The Longest Peace of the Early Modern Middle East

This project aims to establish the unknown history of the longest peace in the Early Modern Middle East that commenced with the Peace of Zuhab and continued until the fall of the Safavid monarchy in Iran. It will bring to light the multiple dynamics of the eighty-three years of peaceful coexistence between the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Iran, which together controlled almost the entirety of the region in question. Firstly, we will reconstruct the course of events, which are not yet known to us, by using all relevant sources of Iranian, Ottoman, and European origin. A vast majority of these sources consists of literary works in manuscript form and uncatalogued documents. The project will focus not only on Constantinople and Isfahan but also on the borderlands of Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, Iraq, and the Persian Gulf. In this way, we will integrate the geographically removed scenes of international relations within a coherent narrative, which will enable us to better understand how foreign policy was made and how diplomacy was conducted. This holistic approach will allow the findings of our project to go beyond a mere description of the ceremonial form of interstate contacts, and shed light on the rich, tangible content that has remained hidden to us. Additionally, in order to establish the essentials of the pre-modern Middle Eastern diplomacy, we will occasionally refer to cases from other contemporary and non-contemporary states, such as the Mamluks, the Seljuks, the Ilkhanids, the Ghaznavids, the Uzbek Khanates, the Mughals, Moroccoa, and Turkish principalities in Anatolia. This attempt will help us come up with sets of hierarchies for states, rulers, ministers, princes, diplomats, and ceremonies applicable for different contexts and time frames. Last but not least, we will investigate the utilization of religion in this conciliation between two great powers whose relations before 1639 were marked by war, conflict, and confrontation.

The Project reconstructed the network of diplomatic relations (in term of exchange of both envoys and letters) that connected Safavid Persia and the Ottoman empire between 1639 and 1722, as well as the system which regulated this exchange and made it possible and meaningful. These eighty-three years that followed the Peace of Zohab/Kasr-i Shirin (1639) represent the longest period of peace in the Middle East during the early-modern and modern age. Despite its importance, this period has never been properly studied: on the contrary, it has always been seen not only as a time "without history" (on account of the absence of wars between the two powers), but also as one without the adequate primary sources to document what little may have taken place and, finally, as one that coincided with a phase of "decline" for both empires. The project challenged this vision and successfully debunked the equation no wars = no history. In so doing, it contributed to further qualifying the notion of "decline", which had already been heavily called into question by a number of other scholars - both Ottomanists and Safavidists. In order to fill this historiographical void, the project located and used a vast number of primary sources (to a very large extent, official documents issued by either empire, that compounded the few existing narrative sources). In the process, many Persian official documents preserved in the Turkish archives were identified (as is well-known, the central archives of the Safavid state are lost). The Peace of Zohab/Kasr-i Shirin was a turning point in Middle Eastern history: not only did it establish borders that, to a very large extent, still exist today but it also marked an important step in the evolution of the relations between Ottomans and Safavids - from the personal relations between two rulers to the established and codified diplomatic relations between two states with a definite legal personality. Mutatis mutandis, its effects can be compared to those of the Peace of Westphalia, that put an end to the Thirty Years' War: that is, it introduced a new way to do diplomacy and to understand the relations between states. Furthermore, the project showed that the relations between Safavid Persia and the Ottoman empire during the years 1639-1722 were fundamentally peaceful but neither cordial or static: despite the military imbalance between the two states (and in favour of the Ottomans), these relations were subject to a constant process of negotiation which reflected, among other factors, the respective international position of the two powers and especially of the Ottoman empire, which was constantly engaged in Europe (and here one can mention the second siege of Vienna of 1683).