Download PDF | Selim Güngörürler - The Ottoman Empire and Safavid Iran, 1639–1682_ Diplomacy and Borderlands in the Early Modern Middle East-Edinburgh University Press (2024).
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Acknowledgements
The seeds of this book were first sown as I was preparing to embark on a doctoral disseration about Habsburg–Ottoman relations in the early eighteenth century. Amidst a discussion of our syllabus, my doctoral advisor and mentor, Gábor Ágoston, wondered if I could academically use my knowledge of Persian, which I had hitherto studied purely for literary enjoyment, and it was this suggestion that triggered the quest leading up to my changing tracks towards research on a different geography and time. It was Prof. Ágoston also who, by heartening me to delve into the scholarship on Ottoman–Safavid relations, motivated me to formulate the research questions that yielded first the dissertation and now the present book. Since 2011, he has taught and guided me more than a doctoral student could expect from an advisor. I have benefitted much from his combination of constructive support and encouragement to stand on my own two feet.
The privilege of having been his student I will always carry as a mark of pride. Giorgio Rota, first as my dissertation committee member and more recently as my project director, has an equally principal share in the fruition of the almost ten-year work behind this book. He wholeheartedly mentored me by introducing sources, commenting on publications, pointing out potential gaps, and reading my drafts, no less painstakingly than I myself did, to save me from the pitfalls of a young academic’s overenthusiasm. It is thus a source of particular pleasure that in 2020 I began working beside him, which has thus enabled me to continue benefitting from his generous expertise, to which this book is immensely indebted. I cannot thank him enough for the advice and wisdom he has shared with me. His dear fellowship continues to be a reason for me to stay in academia. From my former supervisor and director, Derin Terzioğlu, I have learned a lot.
I should particularly note here how she has trained me to contextualise my findings and tighten my arguments. It was she and Selçuk Akşin Somel who suggested early on that I might have the skills needed to pursue a career in academia. I am grateful for their support. I am indebted to Judith Tucker for the time she spent on reading and commenting on my dissertation draft. From Paolo Sartori, who was the first to motivate me to shape what later became my ongoing project, I have benefitted beyond what I could imagine when we had first met. Although we did not have a formal advisor–advisee relationship, his friendly mentorship has contributed so much to my scholarship that it deserves to be mentioned alongside that of my supervisors. It is thanks to his intellectual and editorial advice that I could work further on my teaching, writing and argumentation. He is also the originator of the idea to prepare this book’s first proposal and submit it to the EUP through the Royal Asiatic Society. Velizar Sadovski readily shared his scholarly wisdom throughout the conception, late-stage research, and writing of this book. Florian Schwarz, as director of the Institute of Iranian Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, has provided me with a comfortable and productive research environment.
I thank him for facilitating my work since I joined the Institute. I am likewise grateful for the similar support I received from Chris Roosevelt during my fellowship at Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations. I had the privilege of consulting and receiving valuable advice on many occasions from Claudia Römer, and from the late Bert Fragner while he was in active retirement. Evrim Binbaş did not spare his help in steering my book proposal through the Royal Asiatic Society towards the EUP. I have benefitted greatly from the collegial inspiration and friendship of Ulfatbek Abdurasulov, Viola Allegranzi, Arturo Annucci, Elçin Arabacı, Jo Ann Hoeppner Moran Cruz, Laura Goffman, Faisal Husain, Andrzej S. Kaminski, Bruno De Nicola, Yiğit Alp Özalkuş, Michael Polczynski, Lukáš Rybár, M. Habib Saçmalı, James Shedel, Ceren Temizyürek, Fuat Cem Topcu, Davide Trentacoste, Leili (Afsane) Vatani, Elizabeth Williams and Guglielmo Zucconi. This research was funded in part by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [P 32696-G]. Earlier research that afforded a groundwork for this book had been facilitated by financial support from Georgetown University, Austria’s Agency for Education and Internationalisation, German Academic Exchange Service, and Koç University – RCAC, in chronological order. Primary source research was conducted at the Ottoman Archives (Istanbul), Süleymaniye Manuscript Library (Istanbul), Austrian National Library – Manuscript Collection (Vienna), and Berlin State Library – Oriental Section.
