Why Did the Ottoman Empire Fail to Conquer Iran? Battle of Yeghevard 1735

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]2:00 in the afternoon, June 19th, 1735.

[00:00:05]The summer air in the arid valleys around Yeghvard is thick with smoke.

[00:00:09]Muskets, camel-mounted cannons, hundreds of them, roaring. Perched atop a strategic hill, proud Ottoman soldiers of the Janissary force were frantically [music] trying to deploy their heavy artillery. They were protected by a massive coalition of 80,000 troops, commanded by commander-in-chief Köprülü Abdullah Pasha.

[00:00:32]Across from them, they were met by a vanguard force of approximately 15,000 to 18,000 Persian warriors under Nader Qoli Beg, the general who held regency power in the Safavid dynasty. For Abdullah Pasha, the math seemed obvious.

[00:00:50]An easy victory. A golden opportunity to end the protracted war in the Caucasus.

[00:00:56]But in less than two hours, that assumption had turned into a devastating tragedy. From the steep mountain ranges, a thunderous roar echoed down.

[00:01:06]Not from Persian musketeers, heavy muskets, long range, firing from a distance the Janissary's standard musket before the Ottoman artillery could fire its third salvo. Elite Persian troops had stormed the hilltop, seized the cannons, and turned their guns against their former masters. In the utter chaos of the retreat, a Persian soldier named Rostam approached Köprülü Abdullah Pasha's chariot.

[00:01:34]He knocked Köprülü Abdullah Pasha from his horse and coldly beheaded him.

[00:01:40]Pasha's head was offered to Nader in his tent while the remnants of the Ottoman army were being mercilessly slaughtered in the mountain valleys. Fewer than eight, 000 Ottoman soldiers survived and fled back to the Kars fortress, [music] leaving behind more than 40, 000 dead on the battlefield.

[00:02:02]For decades, mainstream historians have often simplified the conflict [music] between these two superpowers of the Islamic world into a religious confrontation between Sunni and Shia sects, or described it as the personal triumphs of a lone military genius.

[00:02:19]However, a more in-depth analytical lens reveals a far more complex reality.

[00:02:25]Welcome back to Great History.

[00:02:27]If you're here for honest, evidence-based [music] history over recycled myths, make sure to subscribe. Now, back to the video.

[00:02:37]In the 1720s, [music] the Safavid Empire, the major power ruling Persia, modern-day Iran, collapsed. An Afghan tribal group called the Ghilzai basically marched in, sacked the capital of Isfahan, and captured [music] Shah Sultan Hussein.

[00:02:54]The whole system collapsed almost overnight. Two neighboring empires are watching this happen, and they're both thinking the same thing, free estate.

[00:03:03]The Ottoman Empire in the west and Tsarist Russia in the north both start moving fast to grab as much of Persia's border territory as they can. Within a short period, they annex an enormous chunk of territory, western Iran, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and parts of the Caucasus mountain region.

[00:03:24]But here's the problem. All of that territory was basically a trap. The Ottoman army was basically built for one specific type of warfare, flat European terrain, where you could move food, cannon, and supplies along the Danube River and a network of well-maintained roads. The whole system depended on supply depots spaced exactly one day's march apart, like a a of logistical rest stops stretching across the Balkans, the Caucasus Mountains, absolutely none of that applied. We're talking broken mountain ranges, thick forests, no roads, and dozens of different ethnic groups that scorched the earth on the way out, burning crops so the Ottomans couldn't forage. Everything had to be hauled in on ox carts or camels, squeezing through narrow mountain passes.

[00:04:18]The supply train stretched for miles, moving at the pace of the slowest cart.

[00:04:23]When something went wrong at the front, the back of that column had no idea for hours.

[00:04:29]The enemy operated on a completely different logic. Light cavalry and pack animals could move through terrain that would stop a wheeled convoy cold.

[00:04:38]Soldiers carried dried meat and traveled light. Entire forces could move, strike, and disappear before the Ottoman army could even finish forming defensive positions. Keeping an army supplied under those conditions was brutally expensive.

[00:04:53]The Ottoman treasury at this point held about 118 tons of silver. That sounds like a lot until you find out Spain and France were each running on 440 to 500 tons. So, the Ottomans had less than a quarter of the financial firepower of their Western European counterparts. And unlike those countries, which had banks and credit systems to borrow money internationally, the Ottomans had to squeeze it out of their own population through a rigid tax system, handing tax collection rights to local feudal lords in exchange for them funding the military, which, sure, gets you cash in the short term, but it also means the sultan slowly loses control of his own army.

