by Alan Mikhail
Despite being pummeled by August’s scorching heat, Selim’s men covered the rocky terrain on the steady climb from Erzurum to Chaldiran in good time, leading pack mules and towing cannons. Morale rose and fell, with only the excitement of impending battle pushing them forward. A few days away from Chaldiran, the heavens intervened to bolster the men’s spirits. On the afternoon of August 20, a solar eclipse—always an auspicious harbinger—halted the Ottoman forces in their tracks.
Astronomers from around the Muslim world had flocked to Istanbul after its conquest in 1453, producing dozens of learned treatises on topics as varied as the earth’s rotation, the nature of time, the planetary system, and, indeed, eclipses. Some of this work anticipated and even influenced later theories by the likes of Nicolaus Copernicus and Tycho Brahe. Even if he had encountered some of these astronomers or their works in Istanbul, Selim, now far off in eastern Anatolia, did not concern himself with such celestial matters. He focused singularly on the worldly challenges before him, the looming war with his rivals of old. But Selim’s men basked in the ethereal light of this cosmic omen, inspired now to cover the remaining few days toward their goal.
THE FERTILE PLAINS OF Chaldiran must have seemed a mirage, after the trek through vast stretches of drab terrain, when the Ottoman army reached the valley on August 22. Having crossed the whole of Anatolia, Selim spotted his enemy’s forces only a few thousand meters away. Making his arrival imposingly obvious, he sent detachments to take up positions on the western edge of the valley floor, and he ordered others to move into the hills to the north and south. Selim had guessed, and now confirmed, that his forces far outnumbered those of the Safavids—he had more than a hundred thousand soldiers to Ismail’s roughly forty thousand. Perhaps most significantly, Selim had some twelve thousand musketeers and three hundred wheeled-cannon carriages, while the Safavids only had cavalrymen and foot soldiers. Given their strategic advantages, Selim and his commanders resolved to strike quickly, before the Safavids could muster reinforcements.
War began the next day, August 23. At sunrise, the men in the hills charged down to the valley floor. This, combined with the might of the Ottoman soldiers already on the plains, drove most of the Safavids up into the parched eastern hills. Now on the higher ground, Ismail’s troops fanned out to surround the Ottomans in the bowl beneath them. With Selim’s soldiers encircled and exposed, Ismail believed he had seized the upper hand. A signal from him would release his men to flow down and squeeze the Ottomans in a death vise. To loosen their inhibitions as they surged downhill, Ismail distributed wine to his soldiers just before the attack.
The Ottomans’ advantage in firearms proved the battle’s decisive factor. In a tight formation of their own inside the Safavids’ constricting ring, the Ottomans positioned their cannons facing outward, with musketeers behind them. As the Safavids’ slightly inebriated cavalrymen spurred their horses down onto the valley floor, with foot soldiers charging behind them, Ottoman gunners—following the cadence of the drummers beating out their war anthem—fired their cannons and muskets, easily picking off their enemies. From above, the scene would have looked like a stone dropping into water—ripples of bullets emanating out in concentric circles. Safavid bodies began piling up. As bursts of gunpowder puffed black smoke into the air, elements of the two sides’ cavalries collided elsewhere on the valley floor. Ismail himself hacked to death several Ottoman soldiers before sustaining a wound to his hand and eventually evacuating the battlefield. Even in this fighting on horseback, at some distance from the direct reach of cannon fire, the Ottomans maintained the advantage. Selim’s warhorses had been trained around gunfire, whereas the Safavid horses were easily startled by the blasts. “The Persian horses,” according to the secondhand report of a Venetian ambassador, “hearing the thunder of those infernal machines, scattered and divided themselves over the plain, not obeying their riders’ bit or spur any more, from the terror they were in. . . . [They] had never before heard such din.”
