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FIRANGI, ZARBZAN, AND RUM DASTURI:
THE OTTOMANS AND THE
DIFFUSION OF FIREARMS IN ASIA
Gábor Ágoston
Georgetown University
agostong@georgetown.edu

The appearance and mass employment of firearms in warfare was one of the
most significant developments of the late Middle Ages. First manufactured in
China in the 1280s, gunpowder weapons had reached both the Muslim World
and Christian Europe within decades, and by the early fourteenth century
firearms were being used in European battlefields and sieges. By mid-century,
firearms had reached the Balkan Peninsula, and by the 1380s the Ottomans
were also acquainted with the new weapon, as they faced enemies already in
the possession of firearms: Byzantines, Venetians and Hungarians. Ottoman
soldiers used cannons in their sieges of Byzantine Constantinople (between
1394 and 1402, 1422 and 1453), Thessaloniki (1422 and 1430), Antalya
(1424), Novo Brdo (1427 and 1441), Smederevo (1439), and Belgrade (1440).
In addition to siege warfare, by 1444 the Ottomans had started to use cannons
and matchlock arquebuses aboard their river flotillas, and in field battles.1
Blacksmith and cannon founders from Europe helped in the transmission of
European gunpowder technology to the Ottomans. Some of these men are known
by name, such as Master Orban, who cast one of the largest Ottoman cannons for
Sultan Mehmed II (1444–1446, 1451–1481) before the siege of Constantinople

1 Gábor Ágoston, Guns for the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the Otto-
man Empire. Cambridge, 2005, 16–21.

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in 1453, and Jörg of Nuremberg, who served the sultan between 1460 and 1480.
But there were hundreds more, unknown to us by name, who forged wrought iron
guns, cast bronze cannons, manufactured gunpowder for the sultans, and operated
cannons and guns in Ottoman fortresses. Yet, the majority of founders in the
Ottoman foundries were Muslim Turks, as were the artillerymen (topçu) and
gunners (tüfekçi/tüfenkçi, tüfenk-endaz) in Ottoman fortresses and armies.2
Most of the artillerymen were members of the artillery corps (topçu ocağı),
which the Ottomans established as part of the sultan’s standing army in the early
fifteenth century, well before their opponents in Europe and Asia. By the
beginning in the second half of the fifteenth century, the Ottomans had organized
the corps of gun carriage drivers (top arabacı), who manufactured, repaired and
operated the war wagons in campaigns, and set up the wagon laager or tabur.
Firearms and gunpowder used by the Ottomans were largely manufactured
domestically. The empire possessed the necessary raw materials, and the
government established weapons and ammunition industries, which until the
mid-eighteenth century were capable of meeting the need of the armies, navies
and fortresses. The resulting Ottoman firepower superiority in turn forced the
sultans’ adversaries to employ firearms in ever-larger numbers and to reform their
militaries accordingly. The following essay offers new evidence and consideration
regarding the Ottomans’ impact on the diffusion of gunpowder technology in
Safavid Iran and the Indian subcontinent in the sixteenth century.3

CHALDIRAN AND SAFAVID RESPONSES

One stunning example of the efficacy of Ottoman firepower was the Battle
of Chaldiran. In the battle, fought on 23 August 1514, at a site northeast of Lake

2 Gábor Ágoston, ‘Firearms and Military Adaptation: The Ottomans and the European Mil-
itary Revolution, 1450–1800’, Journal of World History 25:1 (2014) 88–90, 94, Table 2; Salim
Aydüz, Tophâne-i Âmire ve Top Döküm Teknolojisi. Ankara, 2006, 136–148.
3 For earlier studies see Halil İnalcık, ‘The Socio-Political Effects of the Diffusion of Fire-
arms in the Middle East’, in V. J. Parry and M. E. Yapp (eds.), War, Technology and Society in the
Middle East. London, 1975, 195–217; Salih Özbaran, ‘The Ottomans’ Role in the Diffusion of
Fire-arms and Military Technology in Asia and Africa in the Sixteenth Century’, in Idem, The
Ottoman Response to European Expansion. Istanbul, 1994, 61–66 (originally published in 1986).

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 THE OTTOMANS AND THE DIFFUSION OF FIREARMS IN ASIA

Van in present-day northwest Iran, the Sunni Ottoman Sultan Selim (1512–
1520) defeated his Shia Safavid rival, Shah Ismail (1501–1524). While Ottoman
numerical superiority and Safavid tactical errors also contributed to Ottoman
victory, Ottoman firepower and the use of the wagon laager proved decisive
factors against an enemy which did not deploy firearms in the battle. At Chaldiran,
Sultan Selim, “as was the Anatolian manner, surrounded his encampment with
shields and caissons, linking the caissons together with chains. The twelve
thousand matchlockmen he always had with him were stationed in front of the
lines.”4 When the Safavid cavalry pushed the Ottomans back, they retired to
their wagon laager, which the Ottomans had learnt from the Hungarians in the
1440s, calling it tabur after the Hungarian name of the wagon laager (szekértábor).
From behind their defensive wagon laager, which Safavid chroniclers described
as an impenetrable “strong fortress”, janissary gunners drove back multiple charges
of the Kizilbash cavalry, the backbone of the Safavid army.5
The lack of firearms in the Safavid army at the battle is puzzling, as the
Safavids had been familiar with the weapon well before the battle. Scholars
have long discredited the Sherley myth, which claimed that two English
soldiers of fortune, Anthony and Robert Sherley, introduced firearms into Iran
in the late 1590s. Contemporary sources demonstrate that the Ak Koyunlu
Turkmens – the Safavids’ predecessors in Azerbaijan and Iran – had used
firearms in the 1470s, under their most capable ruler, Uzun Hasan (1453–
1478). In 1501, Ismail, the grandson of Uzun Hasan and the leader of the
militant Safaviyya Sufi movement, entered Tabriz, the seat of his grandfather
Uzun Hasan, and declared himself shah of Persia and Twelver Shiism the
official religion of his realm. In successive battles, Shah Ismail eliminated the

