Barry Wood. The Battle of Chālderān: official history and popular memory [July 2016] (2017)

Barry Wood. The Battle of Chālderān: official history and popular memory // Iranian Studies, Volume 50, Issue 1. Published by Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of International Society for Iranian Studies. — [July 2016] January 2017, pp. [1-27] 79-105.

Abstract

This article examines some manuscripts of the so-called “Anonymous Histories of Shah Esmāʿil” with a view to answering the question: How did people in post-1514 Iran remember the Battle of Chālderān? After a brief examination of these manuscripts, the article focuses on three moments of the battle – the Safavid council of war, Esmāʿil’s clash with Malquch-oghli, and the Ottoman cannonade – to explore the ways in which popular memory embellished and altered the events we know from the official histories. Such changes reveal that the loss at Chālderān may have marked the end of Shah Esmāʿil’s aura of invincibility, but not of his larger-than-life image in the minds of his countrymen.