Battle of Chalidran

The Battle of Chaldiran or Chaldoran occurred on 23 August 1514 and ended with a victory for the Ottoman Empire over the Safavid Empire. As a result, the Ottomans gained immediate and permanent control over far eastern Anatolia and northern Iraq, as well as temporary control of northwestern Iran. The battle, however, was just the beginning of 41 years of destructive war and merely one of the many phases of Ottoman-Persian Wars, that only ended in 1555 with the Treaty of Amasya. The Ottomans generally had the upper hand, but the Persians for the most part held their ground. Safavid losses in Shia-dominated metropolitan regions of Persia, such as Luristan and Kermanshah, proved temporary, being eventually recovered from the Ottomans, but important Persian cities such as Tabriz were often the target of destructive Ottoman raids. An exception was Azerbaijan, which- though eventually taken back from the Ottomans, would centuries later be permanently lost to the Russian Empire in the 19th century.

Islamic Empire