See also Salih Özbaran, Ottoman Expansion Towards the Indian Ocean in the 16th Century. Is-
tanbul, 2009, 273–282.
4 Ghiyās̲ al-Dīn ibn Humām al-Dīn Khvānd Mīr, Habibu’s-Siyar. Translated and edited by
Wheeler M. Thackston. Cambridge, Mass., 1994, 546–605, 606. Although several contempo-
rary narrative sources put the numbers of the elite infantry janissaries with handguns at 12,000
or more, archival sources show that only 10,065 janissaries were paid before the battle, and only
about half of them were armed with guns.
5 Gábor Ágoston, ‘War-Winning Weapons? On the Decisiveness of Ottoman Firearms from
the Siege of Constantinople (1453) to the Battle of Mohács (1526)’, Journal of Turkish Studies
39 (2013) 129–143, particularly 134–137.

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remnants of the Ak Koyunlus, and conquered Diyarbekir (1503), Baghdad

(1508), Shirvan and Khorasan (1510). Just as the Ak Koyunlu Turkmens
before them, the Safavids were also familiar with firearms, which they used
occasionally to besiege towns. According to a later source, the Safavids owed
their victory against the Uzbeks in 1510 partly to their use of guns. However,
before Chaldiran the Safavids had not faced adversaries who employed firearms
in large numbers, and therefore had not integrated gunpowder weapons into
their army, which relied on the manoeuvrability and speed of the Kizilbash
horsemen.6
The Battle of Chaldiran was one of the most consequential battles in world
history. As a result of their victory, the Ottomans extended their control over
Eastern Asia Minor, parts of Azerbaijan and Northern Iraq, thus shaping the
spheres of influence between Sunni and Shia Islam for centuries to come. The
battle had immediate consequences for the development of the Safavid army,
too. Ottoman firepower impressed the Safavids, and served as stimulus for the
widespread adoption of gunpowder weapons in Safavid Persia. According to
an anonymous Ottoman intelligence report, by 1516 under the supervision of
the chief gunner (tufangchi bashi) the Safavids had manufactured 2,000
handguns, though Shah Ismail’s troops did not know how to use the weapon,
except for twenty defected Ottoman janissaries. The Safavids also manufactured
fifty cannons (top) and caissons (araba), modelled after an Ottoman cannon
and its caisson, which the Safavids recovered from the Aras river after
Chaldiran.7 In 1516 the Safavids captured another 70 pieces of artillery, and by
the next year the shah reportedly had some 100 artillery pieces mounted on
caissons. The number of tufangchis fluctuated in the years to come, but the high
numbers of 8,000 tufangchis in 1517 and 15,000 to 20,000 in 1521, mentioned
in Venetian sources, are likely to be inflated. Ottoman deserters helped to train

6 Roger Savory, ‘The Sherley Myth’, Iran 5 (1967) 73–81; Willem Floor, Safavid Government
Institutions. Costa Mesa, Ca., 2001, 177, 188–189.
7 Published in Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont, Les Ottomans, les Safavides et leurs voisins.
Contribution à l’histoire des relations internationales dans l’Orient islamique de 1514 à 1524. Is-
tanbul, 1987, 158–161, see also 165.

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 THE OTTOMANS AND THE DIFFUSION OF FIREARMS IN ASIA

the shah’s gunners. In 1518 and 1519, 700 and 1,500 Ottoman janissaries are
said to have defected to Safavid Iran.8
Shah Ismail’s eldest son and successor, Shah Tahmasb I (1524–1576),
continued to use firearms both in fortresses and battles. In 1528 the shah
successfully deployed his cannons, matchlockmen, and the Ottoman-style wagon
laager against the Shaybanid (Shibanid) Uzbeks. Responding to Ubayd Khan’s
aggression against Khorasan, Shah Tahmasb confronted the Uzbeks at the Battle
of Jam on 24 September 1528. Although outnumbered and defeated on the
wings at the early stage of the battle, the Safavids ended the battle as victors, due
to their firepower and wagon laager. An eyewitness account noted that the
Safavids had 700 carts (araba), with four zarbzans mounted on each of the carts.
Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur (1526–1530), the founder of the neighbouring
Timurid/Mughal Empire in northern India, closely followed the Safavid-Uzbek
wars. Based on intelligence he received shortly after the battle, he reported that
the Safavids deployed 2,000 araba and 6,000 infantry gunners (tufangchi). He
also noted that the Safavids arranged the cannon and carts in the Ottoman
fashion (Rum dasturi tufak u araba tartib qılıp). Babur also added that the fifteen-
year-old Shah Tahmasb remained in the wagon laager, while his cavalry on the
flanks fled the battle. Later, those inside the wagon laager opened the chains that
bound the carts together, and attacked the Uzbeks. This surprised the enemy,
and sealed their fate. These references demonstrate how quickly the Safavids
adopted the Ottoman wagon laager tactics, which had been one of the reasons of
their own defeat in 1514. One should, however, add that at the time of the
Safavid attack, the Khan was receiving his generals’ premature congratulations
on his victory, while a good part of his army had already left the battlefield. The
Uzbeks were in pursuit of the fleeing Kizilbash cavalry, plundering the Safavid
army camp, while others were heading back to Transoxania.9