By that afternoon, the soil of Chaldiran gurgled with blood. Thousands of soldiers had died, along with many high-ranking generals, several of Ismail’s closest advisers, and a number of provincial governors who had joined the fight. Ismail led the ragged remnants of his army back to the east, but Selim did not immediately pursue them. Stung by his previous experience with the Safavids’ scorched-earth policies in eastern Anatolia, he feared the retreat might be a trap, so he held his victorious troops in Chaldiran for a few days. As they contemplated their next move, they solemnly buried their dead.
AFTER THEIR DEVASTATING DEFEAT, Ismail’s remaining forces fled all the way to the city of Qazvin, south of the Caspian Sea and the Alborz Mountains, where, as a boy, Ismail had plotted his triumphant return north. The mood in Qazvin was considerably more somber in 1514 than it had been in his youth. He made plans to regroup, dispatching letters across the world seeking alliances against the ascendant Ottomans. Spain, Hungary, Venice, the pope, and the Knights of St. John all ignored his entreaties. Only the Portuguese—who were establishing settlements around the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf and looking for allies against the Mamluks—responded, and then only rather meekly. They sent Ismail two small cannons and six arquebuses, barely enough for a hunting trip.
Meanwhile, in Chaldiran, Selim received two envoys from Tabriz. Presuming that the Ottoman sultan, with his overwhelming army, would next march on the Safavid capital, the city’s governors decided to betray their imperial overlords. Preemptively they professed their loyalty to the Ottoman Empire, promising Selim safe passage and even inviting him to enter and take the walled city. Selim remained cautious, in case the message was a ruse, but decided to send some of his advisers back to Tabriz with the envoys to investigate the matter. The leaders of Tabriz welcomed Selim’s men extravagantly, offering them control of the city’s markets, showing them the ramparts and stockpiles of armaments, and touring them around the palace they planned to prepare for Selim and his retinue. The envoys reported back that the proposition seemed genuine: Tabriz’s residents indeed wanted Selim to take their city.
Needless to say, occupying the Safavid capital would pitch the final shovel of dirt on that empire’s buried corpse, and so—though remaining vigilant—Selim advanced on Tabriz. He and his troops entered the surrendered city on September 5. As they quietly filed through the gates, residents peered from windows and doorways at the strangers crowding their streets, curious about their green and red uniforms, intimidated by their long guns. This influx of Ottoman soldiers more than doubled the city’s population.
As a mark of his sovereignty in place of Ismail’s, that week’s Friday sermon in mosques throughout Tabriz was delivered in Selim’s name. Selim instructed his advisers to send letters from Tabriz to the Crimean khan, the Mamluks, and the doge of Venice, informing them of his conquest of the Safavid capital. At the same time, Selim’s men secured the city and celebrated in its streets. After months of marching and stress, exhaustion and homesickness, the capture of Tabriz provided the Ottoman soldiers with an opportunity for an exuberant saturnalia. This city of great culture boasted a magnificent library of books from Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Middle East; dueling schools of poetry; a unique style of miniature painting reflecting Chinese influences that had come with the Mongols; and a cottage industry of fine luxury carpets. The majority of Selim’s men were much more interested in less high-minded endeavors, however, choosing to pursue equestrian sports, wrestling, polo, and archery, as well as gorging themselves on Tabriz’s famous carrot stew and kabobs and, of course, guzzling wine. As in most occupied cities, the soldiers also committed acts of sexual violence against Tabriz’s women and men.
Scenes of Tabriz
Selim dispatched some of the city’s riches and a group of its finest artisans, poets, and intellectuals back to Istanbul. As a sign of the breadth of his victory, he even transferred to Istanbul Ismail’s favorite wife, Tajli Khanum, who was said to be exquisitely beautiful. There, she was married to the
chief judge of the Ottoman army, Ja‘far Çelebi. Later, Ismail would send four of his most trusted men with lavish gifts and—in stark contrast to their previous correspondence—complimentary statements and offers of riches to try to retrieve his wife. Selim responded to the appeal by cutting off the noses of the four men and sending them back to Ismail damaged and bloodied, much like his empire.
