Uzun Hasan caught up with the Ottomans on the plain of Otluk Beli near Erzerum in central Anatolia. He detached a division of 10,000 men under one of his sons, Ughurlu Mohammed, to attack the Ottomans’ fortified camp, drawing up the rest of his army in a crescent formation with infantry in the centre, which he commanded himself, and cavalry on the flanks. An 8-hour battle ensued which was finally decided by an attack against the Persian right flank by fresh Ottoman cavalry under Mehmed’s second son, Mustafa, which drove the enemy flank back in disorder. The collapse of the Persian right, and the almost simultaneous defeat of their left by the future sultan Bayezid II, inevitably caused consternation amongst Uzun Hasan’s infantry centre, to such an extent that, seeing himself hard-pressed from front and both flanks, Hasan fled the field. Zeynal, another of his sons, attempted to rally the deserted infantry but in due course he was killed and the remnants of the main Aq-Qoyunlu army broke in rout. Ughurlu Mohammed, who had meanwhile met with stiff resistance from the Ottoman camp, withdrew when he saw the rest of the army in flight and managed to cut his way through to the Persian camp, from whence Uzun Hasan and the other survivors pulled back beyond the Euphrates.
Other than by dint of hard fighting, the other principal cause put forward for the Ottomans’ success on this occasion was their employment of a substantial amount of firearms. Though not referred to in contemporary Ottoman sources, several Italian accounts refer to Mehmed’s use of artillery here, and later Ottoman chronicles confirm the decisive role it played in the battle, its heavy fire being responsible for the repulse of the first Persian attack, following which the battle had degenerated into a general melee.
Despite the decisiveness of their defeat, Aq-Qoyunlu losses were relatively light, apparently numbering only 4,000, or at the most 10,000, killed in the battle, plus some 3,000-3,700 taken captive — one source says
13,000 — of whom a large number were subsequently executed (these doubtless being the troops of those Turcoman amirs who were technically Ottoman vassals but had sided with Uzun Hasan; only a pressed contingent of Qara-Qoyunlu were spared, subsequently being released). In addition the Ottomans captured Uzun Hasan’s standard, much booty and 1,000 horses, which would indicate that most of the dead were unsurprisingly foot-soldiers. One pro-Ottoman source puts Mehmed’s losses at only 1,000 men, but he would appear to have actually lost more than the Persians, perhaps 14,000 men. An Armenian source says that a total of 20,000 men of both sides were killed in the battle.
World History
