Safavid Armies: Soldiers, Command and Supply

From Shah Ismail I’s rise in 1501 to the end of Safavid kingship in 1736, the shah, a Persian title for king, ruled a state centered in present-day Iran. Its army drew on tribal cavalry, royal guards, ghulams, musketeers and artillery. Ghulams were royal-service soldiers recruited from Christian communities in the Caucasus, between the Black and Caspian seas, including people captured in military campaigns and converted to Islam. Army organization reflected the wider political and social setting of Safavid Iran, where tribal command, royal offices and provincial revenues shaped government. Campaigns also depended on local supplies of animals, lodging, food and gunpowder.

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Qizilbash cavalry and command

The Qizilbash, a confederation of chiefly Turkmen tribal forces, provided the military core of the early Safavid state. In 1500, about 7,000 followers, mainly Turkmen from Anatolia, in present-day Turkey, and Syria, joined Ismail near Erzincan in eastern Turkey. After the state expanded from 1501, the principal battalions remained tribal cavalry armed with sabers, lances, bows and arrows. Tribal chiefs commanded their own followings and held leading military and provincial offices.

Campaign formation reflected that political structure. The shah and his non-tribal retinue occupied the center, while tribal contingents had assigned places on the left and right wings. As Safavid rulers conquered provinces, some tribal leaders received a city or region to govern and draw revenue from. These amirs, or provincial military commanders, recruited and maintained forces through the territory under their authority. Command, troop recruitment and provincial revenue therefore ran through the same military households.

The qurchis were the shah’s personal guard, a distinct corps recruited from the leading Qizilbash tribes. A qurchi-bashi commanded the whole force, and each tribal group had a yuz-bashi, or centurion. The qurchis received pay directly from the royal treasury. Historian Masashi Haneda estimates the corps at about 3,000 under Ismail and 5,000 under Tahmasp I, who ruled from 1524 to 1576; under Abbas I it at least doubled, with European accounts giving 10,000 to 15,000. These are estimates for the guard, not totals for the whole army.

Firearms and cavalry on the field

Safavid commanders knew firearms before the defeats and reforms associated with Abbas I. Ismail showed interest in purchasing guns by 1502, but at Chaldiran in 1514 his army did not deploy firearms. Ottoman matchlockmen, who fired a gun by igniting its powder with a burning cord, stood behind a defensive barricade of linked carts. When Qizilbash cavalry pushed forward, Ottoman troops could withdraw behind that barrier and fire from cover. Historian Gábor Ágoston also identifies Ottoman numerical superiority and Safavid tactical errors as factors in the defeat.

Ismail responded by appointing his wakil, or chief representative, Sultan-Hosayn to form a corps of musketeers. Portuguese envoys saw forty musketeers carrying metal guns at Kashan in central Iran in 1515–16. A 1530 review of Tahmasp’s army lists several types of artillery and 3,000 to 4,000 arquebusiers, or early hand-gunners, alongside a much larger tribal contingent. Its headline total of 105,800 included religious scholars and civilian officials and is judged exaggerated by Haneda. The review records a cavalry-led army with firearm units serving alongside the tribal contingents.

At the Battle of Jam in Khorasan, the historical region of northeastern Iran, on 24 September 1528, Tahmasp used cannon, matchlockmen and linked carts against Uzbek forces. The carts formed a barrier behind which gunners could fire as the shah’s cavalry fought on the wings. One eyewitness counted 700 carts, each carrying four small zarbzan field guns. Babur, the founder of the Mughal dynasty in northern India, later reported 2,000 carts and 6,000 infantry gunners. In Babur’s account, after the Safavid wings broke and cavalry fled, Tahmasp stayed inside the cart enclosure. The gunners opened the chains joining the carts and attacked Uzbek troops pursuing the cavalry, surprising them.

Abbas I’s royal corps and regional command

Shah Abbas I, who ruled from 1587 to 1629, strengthened forces that answered more directly to the crown. The reforms had two purposes: to reduce the political weight of Qizilbash commanders and to give the state troops equipped to face Ottoman firearms and artillery. Abbas reinforced the qurchis and built a more systematic ghulam corps from Armenian, Georgian and Circassian recruits. Many ghulams served as royal cavalry.

The shah also organized musketeers, called tufangchis, and artillerymen, called tupchis. Tufangchi units were named for the regions from which they were recruited, such as Isfahan or Mazandaran, and a min-bashi, or commander of a thousand, headed each group. Haneda notes that qurchis and ghulams continued to use traditional weapons while musketeers and artillery supplied distinct firearm capabilities.

Revenue, wages and movement

In the sixteenth century the Safavid administration distinguished mamalek, or state provinces governed through the military aristocracy, from khassa, the shah’s crown lands. A Qizilbash amir might receive a province as a tiyul, a time-limited claim on its revenues. In return, governors collected taxes, maintained order, recruited troops and supported their contingents. Much of the revenue stayed in the province, leaving the shah with a smaller share.

From about 1590, Abbas expanded the khassa at the expense of indirectly administered state lands. Taxes from crown provinces went to the royal treasury to finance the standing army and crown administration, though revenue assignments to military officers continued. The government chancery, its central offices for written administration, assessed provincial income, authorized salaries and grants, paid troops and kept muster rolls, registers listing soldiers for service and pay. This combination of direct treasury payments and provincial revenue claims underpinned the changing army. The related system of revenue assignments connected military service to the land and its taxes.

Army movement also drew on local resources. Safavid fiscal accounts list riding animals, lodging and provisions for traveling troops and officials among the services required from communities. Labor and transport could be demanded as well. During the Ottoman invasion of 1534, Tahmasp’s scorched-earth policy denied Ottoman Sultan Süleyman I’s army pasture and provisions. Combined with severe early cold, it forced the invading troops to withdraw. These obligations made villages and provincial officers part of campaign supply, alongside the money and weapons controlled by the shah’s government.

Sieges and the Kandahar campaign

Heavy artillery did not move easily across Iran’s rough terrain, and the country’s lack of navigable rivers made long-distance transport difficult. Safavid forces therefore used cannon most often in siege operations, and sometimes cast guns near the place they intended to attack. During the 1585 siege of Tabriz, in northwestern Iran, Persian cannon casters struggled to get a mold right.

A Persian technical manuscript by the qurchi Solayman describes casting a hollow cannon barrel. Workers shaped a clay outer mold around a wooden pattern, then burned away the pattern and placed a clay core built on a spindle in the center. Molten metal filled the gap between mold and core; removing the spindle left the bore.

In the Erzurum campaign in eastern Turkey in 1610, it took forty days to cast three large cannon and a fourth heavy piece.

The recovery of Kandahar, in present-day Afghanistan, shows how an expedition joined finance, supplies and siege equipment. Before Shah Abbas II’s army moved east in 1648, the government secured wheat, lead and gunpowder in the eastern provinces, transported them toward Kandahar and paid some of the army’s back wages. The force traveled by way of Mashhad in northeastern Iran, Herat in western Afghanistan and Bost in southern Afghanistan, then took Kandahar after a brief siege in February 1649. Dutch observers credited Iranian artillery, assisted by European experts, while accounts also describe Mughal command divided by factional conflict. Safavid forces suffered heavy losses, and reports say that as many as 6,000 Qizilbash soldiers defected amid poor pay and accommodation.

By the late seventeenth century, the costs of court and army strained the tax base, and Qizilbash leaders became increasingly alienated from the ruling house. Afghan forces entered Isfahan in 1722 after a six-month siege. Safavid kingship formally ended in 1736, when Nader Shah took the throne.