[00:05:37]Because now the guys with swords owe their loyalty to local strongmen, not Constantinople.

[00:05:44]The endless taxes to fund these Persian campaigns are making people furious.

[00:05:48]And in 1730, it boiled over.

[00:05:52]A rebellion broke out in Istanbul, led by a man named Patrona Halil.

[00:05:57]It's not a minor skirmish. This thing overthrew Sultan Ahmed III himself.

[00:06:02]Got his grand vizier executed. And wiped out an entire era of cultural reform called the Tulip Period, which had been this brief fascinating flowering of arts and modernization. All of it gone.

[00:06:16]At the center of the revolt, surprisingly, was the Janissaries. These were the Ottoman Empire's elite soldiers, or at least they used to be. By the early 18th century, many had effectively become a privileged political caste rather than a true fighting force. Large numbers lived comfortably in Istanbul as merchants and small business owners.

[00:06:40]Commanders sold pay certificates called esames, almost like financial assets.

[00:06:46]You could literally buy the right to collect a dead man's military salary.

[00:06:50]So, the empire was paying salaries for hundreds of thousands of soldiers who didn't even exist, while the actual troops in the field were under-equipped and exhausted. Oh, and every time a new sultan came to power, he was expected to hand out massive cash bonuses to the military.

[00:07:09]Not because they'd won anything, just as a tradition. The idea of packing up and marching through mountain hellscapes in Persia was deeply unappealing to them. While the Ottomans were busy imploding from the inside, Persia was about to produce someone who was going to make their lives absolutely miserable. His name was Nader Qoli, later known as Nader Shah, and historians literally nicknamed him the Napoleon of the East.

[00:07:34]Here's the situation. Nader walked into Persia was a mess.

[00:07:39]The Safavid dynasty was barely functional.

[00:07:42]But Nader, who was essentially the empire's top general at this point, managed to defeat the Afghan invaders in 1729 and restore a Safavid prince, Tahmasp II, to the throne. Persia was back.

[00:07:57]Nader was the hero. Everything seemed fine.

[00:08:01]Tahmasp II, sitting on his restored throne, started to feel a very uncomfortable feeling that powerful rulers throughout history have felt when they owe everything to one person, jealousy. He wanted a military victory of his own, something that was his, not Nader's.

[00:08:20]So, in 1731, while Nader was off in the east dealing with rebellions near Mashhad and Herat, the Afghanistan border, Tahmasp decided to launch his own campaign to retake the city of Yerevan from the Ottomans to prove he didn't need Nader. It went catastrophically wrong.

[00:08:40]Tahmasp didn't just lose the battle. He lost so badly that he was forced to sign a humiliating peace treaty, handing over the entire regions of Georgia and Armenia to the Ottomans in exchange for getting Tabriz back. He gave away two whole regions to get one city. It was, by any measure, a disaster for Nader.

[00:09:01]Though it was a gift, Nader came back to Isfahan, threw a lavish feast, and got Tahmasp too drunk in front of the entire royal court. He then proceeded to point out, in front of everyone, that this was the man running Persia.

[00:09:18]The humiliation was total and very much intentional. Tahmasp II was dethroned on the spot. Nader installed Tahmasp's infant son as the new king, named him Abbas III, and made himself the regent. Persia now had a baby on the throne, and Nader running everything behind the To hold his coalition of warrior tribes together because Persian politics at this point basically required a constant string of military victories to keep everyone from turning on each other.

[00:09:49]Nader needed to keep fighting. The coup needed justification.

[00:09:54]Which meant war.

[00:09:56]This is where Nader showed you exactly why he earned that Napoleon comparison.

[00:10:01]Instead of charging straight into the Caucasus Mountains where the Ottomans had spent years building fortifications in rugged terrain.

[00:10:09]He attacked Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq, and laid siege to Baghdad in 1733.

[00:10:15]He was using it as a bargaining chip, a big enough prize that the Ottomans would trade back the Caucasus territories just to get the Persians out of Iraq.

[00:10:24]But then, an Ottoman general named Topal Osman Pasha showed up with a relief army of 80,000 soldiers.

[00:10:32]For the one and only time in his career Nader lost at the Battle of Samarra in 1733.

[00:10:39]More than half of Nader's entire army was destroyed. His complete artillery, every [music] cannon every siege weapon was captured. And it would have ended the war except for one thing.

[00:10:51]The Ottomans couldn't follow through.

[00:10:54]Remember all those problems from earlier? All of that caught up with Topal Osman right at the moment he needed to pursue Nader into Persian territory and finish the job. He simply didn't have the resources or the stability back home to keep pushing. So, Nader survived.