8 Floor, Safavid Government Institutions, 178–179, 189; Rudi Matthee, ‘Firearms in Persia’,
Encyclopaedia Iranica. Vol. 9. New York, 1999, 619–620.
9 Zahiru’ddin Muhammad Babur, Babur-Nama (Memoirs of Babur). 2 vols. Translated from
the original Turki Text by Annette Susannah Beveridge. New Delhi, 1922 (henceforth BNB),
and Zahirüddin Muhammed Babur Mirza, Bâburnâme. Part Three. Chaghatay Turkish Text
with Abdul-Rahim Khankhaanan’s Persian Translation. Turkish Transcription, Persian Edi-
tion and English Translation by Wheeler M. Thackston. Cambridge, Mass., 1993 (henceforth
BNT) 347rv, 354rv, where the page numbers refer to the manuscript folios used by both Bever-

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While the decisive role of firearms at the battle was clear for the Uzbeks, too,
they were unable to integrate the weapons into their armies. They had access
neither to up-to-date imported weapons, nor were they able to manufacture the
weapons in large enough numbers. The most obvious direct source was Muscovy,
but the Muscovite government did not want to arm the Uzbeks. The weapons
that reached the Uzbeks via smuggling were not sufficient. Moreover, the
Uzbeks lacked troops expert in using firearms. Around 1550, the Uzbeks
recruited some Ottoman janissaries, but these were mainly used in domestic
wars. Although Ubayd Khan launched further invasions against Khorasan, he
avoided open battle with Shah Tahmasb, learning from his defeat at Jam.10
Despite the usefulness of firearms in 1528, Shah Tahmasb’s army, too,
remained largely cavalry, based on the Kizilbash horsemen, and firearms were
more fully integrated into the Safavid military only under Shah Abbas I (1587–
1629). By setting up a standing army, paid by the ruler, Shah Abbas intended to
establish more reliable forces, who could counter the Ottoman janissary infantry
and artillery corps, and also curb the influence of the Kizilbash Turkmens.11 Like
the Ottoman janissaries, Shah Abbas’s new troops were based on military slaves
or ghulams, recruited from captured Circassians, Armenians, and Georgians.
Ghulams had existed under Shahs Ismail I and Tahmasb I, but Abbas created a
corps of royal household slaves, and gradually increased their numbers up to
10,000 to 15,000. The shah called his ghulams “mounted janissaries”, as they were
cavalry, unlike the infantry janissaries. The ghulams did not foster an esprit de
corps, and did not develop into a “socio-political corporation”, as did the janissaries
barracked in Istanbul in the seventeenth century. Although the ghulams too
participated in the power struggles in the Safavid court, they did it not as a

idge and Thackston, and indicated in the various English translations. The battle is examined in
detail in Martin B. Dickson, Shah Tahmasb and the Uzbeks: The Duel for Khurasan with `Ubayd
Khan: 930–946/1524–1540. PhD Dissertation, Princeton University, 1958, 128, 130–134.
10 Dickson, Shah Tahmasb and the Uzbeks.
11 For Abbas’s military reforms see Lockhart, ‘The Persian Army in the Safavid Period’, Der
Islam 34 (1959) 89–98; Roger Savory, Iran under the Safavids. Cambridge, 1980, 78–79; An-
drew J. Newman, Safavid Iran: Rebirth of a Persian Empire. London, 2009, 52–55. Newman,
however, emphasizes the continued military and political power of tribal forces.

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 THE OTTOMANS AND THE DIFFUSION OF FIREARMS IN ASIA

separate political interest group, but by joining forces with Tajiks and Turks/
Kizilbash “and thus forming ethnically and socially mixed factions”.12
Shah Abbas was keen to arm his troops with firearms, and created a corps of
artillerymen of 12,000 strong with 500 cannons. In addition to the artillery,
“several thousand men were drafted into regiments of musketeers from the
Chaghatay tribe, and from various Arab and Persian tribes in Khorasan,
Azerbaijan, and Tabarestan… Without question, they were an essential element
in Abbas’s conquests, and their employment had many advantages.”13 Established
as a separate corps under the shah, the musketeers (tufangchi) were recruited
mainly from Iranian peasants, and said to have numbered some 12,000 men.
Although the corps was created on the model of the Ottoman janissaries and
with the aim to counterbalance the latter, unlike the infantry janissaries, the
tufangchis were mounted infantry, who moved on horse but fought on foot. They
represented “a good (perhaps the best) instance of a hybrid and ad hoc Safavid
answer to the new military challenges of the time”.14 Abbas’s loyal chronicler and
chancery secretary (munshi), Iskandar Beg Turkman, claimed that in the spring
of 1602, when Abbas marched against Balkh, the last major Uzbek foothold in
Khorasan, the shah mobilized 300 cannons and mortars, with carriages and
chains, and 10,000 infantry gunners and artillerymen, who comprised about
one fifth of the 50,000-strong army.15 It is noteworthy that the Persian text calls
these cannons top-i zarbzan, a term that usually designated smaller field pieces
in Turkish, Persian and Arabic sources.

