Safavid Army

The army of Safavid Iran, founded with the dynasty itself in 1501, rested initially on the Qizilbash, Turkoman tribal warriors who served both as fighters and as religious followers of the Safavid founder Haydar, giving the dynasty its military and political base but also creating chronic tribal rivalries that contributed to Shah Ismail I's defeat by the Ottomans at the Battle of Chaldiran in 1514. To break the Qizilbash's hold on military power, Shah Abbas I introduced sweeping ghulam reforms, incorporating slave soldiers, many of them Christian Circassian and Georgian captives first acquired during Shah Tahmasp's earlier Caucasus campaigns, into a new force loyal directly to the crown and free of the tribal and clan loyalties that had constrained earlier Safavid rule. This reformed army allowed Abbas I to reconquer, by 1602, territories the Safavids had lost to the Ottomans after Chaldiran, continuing a long-running rivalry that included the Ottoman-Safavid War of 1532 to 1555, concluded by the Peace of Amasya, and further campaigns over the following century. The Ottoman-Safavid conflict, driven by both territorial ambition and the sectarian divide between Sunni Ottoman and Shia Safavid Islam, persisted in various phases for more than three hundred years and repeatedly tested the Safavid military's capacity to hold Iran's western frontier.