[00:11:09]What he did next was almost hard to believe. Within just a few months Nader squeezed every available coin out of the population.

[00:11:17]Bled the Persian provinces dry through brutal taxation and rebuilt an army.

[00:11:23]Bigger. Better equipped. Then he went back to Mesopotamia.

[00:11:27]Found Topal Osman Pasha and destroyed him.

[00:11:32]Then to really put the Ottomans in a vise, Nader played a diplomatic [music] card.

[00:11:38]In March 1735, he signed a treaty with Russia, the Treaty of Ganja.

[00:11:44]Russia, nervous about how much territory the Ottomans had been grabbing, agreed to hand back two major strategic [music] fortresses on the Caspian coast, Baku and Derbent, to Persia, and withdrew all Russian troops from the region.

[00:11:59]Just like that.

[00:12:00]Nader had flipped Russia from a potential threat into a de facto ally.

[00:12:05]But, the Ottomans still held three major fortresses in the Caucasus, Ganja, Tiflis, and Yerevan.

[00:12:12]And taking fortresses, [music] it turned out, was not exactly Nader's strength.

[00:12:18]The siege of Ganja in 1734 [music] to 1735 made that very clear. The problem was the artillery. Nader's cannons were field guns, the kind you wheel around a battlefield to support infantry. What you need to crack open a massive city wall is something completely different, heavy siege artillery.

[00:12:37]Essentially, giant specialized cannons designed to punch through stone fortifications.

[00:12:43]Nader didn't have those. So, Nader switched to plan B, digging.

[00:12:48]Nader's engineers started digging tunnels beneath the walls, a technique called sapping and mining, with the goal of packing the tunnels with explosives and literally [music] blowing sections of the walls sky high. The Ottomans inside the fortress figured out what was happening and started digging their own tunnels to intercept them. So, now you've got Persian and Ottoman soldiers meeting each other in pitch black underground passages, fighting with whatever they had.

[00:13:15]The mines eventually detonated and killed hundreds of defenders.

[00:13:19]The citadel still wouldn't budge. What finally ended the siege was a piece of news. An enormous Ottoman relief army was marching toward Ganja. Commanded by a general called Koprulu Abdullah Pasha, who held the title of serasker, basically the supreme commander of the entire region. His army was somewhere between 80,000 and 130,000 men, assembled specifically to crush Nader once and for all.

[00:13:47]In June of 1735, Koprulu crossed the Arpachay River into the Armenian Valley. He knew Nader's army was stretched thin simultaneously besieging three separate fortresses at once.

[00:14:00]With their forces divided across a huge area, and when his scouts came back with their report, he felt even better about the situation.

[00:14:09]The Persian forces visible ahead of him were roughly 15,000 men.

[00:14:13]Except, that's exactly what Nader wanted him to think.

[00:14:17]Here's what was actually going on.

[00:14:19]Nader had 55,000 troops available.

[00:14:22]He chose to show up with only his smaller advance guard.

[00:14:26]Why? Because he'd already figured out the trap he needed to avoid.

[00:14:31]If he had shown up with all 55,000 men, Abdullah Pasha would have done exactly what Ottoman commanders always did when they smelled a real fight coming trenches, fortification, stone walls around the nearby fortress of Kars, and a dug in army of approximately 100,000 behind stone walls wasn't a problem. Nader could crack before winter showed up and destroy his already stressed supply lines.

[00:14:57]He'd lose without a single pitched battle.

[00:15:00]So, instead, he made himself look like exactly [music] the kind of easy target that an overconfident general with a massive army simply cannot resist chasing. And then he waited for Abdullah Pasha's ego to do the rest of the work.

[00:15:14]It didn't take long.

[00:15:16]An Ottoman scout came charging [music] into Abdullah Pasha's tent, three days of hard riding through mountain passes.

[00:15:23]Clearly exhausted with a report that Persian troops were retreating south.

[00:15:28]But from the eastern valleys, he could hear war drums.

[00:15:32]The lack of accurate information and the excessive ego of a powerful royal family led Abdullah Pasha to disregard the warnings of his subordinate officers and ordered the army to march fast and force a decisive battle.

[00:15:45]Yeghevard is a wide-open valley hemmed in on all sides by steep mountain ranges with a dense forest running along its eastern edge. Nader had arrived earlier and immediately saw what he was working with. The night before the battle, he secretly moved an elite unit deep into that eastern forest, completely invisible to Ottoman scouts.

[00:16:06]At the same time, he positioned his forward forces on high ground overlooking the valley.