I am grateful to the friendly staff of all four institutions for making sure that requests were processed as smoothly as possible.
During my doctoral study abroad, my mother Tijen devoted herself to picking up my never-ending book orders from within Turkey, and never failed me whenever I needed her to make scans and forward them to me. My sister Eda not only helped my mother in performing these tasks but also printed out large amounts of necessary material and brought it to me during my time in Istanbul; in thus saving me time she generously sacrificed her own, which was no less valuable given her commitments. My father Ibrahim played his part in Izmir by obtaining publications. Our beloved dog Lokum gave me soul-cherishing and unconditional love. The years I spent away from her vicinity hurt the most, as I could explain the reason of my absence to everyone but her. My work on this book since 2018 has been stamped above all by my better half, Setare, for whose companionship I cannot be grateful enough. Since the day we met, her existence has inspired me to discover and foster new sides of myself that I had thitherto not been acquainted with. I can only consider myself lucky that she and I have crossed paths in the journey of life.
Background and Outline
Premodern polities dominating Greater Iran and the eastern Mediterranean lands clashed with one another for millennia: Medes vs Lydians, Achaemenids vs Greeks, Parthians vs Romans, Sassanids vs Romans, Sassanids vs Arabs, Arabs vs Romans/Byzantines, Seljuks vs Byzantines, Mongols vs Seljuks, Timurids vs Ottomans, Akkoyunlus vs Ottomans, and so on. Rulers rose and fell, wars were fought, countries changed hands, and treaties were made, but structural basics such as geographical conditionality (though not determinism) swaying power relations abided. The so-called Persian–Roman, or to be more precise, Iranian–Levantine contrast remained an invisible but constant factor in power relations between polities controlling these lands. This contrast did not determine the balance of power by itself, but was so weighty that it has to be calculated in and used as a scale in understanding what a given status quo in power relations indeed meant. These structural continuities are worth bearing in mind as we consider the history of Ottoman–Safavid relations. The Ottoman–Safavid match-up introduced new factors to the picture. In many ways, such as the two sides’ shared cultural, demographical and political worlds, this match was profoundly unlike anything that had taken place before. But again, in many other respects, such as military strategies and land disputes, these two monarchies simply picked up from where their forerunners in western Iran and Anatolia left off. From a macro-historical perspective, therefore, the Ottoman–Safavid confrontation can be seen as a chapter within the larger narrative of relations between Anatolian and Iranian polities, as well as an episode from the phenomenon of the polities conquered, established, ruled and sustained by Turkish dynasties and militaries across the Middle East of the second millenium ce. The present book explores Ottoman–Safavid diplomacy and political relations from 1639 to 1682, to the exclusion of trade,1 which is a mostly standalone subject not only thematically but also in terms of actors and sources involved,2 and to the exlusion of religious affairs, which I handle elsewhere.3 Of course, readers will be aware that relations between these two parties go back almost two centuries prior to this period. But 1639 is a significant date, for it constitutes the beginning of a sustained timespan of unbroken peace, distinguishing it from what had come before; both the earliest phase of relations (before 1501) in which the Safavids were not yet a monarchy, and from the second phase (1501–1639), which was marked by recurring struggles, wars and truces. The period 1639–82 is furthermore notable, as we shall see, for constituting a historiographical lacuna, which the present book seeks to redress. This is again in contrast with the aforementioned earlier two phases, both of which have been the subject of considerable research, and are thus largely familiar to readers. The historiography handles the first two periods up to 1639 fairly well, though it lacks some crucial levels of analysis, especially in diplomacy and diplomatics. In offering by way of background a brief historical overview of