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The Battle of Chaldiran: How the Safavids Lost the Gunpowder Race
In 1514, the young Safavid Shah Ismail I, founder of Persia's greatest empire since the Sassanians, suffered a devastating defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Sultan Selim I at Chaldiran. That battle changed everything. It shattered Ismail's aura of invincibility as the murshid-e-kamil, the perfect spiritual guide of the Qizilbash. It handed the Ottomans control of eastern Anatolia and the Kurdish borderlands for centuries. And it forced the Safavids to confront a hard truth about modern warfare: the Qizilbash cavalry, no matter how fanatically loyal, could not stand up to massed artillery. In…
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