Starting in 1603, Abbas easily defeated local Ottoman units occupying the region around Tabriz and then advanced north into the Caucasus, pushing Ott oman forces back to well- stocked fortifications at Erivan (or Yerevan, the capital of modern Armenia) and throughout eastern Anatolia. Abbas besieged the frontier area through early 1604, but none of the forts in the region capitulated. It took the Ottomans until 1606 to marshal the forces to try to win back the territory taken by Abbas. At the Batt le of Sis, near Lake Urmia, Abbas and an estimated sixty- two thousand troops drew up defensive lines to stop as many as one hundred thousand Ott omans under Sultan Ahmed. During the initial skirmishes, the Ottomans apparently mistook a cavalry raid as the main Persian attack and tried to reorient their forces toward this foray. Seeing his opportunity, Abbas struck the Ott oman line hard with his disciplined infantry, cavalry, and artillery and routed the disorganized combatants. After a vigorous counteroff ensive, Abbas by 1607 had expelled the last Ottoman soldier from Persian territory as defi ned by the 1555 Treaty of Amasia. Although a new treaty was negotiated, continuing border incidents frustrated efforts to conclude a peace. A series of invasions and counteroff ensives followed between 1616 and 1626, resulting in steady Safavid expansion as Georgia, Baghdad, and parts of Iraq were captured. After surrendering territory to the Ottomans at the beginning of his reign, Abbas convinced them to look no longer for easy conquests in Safavid dominions.
Abbas removed a third enemy from Persian lands during his reign, although he relied on the help of Arabs and Europeans to eject these occupiers. Before going aft er the Ottomans in 1603, Abbas decided to recapture the island of Bahrain from the Portuguese. When the Portuguese became a major naval power and began their voyages of exploration to Asia, they soon arrived off the island of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf and saw its strategic importance to their trading interests in India. In 1507, a Portuguese fleet captured Hormuz and temporarily made its twelve- year- old potentate a vassal of Lisbon. Aft er a brief departure, the Portuguese returned in 1515 and again occupied the island. Shah Ismail, lacking a navy and bogged down in constant warfare with the Ottomans, had no choice but to accept the occupation. The Portuguese sett led in and soon thereafter captured Bahrain, keeping it for the next eighty years. They also occupied and fortifi ed a coastal strip of the Persian mainland opposite Hormuz, including the port of Jarun, near the site of modern Iran’s largest port, Bandar Abbas.
Shah Abbas the Great and His Musketeers, Nontribal Cavalry, and Artillery