Ottoman–Safavid relations, I confine myself to a short chronology of political relations that led to war, change of territory, and peace, so as to lay out the factual groundwork of the topic at hand. The Ottoman monarchy’s dealings with the House of Safi began when the latter, under its chieftain Junayd (r. 1447–60), converted itself from the Sufi order it had been into a religious-military entity with claims to territorial sovereignty and political power. The movement recruited its overwhelmingly Turkish warriors and believers in Anatolia, Azerbaijan and northern Syria. Ottoman and Akkoyunlu lands thus became both a source and a target for the House of Safi. Junayd was eventually driven out from the order’s headquarters, Ardabil, after which he migrated westwards into Anatolia, showed up in Iconium (Konya), capital of the centralAnatolian principality of the Karamanids, and set up indirect contact with the Ottoman monarch Murad II. However, neither the Karamanids nor the Ottomans gave him shelter. Reaching a capacity to raid into the postByzantine rump ‘Empire’ of Trebizond, Junayd increased the political clout of his House by marrying into the Akkoyunlu dynasty ruling central and western Iran, and his movement grew militarily so much that he could campaign against the Shirvanshahs. Under his son Haydar’s chieftainship (1460–88), the House of Safi’s Kızılbaş religious teaching was coupled with its followers’ ideological rejection of Ottoman subjecthood, while the order’s militarisation peaked as it put together an army of warriorbelievers with an operational capacity in Azerbaijan, southern Caucasus, and to the east of Anatolia. Under Haydar’s underage successor and son Ismail, the order gathered its warriors in 1500 to Erzincan and launched their leader’s ‘emergence’ to become a sovereign. In 1501, the shaykh became shah and by 1510, the whole of Greater Iran came under Safavid sway. The Kızılbaş’s becoming the ruling class and military nobility in Safavid Iran had profound consequences on relations with the Ottomans. Because many of the Kızılbaş were from Anatolia, and thus regarded this region as their homeland, it became a site of Ottoman–Safavid competition over sovereignty, territory, subjecthood and ideology.4 Once the Safavids set up a kingdom over a territory more or less overlapping greater Iran, the Ottoman monarch Bayazid II (r. 1481–1512), to cut off the Safavids’ ties from Anatolia, resettled, cordoned off and mobilised against Safavid-follower subjects of the Ottoman state. These earliest Ottoman measures yielded results, though in conventional terms. But the Safavids employed a wide repertoire of asymmetric tactics, such as breaching the borders, harbouring runaway Ottoman princes and, most notably, stirring up uprisings among Kızılbaş loyalists in Ottoman territory, who laid waste to Anatolia, slaughtered dwellers, defeated the Ottoman army and killed the grand vizier. It was only a matter of time, therefore, before the actual state of affairs would be openly acknowledged as war and and the ongoing proxy struggle would give way to direct conflict. And unmediated war did break out. Selim I (r. 1512–20), wresting the Ottoman throne from his father for this sake, first struck back against the Anatolian Safavid-followers and then trampled Shah Ismail’s army (r. 1501–24) in 1514 at the Battle of Chaldiran, eastwards from Van at western Azerbaijan, whereafter he entered the Safavid capital Tabriz and held court there. Northern Kurdistan and western Armenia thus became part of the Empire in this first wave of Ottoman expansion against the Safavids. Selim I then put a ban on the movement of goods and persons from Safavid Iran, keeping up the state of war. Shah Ismail’s last years and the first decade of the reign of his son and successor Tahmasp (r. 1524–76), roughly coinciding with the first decade also of the Ottoman emperor Sulayman I (r. 1522–66), witnessed backroom dialogue through agents and underhand support of each other’s unruly frontier strongmen in Azerbaijan and Iraq on one side, and Kurdistan and Anatolia on the other.5 Fierce war restarted in 1533. Unlike Selim, who had thrust straight on for a head-to-head confrontation and knockdown, Sulayman first contained and then pushed the Safavids further east. And in 1534, once again, the Ottoman troops entered Tabriz and the Ottoman monarch held court at the Safavid capital. Tahmasp withdrew before the Ottoman advance, shunning engagement and instead resorting to scorched-earth tactics to tire out the invaders. By 1535, the Ottomans called off the occupation of Azerbaijan, but the second wave of Ottoman conquests materialised and would be lasting: new gains in western Armenia, southern Kurdistan and middle Iraq became organised as the Ottoman provinces of Erzurum and Baghdad. War reawakened in 1548–9 as Tahmasp’s brother Alqas took shelter at the Ottoman court (1547) and campaigned alongside Sulayman, whose goal was to install the Safavid prince as an Ottomanfriendly shah and to wrest some further territory for the Empire from Iran. Once again, Tahmasp, instead of giving battle, laid waste to eastern Armenia and Azerbaijan in line with his scorched-earth policy. Though Sulayman again had to pull out from Azerbaijan after holding court yet another time at the Safavid capital Tabriz, the Empire captured and was able to keep for good the fortress city of Van and its hinterland at the intersection of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Kurdistan. The two-year war also saw Ottoman campaigns in Georgia (where permanent conquests were also made), Shirvan and Kurdistan. When a last campaign to Nakhchivan in 1553–4 did not bear any outcome other than the by now habitual cycle of the shah’s devastating his own lands and the padishah’s occupation followed by evacuation, the Peace of Amasya in 1555 confirmed the Ottoman’s conquests since 1533. The border between the Empire and Iran, as set by this writ, would hold good for centuries notwithstanding brief handovers of territory in later wars and treaties. The 1555 Peace of Amasya was notable also as the first document to lay the groundwork for neighbourly, if not friendly, relations between the Ottomans and the Safavids.6 Sulayman I’s son Bayazid took shelter at Shah Tahmasp’s court in 1559 after losing the struggle against his brother Selim to become their father’s heir-apparent. Intensive correspondence, diplomacy and bargaining between the two sides ended up in the shah’s handover of Bayazid to an Ottoman delegation in 1562 in return for a handsome payment in gold and the heir-apparent Selim’s issuing a prospective writ of peace for the shah. During the time of peace after 1555, Safavid agents continued to gather donations and build up allegiance networks in Ottoman Anatolia in the name of the Safavid shah. This in turn kept up the drain of finance and manpower from the Empire to Iran. The clash of dynastic claims to legitimacy thus went on even in the absence of military conflict.7 Indeed, it is perhaps not too fanciful to speak of these decades as a sort of early modern Middle Eastern cold war. After Ismail II (r. 1576–7) succeeded Tahmasp and an Imposter Shah Ismail arose in Anatolia (1577), war broke out in 1578, and went on for the next twelve years. By the end of the first campaign in 1579, Ottoman armies had overcome the Safavids, taken Kars, and occupied most of Shirvan along with middle and eastern Georgia. In 1583, after winning the Battle of Torches, the Ottomans captured the province of Çukursaʾd with its metropolis Erivan, and Baku. By 1585, the Ottomans had fully conquered Azerbaijan including Tabriz, former capital of the Safavid kingdom. Karabakh also fell to the Empire with its metropolis Ganja in 1588. After the new shah Abbas I (r. 1588–1629) pleaded for peace by sending his nephew, Haydar Mirza son of Hamza Mirza, as diplomatic hostage to the imperial court, Murad III (r. 1574–95) issued a writ of peace8 in 1590 confirming all Ottoman conquests, after which the new border was demarcated on the spot by joint committees. In 1603, from a position of strength at home and relative advantage abroad, Abbas I broke the peace, whose conditions were in open belittlement of the Safavids, and, by 1604, he had taken back Tabriz, Nakhchivan and Erivan. Next, beating a disorderly Ottoman army at the Battle of Sufiyan in 1605, Abbas’s troops drove out the Ottomans from Azerbaijan, Shirvan, Karabakh and eastern Georgia. Shunning a battle with Ottomans throughout following campaigns, the shah could hold on to Safavid recoveries and have the 1555 borders acknowledged with the Ottoman writ of peace of Nasuhpasha in 1612, but at the cost of accepting to pay a yearly tribute to the padishah.9 War broke out once again in 1615, this time sparked by border disagreements in the Caucasus. Over the course of the ensuing conflict, the Ottomans fruitlessly beleaguered Erivan, a Crimean raid laid waste to northwestern Iran, Abbas I resorted to scorched-earch tactics and burned down much of Azerbaijan, and the Ottomans, thrusting into this ravaged land, entered the Safavids’ now-former capital Tabriz for yet another time, while the Safavids beat an Ottoman contingent. Nevertheless, even as the fighting continued, the two sides bargained on for peace. The Serav writ of pledge10 issued in 1618 near Ardabil restored the terms of the 1612 Peace of Nasuhpasha, though with less tribute to be presented to the Ottoman monarch. Over the next few years, the two sides exchanged missions, abided by the terms of peace and upheld an outward friendship. However, truce was undone in 1623 as the Safavids ended up taking possession of Baghdad via rebel usurpers from the Ottomans’ Local Military Corps who had wrested the control of the city and hence the province in disobedience of imperial orders. Abbas I claimed to not have broken the peace for he had taken Baghdad from a rebel ringleader rather than the padishah, and therefore he asked the padishah to name his son the Safavid prince as governor of Baghdad. Nevertheless, this far-fetched justification could not forestall the war. The long-drawn-out Ottoman siege of Baghdad in 1625–6 and the subsequent clash of the two sides’ armies proved inconclusive. In the meantime, the rebel pasha of Erzurum, Abaza Mehmed, defected to Iran, undermining the Ottoman war effort. Notwithstanding such disruption, the Ottomans invaded Ardalan (easternmost Kurdistan) and raided Hamadan as a counterstrike. Despite gaining the upper hand with their follow-up victory at the Battle of Erivan, the Ottomans were again unable to prevail in their second siege of Baghdad (1630). The Safavids’ siege of Van (1633) proved even less effective. Almost each campaign in this fifteen-year war was preceded and followed by diplomatic contacts between the parties. Breaking the deadlock, the Ottoman army led by Murad IV (r. 1623–40) himself captured Erivan in 1635. Marching southwards, the padishah also entered Tabriz, but eventually withdrew from the wrecked Azerbaijan. In 1636, Shah Safi (r. 1629–42) recaptured Erivan after a winter siege. The definitive campaign to end the war victoriously for the Ottoman side materialised in 1638: after a heavy beleaguerment, Murad IV reconquered Baghdad, and hence Iraq. Under the immediate threat of further Ottoman advance into Iran, Shah Safi appealed for peace. The Peace of Zuhab (a.k.a. Qasr-i Shirin) signed in 1639 re-established the pre-1623 borders, which were indeed those established by the 1555 Peace of Amasya, with certain modifications in favour of the Empire.11 The Peace of Zuhab, which ended the last war between the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Iran (1623–39), marks, after Selim I’s Iranian, Syrian and Egyptian conquests (1514–17), the second watershed that shaped the balance of power in the early modern Middle East. It proved to be the only peace document of the age that would not become overridden by a resumption of the feud it had ended. It held good as long as both signatories remained in existence, namely throughout the eighty-four years until the overthrow of the Safavid kingdom in 1722. Thanks to the regime begotten by the Peace of Zuhab, the principle of territoriality took on its full form in the Middle East because, with the resultant interstate stability, the Ottoman monarchy formally acknowledged the Safavid Iranian polity’s existence as legitimate and unbounded by time. Thus arose in Islamdom a new order whereby neighbouring, sovereign, independent states could co-exist with the legal fiction that they would live on forever. And even after the Treaty of Zuhab’s natural invalidation by the downfall of one of the two signatories, it remained in indirect force. For the surviving signatory (the Ottoman Empire) and the defunct signatory (the Safavid State)’s successors (the Afşarid and later the Kajarid kingdoms of Iran) grounded their later treaties (of Kerden in 1746 and of Erzurum in 1823 as well as 1847) on the terms of Zuhab. It continued to serve as the point of reference drawing the border and conceiving sovereign statehood, in word as well as in deed. It built an international peace of unmatched resilience in the Middle East, going far beyond its original purpose of setting up a truce and settling the border.
We have long assumed, implicitly, that the Ottomans and the Safavids scarcely dealt with each other after 1639. Our received knowledge holds that once the on and off fighting of almost one and a half centuries (1501– 1638) ended with the Ottomans’ taking back Baghdad (1638), neither side wished to become entangled with the other, that they were content with upholding the peace resting only upon a truce and a sketchy border. But this is not in fact the case. While it is true that for the years after 1639 we find nothing like the density of war-referenced military, diplomatic, financial and literary records as that pertaining to Ottoman–Safavid relations in the period prior to this date, closer investigation yields a host of lesserknown sources that attest to how this relationship lived on and required constant upkeep on both sides. Peace, after all, demands investment: it needs information and communication, in the absence of which it is liable to break down. We perhaps best get a sense of how the maintenance of peace was itself an active process by thinking in terms of detente, that is the principle of diplomatic engagement and accommodation that underlay first the European interpower relations in the run-up to World War One and then, more famously, East–West relations in the latter decades of the Cold War. Of course, we should be aware of the limitations of this analogy. There was no Nixon figure in the mid-seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire, nor a Safavid Willy Brandt. But thinking in terms of detente does usefully draw our attention to the fact that peace between the Ottoman and Safavid states was not simply an absence of war: it was a delicate state of affairs that called for active management. The present study reconstructs the history of Ottoman–Safavid diplomacy, political dealings and borderland contacts in the forty-four years after the Peace of Zuhab. It establishes the narrative on this uncharted field almost from scratch, with documents that were not necessarily drawn up to shed light on this subject. It demonstrates that, far from being static, as is often assumed, Ottoman–Safavid relations during the period in question were eventful and dynamic. In particular, over the chapters that follow I attempt to reconstruct how ambassadors, envoys and diplomatic heralds bearing messages and letters shuttled between monarchs, heads of government, border governors and military commanders. The agenda of this busy diplomacy involved negotiations between host statesmen and incoming missions, talks between one of the parties and the other side’s adversaries, embittering demands, declarations of goodwill and thankfulness, mistaken mobilisations, provocations, empty threats, shows of might, initiations of state of war with fielded armies, and reassurances in the face of potential tensions. It was also asymmetric. In its long-term state policy, the Ottoman Empire deemed its relations with Safavid Iran to be of purely secondary importance, and sought simply to maintain the peace at as cheap a price as possible. The Safavids, by contrast, regarded that their relations with the Ottoman Empire were vital for their well-being. Therefore, they readily made concessions to uphold the peace and build a working relationship with their western neighbour. Having internalised the conclusions drawn from their earlier fights with the Empire, they were furthernore aware of what was at stake here, and what they stood to lose if hostilities were to flare up once again. Marginal elements still breached the borders, frontier entities occasionally raided into the other side, not only state troops but also vassals and even tributaries took military actions, central courts as well as their border governors and commanders disputed the territory, demarcation and fortified positions. Yet, the aftermaths of all these strifes bear witness to a simple reality: central courts could set the course of relations without necessarily giving in to the fait accomplis of frontier elements. The borderland brought forth content for the states to deal with, but at the end of the day, central courts could steer relations towards their direction of choice. This is why great upheavals by the borders could end up fostering a cooperative friendship between the two sides, and why lesser breaches could bring them to the brink of war. Besides, border contacts also show that diplomatic business by frontier governors (though not that by vassals or tributaries) was coordinated with, not alternative to, state centres. My exploration of Ottoman–Safavid diplomacy and political relations in this period is divided into four chapters. In lieu of an introduction and conclusion, Chapter 1 plunges straight into the action and offers a broad overview with thematised inferences based on the findings put together in the rest of the book, handling the period as a whole. Focusing not on individual events but on structural dynamics and the logic of practice, it outlines the hierarchical foundation of relations marked by a principle of seniority–juniority on every platform, highlights the key concepts of legal personhood, representation and delegation that underlay diplomatic missions, and delineates the different categories of missions that were exchanged. It proceeds then to explore the use of language in official communications. Next it thematises foreign policy, status quos, the borderland, balance of power, harmony and strife. In doing so it depicts how busily Constantinople and Isfahan (then the capital of Safavid Iran) dealt with each other after the definitive peace. Proceeding with a degree of abstraction, Chapter 1 thus familiarises the reader with the post-1639 peacetime interactions between the Ottoman and the Safavid states.
Chapter 2 moves into a granular approach and delves into the events of 1639–43, beginning with the immediate setting that came into being after the truce. Both sides prioritised a military withdrawal with minimal entanglement, and therefore pushed to upgrade their bare border protocol to a treaty with almost no change throughout its enactment. But the signing in 1639 of the border protocol of Zuhab did not, in fact, translate into an immediate end to the state of war. It took serious time and challenge for the text to be ratified and promulgated as a formal peace treaty. This episode, among others, also reflected the disparity of interest between the two parties. The defeated Safavids and the victorious Ottomans both wanted to end the war, but whereas the hard-pressed Safavids needed the peace and readily made concessions for its sake, the Ottomans, in their position of strength, deemed the peace a desideratum only on their own chosen terms. Not because of these conflicting priorities though, an unforeseen halt interrupted the ratifiction steps. A diplomatic ‘interregnum’ struck just as the prisoners of war were being exchanged, after the last ratification was sent out and before it reached its destination. Therefore, the formal state of war dragged on for a few more years after the fighting had stopped. The Ottomans swiftly built up the fortress of Baghdad, and manned it with troops as strong as the army of a lesser kingdom. Top dignitaries likewise kept their wartime titles of command. Besides the two envoys, commissioners, the ratificatory writ of pledge, a peace letter, and a few other diplomatic letters exchanged after the signing of the protocol, it took the sides two further ambassadors and two more envoys as well as at least twelve further diplomatic letters, a few espionage undertakings, backstage deals, and political executions of high-ranking personages to work out the finalisation of the peace, whose fulfilment had meanwhile become even more tangled owing to a demarcation strife and a border breach. Also thereby, the Ottomans in polite but steely fashion made clear to the Safavids, buoyed by the news of Murad IV’s unexpected death in February 1640, that the Empire retained the upper hand. As the confident grand vizier Avlonyalı Kemankesh Kara Mustafa Pasha tried to reassure his restless new monarch Ibrahim (r. 1640–8) of the Empire’s steady position of strength, the Ottomans set about cleansing middle Iraq of the traces of the bygone Safavid occupation (1623–38) and stamping it anew with marks of their own lordship. Chapter 3 explores the seventeen years (1644–60) that followed the Treaty of Zuhab’s coming into full effect. After the Cretan War broke out in 1645, the Republic of Venice sent emissaries to talk the Safavids into joining the anti-Ottoman alliance, all of which the Shahdom sent back empty-handed. After 1640, each time the Ottomans’ European foes called on Iran to wage war against the Empire, the Safavids would decline, owing to their conviction that the Empire was essentially stronger than Iran, that gains at its expense could not be lasting, and that upholding the peace was in Iran’s best interests under any circumstances. Yet, other developments too helped the Safavids make up their mind as such. For instance, the Ottomans created a military command of the Iranian front at Erzurum in 1646 and fielded an army by the border at Armenia, at the same time as fighting another war across the Mediterranean. Nevertheless, in the next few years the two sides teamed up to advance their common interests over Mughal India and the Bukharan Uzbek Khanate. One borderland that remained a persistent source of tension was the Persian Gulf hinterland, where both sides of the border were then a hotbed of local factions, which frequently played the two monarchies off against each other. Safavid plans in 1651 for a campaign against Ottoman-tributary Basra could likely have sparked a direct confrontation between the two states. But it was instead the Basran principality’s infighting that shook the two states’ sprouting neighbourship, as it triggered an Ottoman intervention from Baghdad, which the anti-Ottoman faction in Basra confronted with warriors recruited from Iran. Yet, after setbacks, the Ottomans could turn the tide: the Sublime Porte did away with the Basran principality’s tributary status and converted it into a hereditary fiefdom within the