Artillery

Though artillery was probably first adopted in Persia under the Timurids (see below) it seems that Uzun Hasan was responsible for its introduction on a large scale during the 1470s. A 16th century source records that Uzun Hasan sent a request to Venice for ‘100 artillerymen of experience and capacity, who were immediately sent on to Persia, for in the matter of their artillery the Persian armies suffered greatly from a paucity of cannon, while on the other hand the [Ottoman] Turkish armies of Asia were very well equipped in this arm, and they could effect much damage in their attack.’ Caterino Zeno reports that Venice actually sent ‘6 immense siege-guns, arquebuses and field-pieces in great number, powder and other munitions of war, 6 gunners, 100 arquebusiers, and other men skilled in artillery’, while Barbaro, who actually accompanied these munitions in 1471, records that they comprised ‘certain bombards, espringards and schioppetti [handguns], with powder, shot, wagons, and other irons of divers sorts to the value of 4,000 ducats’, plus a company of 200 crossbowmen and handgunners. Either way, it proved impossible for these supplies to be landed on the Ottoman-held coast and they ended up in Cyprus.

Uzun Hasan nevertheless obtained some artillery during the next year, capturing ‘numerous’ pieces abandoned in flight by a routed Ottoman army, though the year after that he was decisively beaten at Otluk Beli by the artillery and handgun fire of another Ottoman army, against whom he does not appear to have fielded any of his own. Clearly the Aq-Qoyunlu must have started to take their artillery into battle with them soon after, since in the year of Uzun Hasan’s death (1478), in a battle for the succession between his sons Khalil and Yaqub, it is recorded how Yaqub’s skirmishers reached the position of Khalil’s artillery {tup, cf. Ottoman top), ‘but, as Khalil had reinforced the centre with guns and handguns [tup-u-tufang], the tupchis scattered the skirmishers with their handguns.’

Although at first much of their artillery was captured either from the Ottomans (whose terminology they also adopted) or the Mamluks (as in 1481), before long they were also casting their own, often on site as the Ottomans did, as for the siege of Tiflis in Georgia in 1489, where they cast one large and 12 small cannons. The Aq-Qoyunlu later even attempted to copy the Ottoman practice of setting up their artillery within a wagenburg, but unsuccessfully, as at the Battle of Alme-Qulaq in 1503.