The Ottoman–Safavid War of 1578–1590 was one of the many wars between the neighboring arch-rivals of the Safavid Empire and the Ottoman Empire.
Starting several years prior to the war and up to and including most of the war itself, the Safavids were experiencing significant domestic issues and rivalling noble factions within the court since the death of Shah Tahmasp I. The Ottomans decided to declare war in 1577–1578 to exploit the chaos. The war, despite swift Ottoman victories in the first few years and extensive support from the Ottoman vassal Crimean Khanate during several stages of the war, eventually became geo-politically and military relatively stable for several years with both parties losing and winning smaller battles till around 1580. It eventually had a turning point following the Battle of Torches on 7–11 May 1583 and the assassination of the Safavid generals Mirza Salman Jaberi and Hamza Mirza. Following these turns of events and internal chaos in the Safavid state, the Ottomans headed towards the eventual victory in 1590.
Prelude
At the Sublime Porte, Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha was constantly urging against another war, but was overridden by the Sultan. The sultan however, pushed by the pro-war activists, decided to start the attack. Following Shah Tahmasp I's death, the central government in Qazvin had not been stable yet. The sultan saw it as a unique opportunity to conquer once again the territories that had been conquered by Suleiman the Magnificent over Safavid Iran decades earlier, but was not able to hold them for long. The sentiment for war was once again fueled by the fact that the Uzbeks had made an appeal to the Ottomans to make a combined attack from two fronts, as well as the Ottoman clergy that pushed the sultan to step up as the rightful defender of the Sunnis in the Safavid Empire. The latter pleaded that the sultan should seize the opportunity of Safavid weakness in order to bring a complete end to Shiism in Persia and its territories. When the Uzbeks started to attack the Safavids' far eastern territories comprising Khorasan, the Ottomans started the attack, effectively starting the war.
War
Georgia and Shirvan (1578)
The Ottomans started the war, with the objective of conquering Azerbaijan and the Caucasus. They invaded the Safavids' Caucasian territories through Ardahan, taking Akhaltsikhe in August 1576, Tiflis in August 1578, while pressing Kartli to become a tributary vassal of the Ottoman Empire.
The Safavids, who were left unable to conduct effective campaigns on both the eastern and western fronts, were met with repeated setbacks that forced them back into Iran's heartlands. The seizure of much of the Caucasus had now given the Ottomans a direct land route from the east with their allied Crimean Khanate.
Shirvan fell before the end of the summer of 1578. The Ottomans had now control of almost all territories west of the Caspian Sea coast, and this also opened the way for an attack on what is nowadays the core of Armenia and Azerbaijan, which were subsequently attacked in 1579 by a large contingent of Crimean Tatars, led by Adil Giray, who was captured in a remarkable counterattack led by Mirza Salman Jaberi and Hamza Mirza, and later executed in Qazvin, the Safavid capital at that time. In the meanwhile, on the far eastern Safavid front, the Uzbeks were forced to retreat due to problems with the Kirghiz-Kazakh tribes of Central Asia. As a result of this, the Georgian princes who had fallen under Ottoman rule several years before now changed their allegiance back to Safavid Iran, which they demonstrated by killing large numbers of Sunnis.
On the Black Sea, the Ottomans under Admiral Ali Pasha captured and reinforced the Georgian fortress of Farş.
Ottoman retreat in 1581
In the spring of 1581 a combined Ottoman-Crimean Tatar force, led by Gazi Giray and Dal Mehmed Çelebi, was decisively defeated by the Safavids, which forced the Ottomans of Osman Pasha to just leave a garrison at Baku and retreat to Derbent. The Safavid forces under Piri Muhammed Beg and İmam Kulu Khan, harassed the retreating troops along the Caspian shore to the ramparts of Derbent. A diversionary action was established by the Ottomans, led by Gazi Giray, who made a foray to area between Shabaran and Shamakhi. Following the betrayal of the troops of Abu Bakr Mirza, the son of the former Shirvanshah Sultan Burhan Ali, Gazi Giray was captured in the confusion and sent in captivity to the castle of Alamut where he remained for the next four years.
Nevertheless, the war headed for an Ottoman victory, which was becoming clearer and clearer following the Battle of Torches in 1583. With that victory, the Ottomans had consolidated control as far as the Caspian, including the Safavid possessions of Dagestan and Azerbaijan until the end of the war.
