The Iranians ultimately lost both wars, agreeing to sign the treaties of Gulistan and Turkmenchay, in which they ceded all of their holdings in the Caucasus, corresponding to present-day Armenia, Republic of Azerbaijan, and Dagestan.

In an effort to make up for his losses by winning over less powerful foes and bolster his claim to the throne, Abbas Mirza invaded the areas east and northeast of Mashhad in the summer and fall of 1832, taking control of Khabushan, Sarakhs, and Torbat-e Heydarieh.

Fath-Ali Shah's eldest son, Mohammad-Ali Mirza Dowlatshah, whose mother was a Georgian concubine, was excluded from the succession due to this obsession with settling tribal disputes amongst the Qajars.

[1] After becoming governor, Abbas Mirza was sent to defeat the Kurdish chieftain Jafar Qoli Khan Donboli, who was making a claim to Azerbaijan's territory.

Prince Pavel Tsitsianov, who Alexander I appointed to oversee Caucasian affairs in 1803, had nothing against about using violence, but any infringement of Iran's control over the Caucasus was not something that the Qajar administration could just ignore.

[12] Fath-Ali Shah designated Abbas Mirza as the leader of the Iranian army against the Russians, and gave the order to mobilize a sizable force of 20,000 soldiers towards Erivan.

Since Abbas Mirza was only fifteen at the time, his leadership would have been more symbolic than actual, yet he nonetheless actively took part in the war and displayed bravery as a military commander.

[14] Abbas Mirza's aid was eagerly solicited by both England and Napoleon, anxious to checkmate one another in the East,[15] especially as Persia bordered a common rival, namely Imperial Russia.

Preferring the friendship of France, Abbas Mirza continued the war against Russia's young General Kotlyarevsky, aged only twenty-nine but his new ally could give him very little assistance.

[16] The early stages of the war following Fath Ali Shah's orders to invade and regain Georgia and the northern parts of the contemporary Azerbaijani Republic ended up in years of relatively territorial stale warfare.

Commanding the southernmost Russian divisions during the long war, Kotlyarevsky defeated the numerically superior Persian army in the Battle of Aslanduz (1812) and in early 1813 stormed and took Lankaran.

The Russians were encamped on the opposite bank of River Aras when his two British advisers, Capt Christie and Lt Pottinger, told him to post sentry pickets in short order, but Mirza ignored the warnings.

[citation needed] In October 1813, with Abbas Mirza still commander-in-chief, Persia was compelled to make a severely disadvantageous peace known as the Treaty of Gulistan, irrevocably ceding swaths of its territory in the Caucasus, comprising present-day Georgia, Dagestan, and most of what most recently became the Republic of Azerbaijan.

Persia's dire losses attracted the attention of the British Empire; following the reversal of initial successes, the Russians now posed a serious threat from the Caucasus.

Political issues in the Kurdish principality Baban renewed the animosity between Dowlatshah and the Ottoman governors of Baghdad, Sulaymaniyah, and Shahrizur in the central and southern sections of the Iranian-Ottoman frontier.

The relation between Abbas Mirza and the Ottoman serasker of Erzurum was also made worse due to a dispute over the control of the nomadic tribes that inhabited the northern frontier.

He may have believed that a joint assault on the Ottoman Empire would deter Russia from considering additional attacks against Iran or at the very least further weaken the Russian military.

While a second Iranian force conquered Bitlis and pushed towards Diyarbakr, Abbas Mirza distinguished himself by capturing Bayazit and Toprak Qala and marching on to Erzerum.

On May 1822 at Khoy, Abbas Mirza successfully defeated the Ottoman counterattack, but by this point, cholera had also spread throughout his force, leading him to sue for peace.

"[24] His second war with Russia, which began in 1826, started off on a good note as he won back most of the territory lost in the Russo-Persian War (1804–1813); however it ended in a string of costly defeats after which Persia was forced to cede the last of its Caucasian territories, comprising all of what is modern day Armenia, Nakhchivan, the rest of the remainder of the contemporary Azerbaijani Republic that was still in Iranian hands, and Iğdır Province, all conform the 1828 Treaty of Turkmenchay.

[26] In an effort to make up for his losses by winning over less powerful foes and bolster his claim to the throne, Abbas Mirza invaded the areas east and northeast of Mashhad in the summer and fall of 1832, taking control of Khabushan, Sarakhs, and Torbat-e Heydarieh.

[1] This marked the start of Abbas Mirza's Nezam-e Jadid ("The new [military] order"), a project to build an up-to-date army capable of fighting in a modern environment.

[29] This approach of recruiting foreign instructors was strengthened when untrustworthy forces that had fought in France were sent to the Caucasian front during the War of the Sixth Coalition in Europe.

French instructors began working at Tabriz in 1807, but after Iran severed ties with France, British officers made up the majority of the training staff.

Numerous paintings, including portraits of Napoleon, the Russian emperor, and Sultan Selim III, were used to decorate the palaces in Tabriz and Ujan.

In Tabriz, a maidan (square) was built around the barracks, the latter which the Scottish army officer and diplomat John Macdonald Kinneir considered to be sole attractive structure in the city.

[1] According to the Scottish traveller Robert Ker Porter, Abbas Mirza was "rather above the ordinary stature;" his eyes were "dark and expressive...; his nose aquiline; his beard full, and like his finely-formed eye-brows, of a jet-black.