It was already September, and northern Iran, the Caucasus, and Anatolia would soon turn frigid and snowy, making it nearly impossible for the Ottoman soldiers to trek back to Istanbul. So Selim decided to winter in Tabriz. More significantly, this would allow him to continue his fight against the Safavids in the next military season. Resting, reprovisioning, and strategizing that far east, Selim calculated, would allow the Ottomans to attack Qazvin the following spring, and from there attempt the invasion and subjugation of the whole of Iran. However, when word reached his troops that he planned to keep them in Tabriz through the winter in order to fight again in the spring, they nearly mutinied. In the previous nine months, they had marched more than a thousand miles from Istanbul, fording rivers and climbing mountain passes, carrying supplies and dragging heavy weapons through torrential rain and roasting heat—all with the looming imperative of remaining ever-ready for war. Physically battered and emotionally drained, they wanted only to return home. Selim thus had no choice but to retreat. After just eight days in Tabriz and with the change of seasons approaching, a disappointed Selim and his impatient soldiers packed up to begin their long march back to Istanbul.
In late 1514, Selim stood closer than ever before to his dream of extinguishing one of the Ottomans’ primary ideological and military foes. The repugnant Safavids had pestered him and his empire for years. From Tabriz, he believed, he could have destroyed them forever with one more concerted thrust into the heart of Iran. Abandoning the city now indefinitely deferred that ambition.
DESPITE THE FRUSTRATION OF his forced retreat from Tabriz, Selim’s defanging of the mangy Shiite dog—his favorite epithet—allowed the Ottomans to focus on other enemies and other interests. Most immediately, neutralization of the Safavids solidified the Ottomans’ authority on their eastern border as never before, especially in the rural areas between the cities of Bayburt, Erzincan, and Erzurum. By far the most important development, however, was the imposition of Ottoman sovereignty on the southern city of Diyarbakir—long a territorial ambition of Selim’s, as we have seen—which paved the way for later victories that would prove infinitely more significant and enduring than any gratification that could have come from moving farther east into a crumbling Iran.
Shah Ismail’s defeat at Chaldiran was, to him, an utterly devastating psychological blow. Never having lost on the battlefield, his ego and aura of invincibility had ballooned, as his letters to Selim amply suggested. In the fall of 1514, instead of trying to pick up his military and emotional pieces, the Safavid shah entered a period of mourning, wearing only black robes and a black turban. He ordered all his military standards dyed black as well. Despite the very real threat the Ottomans still posed to his west, and the encroachment of the Uzbeks and the emergent Mughals to his east, Ismail would never again lead his troops into battle. He allowed his state to slip into disarray as he took to the bottle and the comforts of the flesh. In the words of one of Ismail’s official chroniclers, “most of his time was spent in hunting, or in the company of rosy-cheeked youths, quaffing goblets of purple wine, and listening to the strains of music and song.” Word of Ismail’s sorry state soon spread far beyond his court. No doubt with considerable satisfaction, one of Selim’s chroniclers wrote that, after Chaldiran, Ismail was “always drunk to the point of losing his mind and totally neglectful of the affairs of the state.”
Ismail’s personal crisis soon became a political one. Before Chaldiran, the Safavid shah had led his men as a divinely endowed and protected spiritual teacher who directed each soldier on the battlefield and in the mosque. Selim’s thrashing of Ismail made faith in the shah impossible. No longer the invincible messenger of God, Ismail became instead a fallible human. As the Safavid military elite saw their leader defeated and drunk, they responded with skepticism and disrespect, followed ultimately by outright sedition. After Chaldiran, they realized that only a combined Safavid–Mamluk force could match the overwhelming military capabilities of the Ottomans, so they pressed Ismail to reach out to the Mamluks to attempt to establish such an alliance. The Mamluks were wary. Given Ismail’s parlous mental state, his own military’s loss of respect for him, and the Ottoman disruption of the Safavids’ southern military routes, the Mamluks were dubious that Ismail would, or even could, deliver on his pledges. Better to go it alone against the Ottomans, concluded the Mamluk military commanders, than to forge an alliance with a divided, unreliable Safavid state.
