Defensive walls in Safavid Iran

[2] The term "wall", as historian Rudi Matthee explains, is flexible, and ranges in meaning from fortified ramparts to feeble clay enclosures of urban quarters of gardens and plots of agricultural land.

[7] The rule of Shah Abbas the Great which was also characterized by attendant relatively stability provided the Iranians with strategic depth and made fortifications of cities in central Iran less and less important.

[9] A selection of cities and the existence of walls, per Matthee:[4] The Safavid rulers did not face the Ottoman dilemma of being forced to adapt new forms of warfare based on European model, nor the Tsardom of Russia's acute need to restructure its army and defensive strategies due to the outbreak of the Smolensk War in the 1630s.

[9] While the Ottomans were forced to adapt the European way of warfare and the Russians fully integrated firearms into its system, in Safavid Iran, as Matthee explains: "The interplay between political, social and material factors made a similar revolution unnecessary and therefore perhaps impossible.

Iran's "military revolution" remained half-finished; it buttressed the absolutism of Shah Abbas I and his successors, but failed to effect a profound transformation in the Safavid political and social structure".