12 On the ghulams, see Giorgio Rota, ‘Fighting with the Kizilbash: Preliminary Remarks on
Safavid Warfare’, in Kurt Franz and Wolfgang Holzwarth (eds.), Nomad Military Power in Iran
and Adjacent Areas in the Islamic Period. Wiesbaden, 2015, 239. On the janissaries, see Baki
Tezcan, The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern
World. Cambridge, 2010, especially chapter 6.
13 Eskandar Beg Monshi, History of Shah ‘Abbas the Great. 2 vols. Transl. by Roger M. Savory.
Boulder, Colorado, 1978, I. 527.
14 Rota, ‘Fighting with the Qizilbash’, 239.
15 Eskandar Beg Monshi, History, II. 809–810, 812; see also Floor, Safavid Government In-
stitutions, 181.

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INDIA

Firearms had reached peninsular India by the 1460s, but the weapon spread
16

only from the early sixteenth century onwards, and soldiers from the Ottoman
lands played an important role in the process. Threatened by the Portuguese,
the Sultanate of Gujarat (1407–1573) – a regional Muslim power that seceded
from the Sultanate of Delhi and developed strong naval capabilities with ports
such as Surat and Diu – sought help from the Mamluk Sultan Kansuh al-Gauri
(1501–1516), whose revenues from the spice trade the Portuguese endangered.
The Mamluk sultan in turn asked naval and military aid from the Ottomans. In
1507, the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II (1481–1512) sent to Egypt his
commander, Kemal Reis, with a fleet that carried fifty cannons, and copper to
cast more ordnance in Suez. In 1508, a Mamluk fleet commanded by Amir
Husain the Kurd (al-Kurdi), the governor of Jeddah, joined the Gujarati fleet
under Malik Ayaz, governor of Diu and a rich merchant. The allied fleet defeated
the Portuguese at the Battle of Chaul, south of present-day Bombay, and took
the captured firearms to Goa of the Sultanate of Bijapur. However, at another
battle near Diu the next year, the Portuguese destroyed the allied navy.17
Writing about the 1508 Mamluk-Gujarati victory three generations later,
the chronicler Muhammad Kasim Firishta (d. 1623), who completed his
Persian-language history at the request of Ibrahim Adil Shah II (1580–1627)
of Bijapur, recorded that the “Sultān of Rūm, who was the enemy of the
European unbelievers (Kāffār-i Firang), sent many ships to the coast of Hind
for a holy war (ghaza) and protection, and many ships arrived near Gujarāt…
Ten large ships of the Rūmīs, who were come from the Khūnkār of Rūm for
purposes of holy war, accompanied Ayyāz, and Ayyāz, having gone to Chēwal
(Chāul), fought with the Christians... and Ayyāz was victorious and slew very

16 Iqtidar Alam Khan, Gunpowder and Firearms: Warfare in Medieval India. New Delhi,
2004, 42–46.
17 Palmira Brummett, Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomacy in the Age of Discovery.
New York, 1994, 35, 114–115; Longworth Dames, ‘The Portuguese and Turks in the Indian
Ocean in the 16th century,’ Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1921) 1–28, particularly 8–11;
E. Dennison Ross, ‘The Portuguese in India and Arabia,’ Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
(1921) 545–562, particularly 547–551.

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 THE OTTOMANS AND THE DIFFUSION OF FIREARMS IN ASIA

many.”18 Abd al-Rahman Ibn Ali Ibn ad-Dayba (1461–1537), a contemporary

Arab chronicler of the western Yemeni town Zabid, claimed that Amir Husain
was accompanied by Selman Reis, whom the Ottoman Sultan Selim (sic!)
sent.19 This is an interesting piece of information, because historians have
generally thought that Selman Reis arrived in Mamluk Alexandria in November
1511 with a shipment of Ottoman military aid, and that he entered Mamluk
service only after this date (at the latest in 1514).20
While Selman Reis’s possible participation in the 1508 naval battle at Chaul
needs further research, Portuguese sources make it clear that among the
soldiers of the allied Mamluk-Gujarati navy there were many Rumes, that is,
Ottoman subjects from Rum (the lands of the former Eastern Roman Empire,
now Ottoman Asia Minor). Malik Ayaz himself is referred to in the Portuguese
sources as Rume who knew Turkish.21 The Bijapuri authorities welcomed the