THE BATTLE OF CHALDIRAN and the resultant weakening of the Safavid Empire allowed a new power to rise in the Middle East. In March 1515, the Portuguese captured the strategic island of Hormuz, a tiny speck of land at the entrance to the Persian Gulf, just off the Iranian coast. They would hold it for another century, making it the earliest European possession in the Persian Gulf. From the days of Henry the Navigator and Columbus exploring the west coast of Africa and the islands of the eastern Atlantic to Vasco da Gama’s rounding of the Cape of Good Hope in 1497, the Portuguese had steadily been building a global maritime empire of coastal forts and fortifications. In the early decades of the sixteenth century, their major theater of war was the Indian Ocean. To add to their holdings in India, they captured Malacca on the Malay peninsula, on the ocean’s far side. They also notched important victories in Brazil, and Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada.
Portuguese ships had first appeared in the port of Hormuz in September 1507, and had been booted off the island a few months later by locals acting in concert with the Safavids. But the diversion of Safavid forces away from the coast after Chaldiran enabled the Portuguese to invade the island again, and this time they held it. The capture of Hormuz won the Portuguese control over the strait through which all shipping from Persian Gulf ports had to pass, as well as a key way-station on the sea-lanes to their colonies on the west coast of India.
The imperial powers of the Ottoman Empire, Spain, and Portugal had consistently butted heads in North Africa and the western Mediterranean. And it was, of course, the commercial blockade of the Ottomans and Mamluks that had forced the Portuguese and the Spanish to seek out novel ways to reach Asia. In the years after Chaldiran, as the Ottomans and the Catholic powers continued to clash in North Africa, and the battle between Christians and Muslims crossed the Atlantic, the Portuguese and the Ottomans would also intensify their struggle for global power on the other side of the world, in the Indian Ocean.
Portugal’s empire consisted almost entirely of isolated coastal holdings. While it had established colonies on the five continents of the New and Old Worlds, when taken together, the total amount of territory the Portuguese controlled was, in fact, quite small. The Ottoman Empire was the exact opposite—a contiguous terrestrial whole concentrated in one region. While the equation would change later, in the sixteenth century land equaled power. Selim held more of the earth’s surface than any European power and more than most of the globe’s other states. After Chaldiran, he would tip the global territorial balance even more in his favor.
CHAPTER
18
FRATERNAL EMPIRES
The chainmail of the Mamluk sultan Qaitbay
IN THE EARLY SIXTEENTH CENTURY, ALL THE WORLD’S MAJOR empires made religiously-tinged claims to universal sovereignty. The Safavids chose to tie their state to Shiism to distinguish themselves from other Muslim states, insisting that since this was God’s true religion, they were destined to take over the world and rule over Muslims everywhere. The Spanish and the Portuguese similarly projected their Catholicism into and onto the world, claiming they were the world’s divinely ordained religious rulers. Thus, they cleansed Iberia of all non-Christians and carried Christi
anity to the pagans in North America, the infidel Muslims in North and West Africa, and the uncouth unbelievers in India. A few decades later, in an act that might be compared to the Safavid embrace of Shiism, various European states would adopt Protestantism as their official creed, in part as a direct challenge to Catholic assertions of universality.
Unlike these powers, Selim could never claim to be the foremost defender of his religion on earth. The Mamluks, as guardians of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, stood in his way. Thus, to prove himself the world’s leading Sunni Muslim, to affirm that God had chosen him to cast his shadow over all of creation, and finally to fulfill the prophecy at his birth that he would hold all of the seven climes, Selim had to conquer the Mamluk Empire. Only then could he claim preeminence in the Muslim world and unleash his ambitions for Sunni Ottoman global domination. Above all, Selim wanted to become the caliph—a designation reserved only for the ruler of Mecca and Medina, and a title that no previous Ottoman sultan had been able to claim.