[00:16:12]The exact valley the Ottoman army would have to march straight into.

[00:16:17]Abdullah Pasha, for his part, set up a textbook Ottoman battle formation. Janissary infantry in the center.

[00:16:25]Sipahi cavalry guarding the flanks.

[00:16:28]Heavy artillery hauled up onto a strategic hill with a clean sight line across the entire valley. There was just one problem. The guns weren't ready yet.

[00:16:38]Nader saw it immediately. The Ottoman artillery was still being unlimbered.

[00:16:42]That's the process of detaching the cannons from [music] their transport carriages and setting them up to actually fire. It takes time. And in that window, Nader did two things at once.

[00:16:54]First, he sent a unit forward into a direct skirmish, just enough to grab [music] Abdullah Pasha's attention and pull his focus toward the center of the field. And while every Ottoman eye was locked on that fight, he sent 3,000 Jazayerchis straight up the hill.

[00:17:10]A quick note on what a Jazayerchi actually was. These were Nader's elite musketeers.

[00:17:16]And they carried a weapon called the Jazayer, a heavy flintlock musket that weighed around 20 kg.

[00:17:22]For reference, a standard European musket of the same era weighed about 5 kg. So, we're talking about a gun nearly four times heavier, firing a bullet roughly 24 mm in diameter compared to the standard 18.

[00:17:37]Bigger bullet, more powder, dramatically longer range.

[00:17:42]The trade-off was reload speed. The Jazayer used a powder horn instead of pre-packed paper cartridges.

[00:17:49]So, loading took longer. But, here's the thing, it didn't matter.

[00:17:53]Because the Jazayer could hit you before you were even close enough to shoot back. Nader personally drilled these soldiers in brutal training regimens, transforming them into a professional body that served as the backbone of his power.

[00:18:07]In an aggressive opening maneuver, the Jazayerchis drove the Ottoman gunners off the ridge before the battle had fully begun.

[00:18:14]Having secretly advanced through rocky crevices beforehand, the elite Persian troops suddenly opened fire and stormed the Ottoman artillery position at close range.

[00:18:25]The Ottoman artillerymen, still struggling to get their cannons into position, didn't have a chance.

[00:18:31]Within the first hour, the entire Ottoman artillery force on that hill had been wiped out. 40 cannons, gone. Then Nader sent another unit to silence the Ottoman left-wing artillery as well.

[00:18:44]In less than 60 minutes, the biggest Ottoman advantage on that battlefield had simply ceased to exist.

[00:18:51]The effect on morale was immediate.

[00:18:53]These were soldiers who had shown up expecting to watch their artillery tear apart a numerically [music] inferior enemy from a safe hilltop. Instead, they watched their guns get taken away before a single cannonball had been fired. As soon as the Ottoman artillery was silenced, Nader immediately ordered forward 500 zamburaks.

[00:19:14]A zamburak, if you've never heard of it, is exactly as unhinged as it sounds.

[00:19:21]Take a small swivel cannon called a falconet and bolt it onto the back of a camel. When it's time to fire, the camel kneels down.

[00:19:30]The gunner sitting on top lines up his shot.

[00:19:34]And suddenly, you have a mobile artillery platform that can gallop across terrain where wheeled cannons would get stuck.

[00:19:42]Reposition in minutes and harass enemy lines from angles nobody planned for.

[00:19:48]They were lighter, faster, and now that the Ottoman counter-artillery [music] was gone, completely unopposed, they rode straight up to the Janissary ranks, close range, and opened fire directly into one of the tightest, most densely packed infantry formations on the battlefield. For context on how one-sided this got, the Ottoman cannons reportedly fired two, maybe three times total before being abandoned or captured. Nader's mobile units kept firing the entire battle. The Ottoman center was reeling.

[00:20:23]Abdullah Pasha was trying to pull his forces back, re-establish some kind of defensive line, and get control of the situation. That's when Nader gave the signal. The forest on the eastern edge of the valley, the one Ottoman scouts had never checked, exploded. Thousands of Persian troops poured out from the flank, hitting an army that was mid-retreat, already confused and demoralized.

[00:20:48]A pincer attack [music] works by hitting an enemy from two directions at once, so there's no clean direction to run, and it only works if the enemy can't react [music] fast enough to regroup.

[00:20:58]The Ottomans had a formation designed exactly for moments like this, the column in a box, a way of rapidly reorganizing a marching army into a tight defensive square. It had saved Ottoman forces dozens [music] of times on flat European battlefields with predictable terrain and room to maneuver.