During the campaign in Shirvan the Ottomans tended to work together with the Sunni population of Shirvan and Dagestan. Lezgin tribal fighters actively aided the Ottomans in clearing Safavid garrisons from the area. This joint effort allowed the Ottomans to temporarily establish the short-lived Eyalet of Shirvan and Dagestan.
Crimean campaign (1584)
In 1583, the Crimean Khan Mehmed II Giray refused to send more troops to the Ottoman Empire for the campaigns of the Ottoman–Safavid War, depriving Osman Pasha of support against the Safavids in the region of Shirvan. This started the Crimean campaign (1584), in which the Ottomans led two military operations, one under Osman Pasha and the other under Kılıç Ali Pasha, to punish the rebellious Crimean Khan and to reestablish dominance in the Crimean Khanate. They reestablished control of the peninsula and enthroned a new Khan favorable to the Ottomans, Islam II Giray.
The reverses that the Safavids suffered on the battlefield also intensified several internal factional power struggles, in which Mirza Salman and Hamza Mirza were assassinated by assassins of the other faction within the court, with Hamza Mirza, son of Mohammad Khodabanda, being assassinated on 10 December 1587. With their deaths, the war efforts of the Safavids deteriorated even more.
Fall of Tabriz in 1585
In 1585, an Ottoman force under Osman Pasha had managed to capture Tabriz, which would remain under Ottoman rule for the next two decades. They also took the city of Kars the same year. In 1587, Ottoman forces under the Governor of Baghdad, Cığalazade Yusuf Sinan Pasha, managed to take Luristan and Hamadan. That same year, the Uzbeks had concluded their own problems back in Central Asia, and had started to attack the Safavids' eastern provinces once again. It appeared that the very existence of the Safavid state was now in question. In 1588, the Ottoman commander Farhād Pasha advanced into Karabakh through Georgia. Many of the Turkic Qizilbash tribes, which formed the backbone of the Safavid military, submitted without any significant resistance in order to protect their own interests.
Treaty of Constantinople (1590)
In the face of all these difficulties -and even a staged coup in Qazvin by Murshi Quli Khan, of the Ustajlu Qizilbash clan- Mohammad Khodabanda decided to abdicate, favouring the throne to his son Shah Abbas I (who would be later be known as Abbas the Great). At the time he took over, all Iranian provinces in the Caucasus, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and even in western Iran were occupied by the Ottomans, while the Uzbeks had seized swaths of its eastern territories.
Therefore, in order to settle matters at home first and to defeat the Uzbeks, he decided to sign a humiliating peace treaty on 21 March 1590, by which the war ended. The peace treaty, known as the Treaty of Constantinople, with the Ottomans in 1590, ceding to them the provinces of Azerbaijan, Karabagh, Ganja, Dagestan and Qarajadagh, as well as parts of Georgia, Luristan and Kurdistan. This demeaning treaty even ceded the previous capital of Tabriz to the Ottomans. Finally, Shah Abbas had to give as hostage to the Ottomans one of the possible successors to the Safavid throne: his nephew the young Haydar Mirza went sent to Constantinople in 1590, where he would die in 1596.
Aftermath
A peace of Constantinople was concluded on 21 March 1590, in which the Safavids were forced to confirm these Ottoman conquests, as well as promising to end Shiite propaganda in Ottoman territories and persecution of Sunnis in its own lands. By ceding many of its integral regions to the Ottomans, Abbas could settle matters in his crumbling state first, which had been neglected for so long by his father Mohammad Khodabanda. After having the matters settled and the state and military significantly reorganised, Abbas would declare war again on the Ottomans in 1603, crushingly defeating them and reconquering all lost territories by the Treaty of Constantinople.
The advent of the Ottoman-Safavid war temporarily deflected Ottoman interest from European affairs, where the Ottoman Empire had been active with the Franco-Ottoman alliance and the support of the Dutch Revolt, in an interesting episode of mutually-supportive relations between Islam and Protestantism.
Literature
Several major Ottoman illustrated manuscripts were created to relate the war against the Safavids, such as the Nuṣretnāme ("Book of Victory") of the Ottoman bureaucrat Muṣṭafa ʿĀlī (d. 1600) detailing the campaigns of Lālā Muṣṭafa Paşa, the Şecāʿatnāme ("Book of Valor") of Āsafī Dal Meḥmed Çelebi (d. 1597–98) and the Tārīh-i ʿOsmān Paşa ("History of ʿOsmān Paşa") by an anonymous author reporting the campaigns of Özdemiroğlu Osman Pasha (d. 1585), governor of Şirvān.
Main battles
The main battles and events of the war included: