Safavid Army
Authors: Streusand Douglas E. 
Published: March 2019

Ruling from 1501 through 1722, the Safavid dynasty unified the eastern and western halves of the Iranian plateau and imposed Twelver Shiʿism on the population. The interpretation of the Safavid Empire as a revival of an Iranian imperial tradition dating back to the Achaemenids is not credible, but the dynasty did create the framework in which modern Iran developed. By creating a large Shiʿi polity and politicizing the Sunni-Shiʿi split, the Safavids established an essential part of the framework of the modern Middle East. Safavid military history had three phases. From the beginning of the polity in 1501 until the Ottoman Sultan Selim (r. 1512–1520) defeated the founder of the Safavid polity, Shah Ismaʿil I (r. 1501–1524) at Chaldiran in 1514, the Safavid army was a tribal army. The Turkmen tribes (uymaq) that followed the Safavid rulers were known as the Qizilbash (red heads) after their distinctive red head gear. The Safavid Empire differed little from the earlier tribal Turkic and Mongol tribal confederations that had dominated much of the Middle East since the 11th century. In the second phase, from 1514 through the reign of Shah ʿAbbas I (r. 1588–1629) the Safavid military system evolved from an army of tribal cavalry to a composite force with cavalry recruited through several different mechanisms, and artillery and infantry components. The transformation gave the Safavids an army capable of defeating the Uzbeks and Mughals and, under conditions of advantage, the Ottomans. From the death of ʿAbbas I until the collapse of the empire in 1722, the third phase, the military organization did not change, but lost vitality and capacity. In 1648, the Safavids could project enough power to take Qandahar from the Mughals; in 1722, they could not defend their own capital from an Afghan army without siege equipment. The military transformation during the second phase paralleled and depended upon a transformation from a decentralized polity in which the Qizilbash dominated the provinces to a more centralized regime that depended primarily on silk exports. The Ghilzai Afghans, who ruled what had been the Safavid Empire from 1722 through 1729, and Nadir Shah Afshar, who ruled from 1729 to 1747, took over the Safavid governmental institutions. Some historians regard Nadir Shah as one of the great commanders of history. This bibliography includes generally accessible works in English, French, and German, on the assumption that its users will be mostly Western military historians, not scholars of Iranian history. It does not, therefore, include primary sources, either in Persian or in other languages. Most of the works listed, especially the Encyclopaedia Iranica articles, contain excellent bibliographic information. The citations themselves reproduce the transliteration in the works cited. Otherwise, this bibliography employs a simplified version of the transliteration system employed in the International Journal of Middle East Studies without diacritical marks except the reverse apostrophe for the letter ع (ayn, pronounced as a glottal stop in Persian). Because there is no standard method of transliterating languages written in the Arabic script into the Latin script, readers must expect some variations.