188 DESTINY DISRUPTED
Chaldiran as a victory for the Ottomans, but overall it was more of a draw,
because Selim could not hold Tabrez. With winter coming, he fell back to
more secure bases deeper inside Anatolia, and by the following year the
Persians had reoccupied Tabrez and inoculated it with a scorched-earth
campaign that left nothing for invaders to feed on if they wanted to attack
again. So the battle of Chaldiran actually ended up defining the frontier
between the Ottoman and Safavid realms, which hardened eventually into
the border between the successor states, Iran and Turkey, and remains the
border between those countries to this day.
Ismail went home from Chaldiran a sad and broken man. Losing a bat-
tle made him rethink his identity. He spent his remaining years more or
less in seclusion, pondering the cosmos and writing religious poetry. Is-
mail's empire not only survived his dejection but prospered, in part be-
cause it enjoyed a succession of gifted and long-lived rulers.
With the border more or less firmed up, hostilities between the Ot-
toman and Safavid empires went into remission and trade began flowing
in both directions to the benefit of both societies. The Safavid Empire was
always smaller than the Ottomans' and never quite as powerful, but with
its single state religion and its single dominant ethnic group, it was cultur-
ally more unified.
This no-doubt-about-it Persian Empire peaked under Ismail's great
grandson Shah Abbas the Great, who died in 1629 after a forty-two-year
reign. Abbas equipped his armies with firearms and cannons, and in his era
Iran developed booming state-supported textile, ceramics, garment, and
carpet industries, which exported goods to places as distant as western Eu-
rope, Africa, and India.
The art of painting, and particularly of the "Persian miniature"-
exquisitely detailed scenes surrounded by floral and geometric borders-
climaxed in Safavid Persia. Calligraphy, regarded as a major art form in the
Islamic world due to Muslim reverence for the written Qur'an, also reached
perfection here. The two arts came together in illuminated books, the high-
est artistic products of the age, and the culminating work in this form was a
Book of Kings, Firdausi's epic, produced for a Safavid monarch: it had 258
paintings and sixty thousand lines of calligraphy by various artists-essen-
tially, an entire museum between two covers.