[00:21:17]In a mountain valley, mid-retreat, with shrapnel coming from the front and thousands of troops suddenly materializing from the forest on your flank, there was no regrouping.

[00:21:28]There was barely even a retreat. And Nader had thought of that, too. He personally led one.

[00:21:35]000 of his best horsemen to cut off the retreat routes.

[00:21:40]The numbers at the end of this battle are almost hard to believe.

[00:21:43]Between 40,000 and 50,000 Ottomans ended up killed or wounded. That's more than half the entire army.

[00:21:51]Wiped out in a single engagement. Of the 40 heavy cannons Abdollah Pasha had dragged up that hill at the start of the battle, 32 were captured. Only about 8,000 soldiers made it out alive scrambling to the fortress at Kars.

[00:22:06]Abdollah Pasha himself didn't make it.

[00:22:09]Neither did most of his senior staff.

[00:22:12]The Persian losses were extremely small.

[00:22:15]The sources don't even give a specific number, which tells you everything you need to know. So, what happened after?

[00:22:22]First, the immediate aftermath. The moment news spread that Abdollah Pasha's army had been wiped out, every Ottoman fortress that had been holding out for months just gave up. No rescue was coming. The garrisons at Ganja, Tbilisi, and Yerevan opened their gates one after another. Istanbul formally recognized Persian control over the entire Caucasus region. The Treaty of Constantinople, signed in 1736, made it official. Nader was the legitimate ruler.

[00:22:55]The Caucasus was his.

[00:22:57]End of war.

[00:22:59]In January 1736, on the plains of Mughan, Nader called together a grand tribal assembly, leaders from across the empire, all gathered in one place, and in front of all of them, he announced that the Safavid dynasty, the royal family that had ruled Persia for over two centuries, was finished.

[00:23:20]He declared himself Shah of the new Afsharid Empire. The man who had started as a soldier from a minor tribal background had just [music] made himself king of Persia on the back of one battle. But winning a war and running a country are two completely different skill sets, and Nader, it turned out, was extraordinary at exactly one of them.

[00:23:42]To fund the war machine that beat the Ottomans, Nader had taxed his own population into the ground. And once the war was over, the army didn't shrink, it kept growing.

[00:23:53]At its peak, Nader's military reached 375,000 men.

[00:23:59]For context, that's roughly the entire [music] population of present-day Pittsburgh, all of them soldiers, needing to be fed and paid indefinitely.

[00:24:09]An army and a king who needed to keep paying it with no civilian bureaucracy managing the economy.

[00:24:14]So Nader did the only thing he could think of, he launched more wars, not for territory or ideology, just for cash. In 1739, [music] he invaded India specifically to loot it, which worked, briefly.

[00:24:29]But you can only do that so many times before you run out of neighbors to rob.

[00:24:34]By the end, Nader had become paranoid, brutal, and increasingly erratic. He was assassinated in 1747, just 11 years after his greatest triumph, and Persia collapsed into decades of civil war almost immediately after. Meanwhile, on the Ottoman side, the loss at Yeghevārd set off its own chain reaction.

[00:24:58]Russia had been watching the whole thing from St. Petersburg very patiently.

[00:25:03]Very patiently. And when it became clear that the Ottoman army was exhausted and its southern border was essentially undefended, Russia tore up its peace agreements with Istanbul and declared war. Just like that.

[00:25:16]The Ottomans, still reeling from Yeghvard, now had to fight a completely different front.

[00:25:23]However, the humiliation of Yeghvard forced the Ottomans to look in the mirror. They brought in European military experts, including a French officer named Claude Alexandre de Bonneval, established military engineering schools, upgraded their artillery foundries, and started restructuring their finances. Painful, slow, deeply uncomfortable reforms. It wasn't enough to make them dominant again, but it was enough to keep them alive for another two centuries.

[00:25:55]Slowly creaking along as what European diplomats would eventually start calling the sick man of Europe.

[00:26:02]All of that blood, all of those campaigns, sieges, and mountain battles, Nader's entire war to redraw the map and the border between Turkey, Iran, and the Caucasus states today still follows almost exactly the same line established by the Treaty of Zuhab in 1639.

[00:26:23]A border drawn nearly a century before any of this happened. Nader pushed that border westward with his army, and then his empire collapsed, and it snapped right back to the old Ottoman-Safavid line.

[00:26:35]So, why did the Ottoman Empire fail to conquer Iran? Because you can't conquer a country your army was never built to hold. Neither of them won. They just lost at different speeds.

[00:26:47]Thanks for letting us fill your head space.

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