18 Dames, ‘The Portuguese and Turks’, 9.

19 Ross, ‘The Portuguese’, 549.
20 The exception is Brummett, Ottoman Seapower, 115, who, following Ross, claimed that
the Mamluk fleet of 1507–1508 was jointly commanded by Husain al-Kurdi and Selman Reis.
However, the standard works on Selman Reis maintain that it was only from 1514 onward that
he was in Mamluk service. In 1514 he helped to build a naval arsenal in Suez for the Mam-
luk Red Sea fleet. The fleet, under the joint command of Selman Reis and Husain al-Kurdi
launched a campaign in late 1515 against the Portuguese, partly to help Muzaffar Shah II of
Gujarat. However, this campaign never reached the Gujarati coast. The fleet built a stronghold
at the entrance to the Red Sea near Bab al-Mandab against an expected Portuguese attack,
and unsuccessfully besieged Aden. Selman Reis returned with the fleet, and in 1517 repulsed
the Portuguese attack against Jeddah, the port of and gateway to Mecca. See Svat Soucek,
‘Selman Re’is’, in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition. Vol. 9. Leiden, 1997, 135–136; İd-
ris Bostan, ‘Selman Reis’, in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi. Vol. 36. İstanbul, 2009,
444; Albrecht Fuess, Verbranntes Ufer. Auswirkungen mamlukischer Seepolitik auf Beirut und die
syro-palästinensische Küste (1250–1517). Leiden, 2001, 60–63. Ad-Dayba and Fihrishta might
have conflated the 1508 Chaul campaign with the 1515 expedition.
21 Malik Ayaz’s (d. 1523) activities in Gujarat are discussed in detail in Kuzhippalli S.
Mathew, Portuguese and the Sultanate of Gujarat, 1500–1573. Delhi, 1986, 24–40, and Jean
Aubin, ‘Albuquerque et les negotiations de Cambaye.’ Mare Luso–Indicum 1 (1971) 3–63, par-
ticularly 5–17. Regarding Ayaz’s origin, Mathew repeats Dames, who quotes the contemporary
Portuguese historian João de Barros. The latter claimed that Malik Ayaz was a captured Rus-
sian, sold at the Istanbul slave market, and brought to Gujarat by his master. Other sources
suggested that he was a Turk, a Tatar or a Persian, or hailed from Southern Europe, Asia Minor,
Armenia, Java or Sumatra. See The Book of Duarte Barbosa. 2 vols. Transl. by Mansel Long-

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Rumi soldiers and experts and resettled them in Goa with the help of Muslim
merchants, who also financed the construction of shipyards and military
plants. Conquering Goa in 1510, the Portuguese governor Afonso de
Albuquerque captured from the defenders a hundred large bombards and a
“large quantity” of small artillery. He also found cannons, mortars and
gunpowder in the armoury, which the Rumes stockpiled there. Impressed by
these weapons, Albuquerque sent to King Manuel I of Portugal (1495–1521)
“guns, which fire heavy cross-bow type bolts”, two heavy bombards, and a
sample of a cannon of the Goa Rumes, together with its mould.22 Three years
later, in December 1513 Albuquerque praised the high quality of the
matchlocks made by local gunsmiths in Goa, who “make guns as good as the
Bohemians”. In another letter Albuquerque informed his king that the Goan
gunsmiths “returned, becoming our masters in artillery and the making of
cannons and guns (bombardas e espimgardas), which they make of iron here in
Goa and are better than the German ones”.23
Military experts from the Ottoman and Safavid lands also played an
important role in the diffusion of firearms, the Ottoman-style wagon laager
and the associated fighting methods in the Timurid/Mughal Empire in
northern India. At the first Battle of Panipat (1526), Babur defeated the larger
army of Sultan Ibrahim Lodi, due in part to his combined use of field cannon,
matchlockmen, and the Ottoman-style wagon laager. Babur’s victory marked
the end of the Delhi Sultanate of the Lodi dynasty and the beginning of the
Timurid/Mughal Empire in northern India. Before the battle, Master Ali-

worth Dames. London, 1918–1921, I. 130–131, footnotes. See also Aubin, ‘Albuquerque,’ 5,
and Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration. Oxford, 2010, 26–27. Sixteenth-cen-
tury Portuguese sources used the terms Rume/Rumes, that is, Rumi (Anatolian/Ottoman) and
Turco/Turcos, that is “Turk”, for the Ottomans. See Salih Özbaran, Umman’da Kapışan İmpar-
atorluklar. Osmanlı ve Portekiz. İstanbul, 2013, 59–89.
22 Özbaran, ‘The Ottomans’ Role’, 62; Rainer Daehnhardt, Espingarda Feiticeira/The Be-
witched Gun. [Lisbon], 1994, 38; Richard M. Eaton, ‘“Kiss My Foot” Said the King: Firearms,
Diplomacy and the Battle of Raichur, 1520’, Modern Asian Studies 43:1 (2009) 289–313, es-
pecially 297–298.
23 Cited in Daehnhardt, Espingarda Feiticeira, 39. See also Richard M. Eaton and Philip B.
Wagoner, ‘Warfare on the Deccan Plateau, 1450–1600: A Military Revolution in Early Mod-
ern India?’, Journal of World History 25:1 (2014) 9–17.

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 THE OTTOMANS AND THE DIFFUSION OF FIREARMS IN ASIA

Quli (Ustād ‘Alī-Quli) “was ordered to tie the carts together with ox-harness
ropes instead of chains, after the Anatolian manner (Rūm dastūri bilä)”.24 In
addition to arranging the wagon laager according to the Rumi/Ottoman
manner, Ali-Quli was master in firing matchlocks (tufak) and firangi guns,
while the Ottoman artilleryman (topçı) Mustafa Rumi was a specialist in firing
small field pieces, called zarbzan, mounted on carts.25 Mustafa Rumi was also
an expert in setting up the Ottoman-style wagon laager. In the spring of 1527,
at the Battle of Khanua against the Rajput-Afghan alliance commanded by
Rana Sanga, it was Mustafa Rumi who “had made the caissons (araba) in the
Anatolian fashion, and they were very sleek and fast caissons”. This time, “the
caissons were secured in front and tied together by chains. The caissons were
seven or eight yards apart, across which the chains were drawn”.26 The use of
the Ottoman-style wagon laager enabled Babur to protect his soldiers in the
camp against cavalry attacks of a much larger army, which outnumbered that
of Babur by a factor of three to one. Small field pieces, matchlockmen and
archers placed behind the wagons, targeted the attacking enemy with sustained
fire, making traditional frontal cavalry assaults against the wagon laager an
ineffective and deadly enterprise. At the same time, Babur’s own horsemen and
infantry could charge at the enemy through the gaps of the wagon laager, while
his mounted archers on the flanks encircled the enemy.
The two types of weapon, firangi and zarbzan, are ubiquitous in the sources.
The firangi/farangi/firengi/firingi was a small anti-personnel cannon, which
translators usually render as Frankish, that is, European (Frenk/Efrenj from
the Arabic Ifranj) cannon, which reached the Indian Ocean via the Portuguese.
Historians posited that the term referred to the Portuguese breech-loader
swivel berços or ‘cradles’, “so called because of the open space behind their barrels
to accommodate a removable powder chamber”.27 However, it is possible that

24 BNT 264r. See also İnalcık, ‘The Socio-Political Effects’, 204; Naimur Rahman Farooqi,
Mughal–Ottoman Relations. Delhi, 2009, 13. While some historians consider Ali-Quli Otto-
man, others posit that he was from Safavid Persia, who, however, used Rumi/Ottoman meth-
ods of warfare.
25 BNT 266v. Ali-Quli: nečä qatla yaxšı fırangīlär attı, whereas Mustafa Rumi: arāba üstidäki
darbzanlar bilä yaxšı darbzanlar attı. See also BNT 217rv.
26 BNT 310v–311v.
27 Eaton and Wagoner, ‘Warfare on the Deccan Plateau’, 26.

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the term is corruption from prangı, the name of a small Ottoman gun, firing
shots of 150 grams (50 dirhems or 0.33 pounds). The Ottomans used the
prangı guns from the mid-fifteenth century onwards in field battles, aboard
their ships, and in their forts, where prangıs often comprised the majority of
the ordnance. Also written in Ottoman sources as prankı, pirankı, parangi,
parangı, pranga, pranku, prangu, and parangu, the Ottoman term goes back to
the Italian/Spanish braga, short for ‘petriero a barga’ and ‘pedrero de braga,’ a
small breech-loading swivel gun. Most of the Ottoman prangı guns were cast
of bronze, but the Ottomans also used iron ones.28
By rendering the Ottoman prangı guns as firangi/farangi, contemporary
Persian-language chronicles conflated the term firang, meaning ‘Frank/
European’, with the name of the prangı gun. A similar merging of terms exist in
Chinese, where the word folangji is used for both ‘European’ and the name of a
gun, although the two have different etymologies. However, the Ottomans
used two distinct terms for ‘European’ (Frenk/Frengi) and the small gun
(prangı), as did Tamil and Telugu speakers, living in southern India and Sri
Lanka. Both have similar but different words for ‘European’ (paranki and
parangi) and ‘cannon’ (pīranki and pīrangi).29 Therefore, it is possible that
Ottoman prangıs reached southern India and the Indian Ocean through Rumi
artillerymen before the Portuguese and their guns.
Called darbzen, zarbzen, and zarbuzan in Ottoman sources, these cannons
were among the most popular types of ordnance in the Ottoman, Mamluk,
Safavid and Timurid/Mughal Empires. Although the term means ‘battering
gun’, and the majority of Ottoman cannons deployed at sieges were indeed
darbzen/zarbzen, there were also lighter field pieces called by this name.
The Ottomans distinguished between small, medium and large darbzen/
zarbzen cannons. The small ones fired projectiles between 50 and 300 dirhems

28 Henry Kahane, Reneé Kahane, and Andreas Tietze, The Lingua Franca in the Levant:
Turkish Nautical Terms of Italian and Greek Origin. Urbana, 1958, 122–123; İdris Bostan, Os-
manlı Bahriye Teşkilatı: XVII. Yüzyılda Tersâne-i Âmire. Ankara, 1992, 88; Gábor Ágoston, ‘Ot-
toman Artillery and European Military Technology in the Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries’,
Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 47 (1994) 44; Ágoston, Guns for the Sultan,
87, 180; Aydüz, Tophâne-i Âmire, 392–399.
29 Kenneth Warren Chase, Firearms: A Global History to 1700. Cambridge, 2003, 242–243.

