Capture of Rasht
| Capture of Rasht | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part of the Russo-Persian War (1722-1723) | |||||||||
|
|||||||||
| Belligerents | |||||||||
 Russian Empire
|
 Safavid Empire
|
||||||||
| Commanders and leaders | |||||||||
|
Peter the Great Colonel Shipov F.I. Soimonov
|
Tahmasp II
|
||||||||
| Strength | |||||||||
| Two battalions of regular troops. Caspian Flotilla |
15,000 untrained and inadequately armed troops, levied mostly from peasantry. | ||||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
| About or over 1,000 | |||||||||
The Capture of Rasht, also written as Capture of Resht, occurred between December 1722 and late March 1723 amidst the successful spree of campaigns of Peter the Great during the Russo-Persian War (1722-1723). The capture of Rasht brought the Caspian Sea town alongside the rest of Gilan into Russian possession for a decade, until the Treaty of Resht of 1732, when they would be returned.
The pretext for the Russian conquest was grounded in the same reasons as for why the entire war in general had started; Lezgian tribesmen, nominal subjects of the Safavid crown but at the time in a state of constant revolt against the central government, had made serious devastations in 1721 to the "life and property" of the Russian merchants in the Shirvan province. Furthermore, by 1722, the Safavid Empire was in a heavy decline and found itself in a state of complete turmoil in general, and thus the Safavid governor of the Gilan province had urgently requested Russian aid.
The war went on swiftly for Peter and his troops. By now, he was in possession of Iranian-ruled Dagestan and had made large inroads into Arran and Shirvan, the latter two territories roughly comprising the modern-day Azerbaijan Republic. Taking further advantage of Tahmasp II's desperate situation, Peter wanted to push deeper into Iran and annex even more territories. Even though the bulk of the army had withdrawn to Astrakhan following the storm of early September 1722 that had destroyed a large number of vessels, the horse epidemic that virtually destroyed the Russian cavalry, and the diseases amongst the soldiers which made the Russians suffer tens of thousands of losses every year during the war, he still ordered for new captures, namely the Caspian Sea provinces of contemporary northern Iran and the rest of modern-day Azerbaijan.
...
Wikipedia