Chaldiran and the Making of a Confessional Border

The war Selim fought against Shah Ismail in 1514 was unlike the ordinary competition between Muslim dynasties, because the Safavid movement made claims about its leader that his followers took in a religious sense, and because the Qizilbash who followed him were spread through Anatolia, inside Ottoman territory, and looked south east for their loyalty. The campaign therefore needed a justification for making war on Muslims, and it was supplied by scholars whose opinions declared the enemy outside the community. The battle at Chaldiran was won by Ottoman artillery and firearms against cavalry, and it stopped the Safavid advance westward for good.

The consequence was a boundary that was doctrinal as much as territorial. Before the sixteenth century the distinction between Sunni and Shia had not generally been a matter of which state a person lived in. Afterwards it increasingly was, as one empire consolidated a Twelver Shia establishment and the other a Sunni one, each defining itself partly against the other, and populations were displaced or repositioned accordingly. That border between the two, drawn through eastern Anatolia and Mesopotamia by a series of wars beginning here, has proved one of the most durable religious frontiers anywhere.