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 THE OTTOMANS AND THE DIFFUSION OF FIREARMS IN ASIA

(150–920 grams) in weight, the medium ones used shots of one okka (1.23
kilogram) in weight, while the big ones fired two-okka (2.5 kilogram) balls.
The smallest Ottoman darbzen/zarbzens weighed 54 kilograms, the heaviest
540 kilograms.30 The zarbzans used in the Timurid/Mughal Empire are
depicted in the Baburname as small field pieces with funnel-shaped mouths,
mounted on two-wheeled carts with spoke-less wheels, drawn by four pairs of
oxen. These weapons were very similar to the Ottoman darbzens/zarbzens,
described and shown in contemporary Ottoman chronicles and miniatures.31
Zarbzans seem to have been among the most popular guns in India. By the
1540s Humayun (1530–1540, 1555–1556), Babur’s son and successor, had
several hundreds of these field pieces. Muhammad Haydar Dughlat (1499–
1551) – first cousin of Babur, ruler of Kashmir, and the author of the
contemporary chronicle Tarikh-i Rashidi – noted that in 1540, at the Battle of
the Ganges (Kanauj) Humayun’s army had “seven hundred caissons, each
drawn by four pairs of oxen. On every caisson was a small Anatolian cannon
that shot a ball weighing five hundred mithqals”. Called zarbzan-i Rūmī in the
Persian text, that is, Anatolian/Ottoman zarbzan, these small field pieces fired
shots weighing about 2.2–2.4 kilograms or about 5 pounds. In terms of calibre,
these Mughal zarbzans were similar to the Ottoman big darbzens/zarbzens,
which fired shots weighing two okkas (2.5 kilograms or 5.5 pounds).32

30 Ágoston, Guns for the Sultan, 83–85; Aydüz, Tophâne-i Âmire, 373–386.
31 Gayatri N. Pant, Mughal Weapons in the Bābur-Nāmā. Delhi, 1989, 150: figure 260, and
Khan, Gunpowder and Firearms, 71–72, and 67: figure 10. Compare these with Ottoman can-
nons at the siege of Vienna in 1529, depicted by a miniature of Nakkaş Osman: Seyyid Lok-
man and Nakkaş Osman, Hünername, 1589. Vol. 2. TSMK Hazine 1524 fol. 257v.
32 Mirza Haydar Dughlat, Tārīkh-i Rashīdī: A History of the Khans of Moghulistan. Ed. by
W. M. Thackston. Cambridge, Mass., 1996, 400 [184] and Mirza Haydar Dughlat, Tārīkh-i
Rashīdī: A History of the Khans of Moghulistan. English Translation and Annotation by Wheeler
M. Thackston. Cambridge, Mass., 1996, 286 [184], where the numbers in square brackets refer
to the folio numbers of the manuscripts used by Thackston. In the sixteenth century, one mithqāl
(miskal) was 4.81 g in Anatolia, 4.6 g in Persia, and 5.41 g in Calicut. See Walter Hinz, Islami­
sche Masse und Gewichte. Leiden, 1955, 5–7. Khan (Gunpowder and Firearms, 78) converted 500
mithqāl as 1.263 kgs, but he did not give any source as to why he calculated one mithqāl with 2.526
g. Using Khan’s conversion, Humayun’s zarbzans would correspond to the medium Ottoman dar-
bzens. In addition to the 700 zarbzans, Humayun also had eight mortars (deg), “each drawn by
seven pairs of oxen”, which used metal projectiles weighing 5,000 mithqāls, therefore roughly cor-

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Zarbzans quickly spread in India and Afghanistan. Humayun’s rival, the

Afghan Pashtun leader and founder of the Suri Empire in Northern India, Sher
Shah (1540–1545), used zarbzans that weighed approximately 60 or 74
kilograms (four männs). These must have been similar to the brass zarbzans,
which Sher Shah commissioned in 1541–1543 from another Ottoman gun
founder, Khwaja Ahmad Rumi. One of Ahmad Rumi’s brass pieces weighed
59.79 kilograms, was 1.35 meters long, and had a muzzle bore diameter of 3.81
centimetres. It fired iron shots weighing about 170 grams. These Indian zarbzans
bore striking similarities to the lightest Ottoman bronze darbzens/zarbzens from
the 1560s. These Ottoman pieces weighed 54–56 kilograms, their length varied
between 1.32 and 1.54 meters, and fired 150-gram cast iron projectiles. In
Mughal India, such small bronze zarbzans were a new design, different from the
bigger zarbzans used during Humayun’s reign.33 The 35 calibre to bore ratio
suggests that they were designed for greater range, accuracy and were used as
anti-personnel weapons. The narrower bore not only economized on copper – a
metal in short supply in India – but also improved casting techniques and quality,
as the smaller pieces required fewer furnaces to pour the metal into the mould.
These lighter pieces also initiated a shift from stone projectiles of Humayun’s
time to smaller iron shots, the common projectile of the Ottoman darbzens.
Ottoman gun founders played some role in introducing new techniques of
forging and cannon casting into India. Ahmad Rumi helped to bring the skill
of forging iron cannons to India’s interior.34 Ahmad Rumi and his colleagues
were also responsible for introducing cast bronze cannon in the Deccan. An
analysis of the metal found that the bronze cannon that (Sayyid) Ahmad Rumi
cast for Sher Shah in 1542–1543 contained 84.72 per cent copper, 13.32 per
cent zinc and iron, and 1.83 per cent tin.35 The ideal bronze cannon in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries contained about 90 per cent copper and 10

responding to the 18-okka (50-pounder) Ottoman mortars. See Jos Gommans, Mughal Warfare:
Indian Frontiers and High Roads to Empire, 1500–1700. London, 2002, 148.
33 See Khan, Gunpowder and Firearms, 74, 87–88: endnotes 65 and 69, and Ágoston, Guns
for the Sultan, 83.
34 Khan, Gunpowder and Firearms, 79.
35 H. E. Stapleton, ‘Note on Seven Sixteenth Century Cannons Recently Discovered in the
Dacca District’, Journal and Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, New series 5 (1909) 367–
375, particularly 369: note 2.

