iraq for the first time from Safavid Iran.Despite brief Iranian reconquests over the course of the centuries by the Safavids as well as by successive Iranian states, the Ottomans will manage by the next bout of hostilities, the 1532-1555 war, to fully conquer most the same territories annexed in the Chaldiran battle.

By the Chaldiran victory, the Ottomans also gain temporary control of northwestern Iran.

The battle, however, is only the beginning of forty-one years of destructive war and merely one of the many phases of the Ottoman-Persian Wars, which will only end in 1555 with the Treaty of Amasya.

Safavid losses in Shia-dominated metropolitan regions of Persia, such as Luristan and Kermanshah, prove temporary, being quickly recovered from the Ottomans, but important Persian cities such as Tabriz wil often be the target of destructive Ottoman raids.

An exception is Mesopotamia and Eastern Anatolia (Western Armenia) which although eventually taken back, will be permanently lost to the Ottomans by the 1639 Treaty of Zuhab.At Chaldiran, the Ottomans have a larger, better equipped army numbering sixty thousand to two hundred thousand, while the Qizilbash Turkmens number some forty thousand to eighty thousand.

Shah Ismail I, who is wounded and almost captured in the battle, retires to his palace and withdraws from government administration after his wives are captured by Selim I, with at least one married off to one of Selim's statesmen.

The battle is one of major historical importance because it not only negates the idea that the Murshid of the Shia-Qizilbash is infallible, but it also fully defines the Ottoman-Safavid borders for a short time with the Ottomans gaining northwestern Iran, and leads Kurdish chiefs to assert their authority and switch their allegiance from the Safavids to the Ottomans.

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