War and Peace in Qajar Persia: Implications Past and ... - Oguzlar.az

Building a new army 59were responsible for drilling troops, they apparently spent much of theirtime in quarrelling amongst themselves and duelling with each other, andEuropean observers were scathing about their military capabilities and theirlow social class.Many soldiers of fortune were to continue to find employment in Iranthroughout the nineteenth century, their numbers diminishing only towardsthe end of the century with the stabilization of the Russian mission with theCossack Brigade. Most had little impact on Iran’s military development, buta few played significant roles. Among these were Isidore Borowsky, a Polishofficer who became a general in Iranian service, took part in several campaignsand finally met his death during the Iranian assault on Herat in1837–1838; a French officer named Semino who had been an NCO underNapoleon and had fought under Ypsilantis in Greece before coming to Iranwhere he served for 27 years, reaching the rank of lieutenant-general, andtaking part in the campaigns of Abbas Mirza in 1830–1833 and in the siegeof Herat in 1837–1838; and, towards the latter part of the century, anItalian Major Maletta, formerly of the Egyptian Gendarmerie, who becamean infantry instructor in Iran.As well as searching for foreign officers, Abbas Mirza also tried to introducechanges into methods by which the nezam regiments were recruited, bothto provide himself with a more predictable supply of manpower and to makehimself independent of the local elite, devising the bunichah system, a primitiveform of conscription whereby liability for military service was tied torevenue assessments in the countryside. Some sort of conscription system mayhave been suggested to him by his French officers, as it seems to have beensuggested to Muhammad Ali of Egypt, but Abbas Mirza’s system, indirectand collective, and with an implicit reliance on landowners, bears strongertraces of Russian influence and the model of Peter the Great, and may haveowed something to the Russian deserters still present in Abbas Mirza’sregiments. 31 However it may also have resulted simply from an effort by AbbasMirza to regularize the existing system from which it differed greatly intheory but little in practice.Nonetheless, when war with Russia again flared up in 1826, it once moreended in a disastrous defeat, with the Russians actually entering Tabriz inNovember 1827 and concluding with the Treaty of Turkomanchay in 1828.Undeterred by yet another military failure, Abbas Mirza continued to maintainthe nezam forces of Azarbayjan which, by 1831, consisted of about 12,000infantry, 1,200 horse artillery and one regiment of lancers, recruited under thebunichah system. They were divided into ten regiments of Iranian troops andtwo of Russians. The Russian regiments were composed of deserters, mainlyfrom the Russian army in Georgia. They were commanded by a formerNCO from Nizhni-Novgorod, now promoted to sartip (general), SamsonYakovlevich Makintsev, known as Samson Khan. The deserter units, knownas the bahaduran, were, in contrast to other troops, well and regularly paidand were apparently good soldiers, fighting well for their new masters, and