Battle of Chaldiran
- Date
- 23 August 1514
- Category
- Military & conflict
- Region
- Eastern Anatolia / Iran
- Era
- Early Modern
- Significance
On 23 August 1514 the Ottoman Sultan Selim I crushed the Safavid army of Shah Ismail I at Chaldiran in northwestern Iran.
Selim's larger force was equipped with field artillery and janissaries armed with matchlock muskets, while Ismail's cavalry relied on traditional weapons and refused to adopt firearms. The Ottoman guns, chained together in a defensive line, decimated the charging Qizilbash horsemen. Two weeks later the Ottomans briefly occupied the Safavid capital, Tabriz, and annexed eastern Anatolia and parts of Upper Mesopotamia. The defeat shattered the myth of Ismail's invincibility and, by some accounts, his confidence, ending his active leadership. Chaldiran demonstrated the decisive power of gunpowder weapons in the age of the Islamic empires and fixed the broad Ottoman-Safavid frontier in eastern Anatolia for generations. It opened more than two centuries of intermittent warfare between the Sunni Ottomans and Shia Safavids, a rivalry that helped harden the sectarian boundary running through the Middle East.
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Empires active in 23 August 1514
- Ming Dynasty1368 CE – 1644 CE
- Songhai Empire1464 CE – 1591 CE
- Inca Empire1438 CE – 1533 CE
- Aztec Empire1428 CE – 1521 CE
- Ottoman Empire1299 CE – 1922 CE
- Solomonic dynasty1270 CE – 1974 CE
Related military & conflict events
- Defenestration of Prague and the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War23 May 1618
- Portuguese capture of MalaccaAugust 1511
- Fall of Tenochtitlan and conquest of the Aztec Empire13 August 1521
- Fall of Beijing and the Ming–Qing transition1644
- Battle of Mohács and the Ottoman conquest of Hungary29 August 1526
- First Battle of Panipat and the founding of the Mughal Empire21 April 1526
Further reading
The wider story
Osman's Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire
The standard readable single-volume Ottoman history.
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