Empire. In 1656, the Ottomans, against indirect Iranian hostility from the early 1650s, set up another military command of the Iranian front, this time at Van, and fielded an imperial army near the border at Azerbaijan. As before, the Safavids gave up their claims once this military command sent emissaries across the border to Iranian governors and to the shah himself. Assured that the Safavids posed no threat, in 1656 the Sublime Porte rejected overtures from the Mughals to invade and split Iran. For the Ottomans, their line of demarcation with Safavid Iran was worth preserving. Chapter 4 deals with the last twenty-three years spanned by this book (1660–82), when the nexus of entanglements shifted altogether from the north and the middle to the southern flank of the border. Once again, Basra was a particular upsetter of rest. Against the Ottomans’ regime makeover in the principality of Basra, three uprisings broke out in the 1660s, once again backed up with troops recruited from Iran. The Ottomans had to undertake three imperial campaigns to crush the Basran establishment’s insubordination for good: in the end Basra became fully annexed as a province.
In 1666, the Ottoman and the Safavid grand viziers exchanged letters to underscore the two states’ neighbourship tested by the ongoing clashes in southern Iraq. By fielding secondary imperial armies near the Persian Gulf while fighting full-fledged wars in Europe and the Mediterranean, the Ottomans effectively browbeat the Safavids. Even after the Basran upheaval was settled, the Sublime Porte asserted itself with the Shahdom in 1669 through a letter of victory recording the fulfilled conquest of Crete from Venice. Perhaps somewhat cowed by such assertions of Ottoman mastery, the Safavids made a point of denying asylum to the defeated Basran leaders.
While it remained mutually accepted practice for both parties to offer refuge to individual defectors, to receive mass defections from across the border was much likelier to stir up a war, particularly when, as in the Basran instance, the defectors proposed also to transfer territory and revenue from one state to the other. Even when presented with the lucrative prospect of acquiring Basra, the Safavids were reluctant to risk a clash with their Ottoman neighbours, choosing instead to prioritise stability over the riskier possibility of marginal gain. As the Cretan War was going on in the 1660s, Iran rejected another round of Venetian offers to fight against the Empire, and turned down a further call, this time from Poland and Russia, in the 1670s. This latter decade was in fact not entirely peaceful, and on several occasions both the Ottomans and the Safavids mobilised against each other when borderland hearsay triggered false alarms and led to states of emergency.
The greatest threat to diplomatic stability was often inadvertent human error. By the early 1680s, peace was restored, both along the frontier and in communications between the courts of the two states. But this was only the calm before the storm, for a revolution in Middle Eastern diplomacy was about to break out without the slightest foretoken. As for our current knowledge on post-1639 Ottoman–Safavid relations, the present book engages with existing scholarship extensively. This it does, however, not by discussing the literature in the body text, but by using and, when need be, quietly setting aright these works in the chapter endnotes, for the sake of keeping the book’s flow as free as possible from historiographical debates and as refined as possible in establishing hitherto-unknown facts upon the new information unearthed during research.
The same goes for primary sources, which I draw on heavily and, whenever necessary, correct quietly in the endnotes, instead of diverging the flow to discuss a particular source. These choices are made in line with the intended function of the work: most of the facts found in the body text, no matter how ‘factual’ they may seem at first glance, are new discoveries, and whereas I thematise and contextualise them, the originality of the knowledge they reveal is a main strength of the book that will presumably have a longer lifespan than the historiographical debates that come along. The visibility of primary sources and secondary literature are therefore confined to endnotes, and engagement with them to references.12
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