The Ottoman Empire won a decisive victory at Chaldiran in 1514, when its cannon and musket-armed janissaries crushed the Safavid Persian cavalry in what is now north-western Iran. The battle checked Safavid expansion and hardened a frontier between the two empires, and between Sunni and Shia Islam, that endures in outline today.
In 1514, on the plain of Chaldiran in what is now north-western Iran, the Ottoman Empire and the young Safavid empire of Persia fought a battle that helped shape the Middle East for centuries. Ottoman cannon and musket-armed janissaries crushed the Safavid cavalry, checked the spread of Safavid power, and hardened a frontier between two great empires, and between Sunni and Shia Islam, that endures in outline today.
Two rising empires
The Ottomans, masters of the eastern Mediterranean, faced a dangerous new rival in the east: Shah Ismail I, whose Safavid movement had swept across Persia and won fervent followers even inside Ottoman lands1. The Ottoman sultan Selim I, determined to end the threat, marched a large army deep into Safavid territory to force a decisive battle.
Cannon against cavalry
The battle was a contest between two military systems. The Safavids relied on the elan of their heavy cavalry2, the Qizilbash, who trusted in the courage of the horseman. The Ottomans brought the new firepower of the age: ranks of janissary infantry with muskets2 and a line of cannon chained together. Ismail's cavalry charged with reckless bravery straight into that firepower.
The firepower decides
The Qizilbash charges shattered against the Ottoman guns and massed musketry. Despite their courage the Safavid horsemen could not break the fortified Ottoman line, and their army was broken with heavy loss. Shah Ismail himself was wounded and barely escaped3, and the Ottomans went on to occupy his capital, Tabriz1, though Selim soon withdrew.
A frontier for centuries
Chaldiran halted Safavid expansion westward1 and won the Ottomans eastern Anatolia, opening a long struggle over a frontier that later treaties fixed roughly along today's Turkey-Iran border. It also hardened the divide between the Sunni Ottomans and the Shia Safavids, a religious and political fault line whose consequences still echo in the region.
Selim turns south
With the Safavids checked in the east, Selim I turned on the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt and Syria, which had been uneasy about the Ottoman advance. At Marj Dabiq in 1516 and Ridaniya, outside Cairo, in 15174 his army, again using cannon and musketry, destroyed the Mamluks. The Ottomans took Syria, Egypt and control of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, one of the largest expansions in Ottoman history. Chaldiran was the first step in the campaigns that made the Ottoman Empire the dominant power of the Islamic world.