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per cent tin. Chemical analysis found that the alloy of an Ottoman cannon, cast
for Mehmed II in 1464, had very similar composition: it contained 89.58 per
cent of copper and 10.15 per cent of tin. Archival sources regarding Ottoman
cannon casting suggest that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Ottoman
cannon founders used the typical tin bronze, which contained 89.5–91.4 per
cent copper and 8.6–11.3 per cent tin.36 However, tin was in short supply in
Mughal India, which might explain the high percentage of zinc and iron.
Rumi cannon founders also introduced to the Deccan the techniques of casting
large bronze cannons and mortars, such as the famous Malik-i Maidan (King of
the Battlefield) at Bijapur fort, one of the largest cannons ever made, which was
cast by Muhammad bin Husain Rumi for the Nizam Shahi ruler of Ahmadnagar
in 1548–1549.37 Twenty-two years earlier, when Ali-Quli made his huge mortar
for Babur, he used the same casting method, which, in turn, had been familiar to
Ottoman gun founders from the mid-fifteenth century onwards: he cast the barrel
and the powder chamber separately. But the Rumi cannon founders faced
limitations as the blast furnaces in India were not capable of heating enough metal
to cast large bronze cannons in one pour. Therefore they had to use several furnaces
with separate channels to pour the melted metal into the mould. This method
however could lead to complications, as is apparent from Babur’s description of
Ali-Quli’s casting one large mortar (qazan) for him in October 1526:
“On Monday the fifteenth of Muharram [22 October] we went to watch
Master ‘Alī-Quli cast the mortar. Around the place where it was to be cast he
had constructed eight smelting furnaces and had already melted the metal.
From the bottom of each furnace he had made a channel straight to the mortar
mould. Just as we got there he was opening the holes in the furnaces. The
molten metal coming from the furnaces stopped. There was some flow either
in the furnace or in the metal. Master ‘Alī-Quli went into a strange depression
and was about to throw himself into the mould of molten bronze, but I soothed
him, gave him a robe of honour, and got him out of his black mood. A day or
two later, when the mould had cooled, they opened it, and Master ‘Alī-Quli
sent someone to announce with glee that the shaft was flawless. It was then

36 Ágoston, Guns for the Sultan, 186–187.

37 Khan, Gunpowder and Firearms, 78, and figures 13–14.

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easy to attach the powder chamber. He took out the shaft and assigned some
men to fix it, and got to work connecting the chamber.”38

conclusions
Faced with superior Ottoman firepower, the enemies of the Ottomans
introduced important changes in their militaries. Of these, the Habsburg
responses are well known for historians.39 This essay has revisited the gradual
incorporation of firearms into the Safavid army following their humiliating
defeat at the Battle of Chaldiran, where Ottoman firepower and the wagon
laager proved decisive. The essay also re-examined the role of Rumi (Ottoman)
gun founders, gunners and matchlockmen in the Indian subcontinent.
It demonstrated that Rumi adventurers and mercenaries played an important
role in the spread of firearms technology in sixteenth-century India. Just as in
the contemporaneous Ottoman Empire, Rumi gun founders and their local
colleagues cast mainly bronze/brass pieces, following casting methods known
in the Ottoman Empire. Likewise, just as in the Ottoman Empire, the majority
of the ordnance used in India consisted of small and medium firangi and
zarbzan guns – the local versions of the Ottoman prangi and zarbzen light field
pieces – which refutes the old orientalist and Eurocentric view that “oriental
powers” were obsessed with and preferred giant cannons. Equally important
was the Rumi specialists’ role in introducing the Ottoman-style (Rūm dastūri)
wagon laager and the Rumi methods of “camp battle”. The fortified Ottoman-
style wagon laager solved one of the main problems that armies in Asia faced:
how to defend one’s army against the swift attacks of the mounted archers of
larger armies. It was firearms and the Ottoman-style wagon laager that helped
the Safavids rout the invading Uzbeks in 1528 at the Battle of Jam, and that
helped Babur crush the much larger armies of Ibrahim Lodi at the first Battle
of Panipat in 1526 and the allied Rajput-Afghan forces at Khanua in 1527.

38 BNT 302rv.
39 See, for instance, Gábor Ágoston, ‘The Impact of the Habsburg-Ottoman Wars: A Re-
assessment’, in Karin Sperl, Martin Scheutz, and Arno Strohmeyer (eds.), Die Schlacht von
Mogersdorf/St. Gotthard und der Friede von Eisenburg/Vasvár. Rahmenbedingungen, Akteure,
Auswirkungen und Rezeption eines europäischen Ereignisses. Mogersdorf, 2015, 87–98.

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