BY THELATE sixteenth century, the Ottomans reigned over vast stretches of territory in three continents, covering all or part of thirty present-day countries. Their empire's subjects numbered as many as thirty-five million, and its animals many more. Their capital city and their military, by far the largest in Europe, were supplied from distant provinces with countless ships and caravans of provisions, and herds of sheep and cattle. These were tremendous achievements for an early modern empire—and also tremendous opportunities for some enterprising microbes, especially among the Ottomans’ large, vulnerable, and mobile population of livestock.

This chapter examines the history of a devastating but little-known pestilence of Ottoman sheep and cattle in the 1590s, and it makes the case that this contagion set a pattern for major European epizootics (animal epidemics) over the following century and a half. The first part explains how the Ottoman livestock pestilence arose from a conjuncture of three circumstances: rising stock densities and diminishing pasturage; expanding animal supply lines and pressures on supplies during military campaigns; and the recurrence of severe winters typical of the Little Ice Age. These factors aligned to produce a widespread contagion that wiped out as many as nine in ten sheep and cattle over much of the empire, contributing to severe famine, flight, and violence. The second part of the chapter examines how Europe witnessed a similar combination of ecological pressures during the eigh-teenth century, with similar consequences for its livestock. Changing cattle supply lines and the untimely combination of severe winters and military campaigns triggered Europe-wide panzootics (animal pandemics) of rinderpest in the 1710s and 1740s resulting in losses of millions of cattle. The third and final part of this essay reconsiders some conventional narratives in the history of veterinary medicine in light of these findings. The few scholars who have written on the history of early modern epizootics have tended to champion the early proponents of contagion theories and their efforts to contain invading diseases of livestock, especially in response to the 1710s and 1740s rinderpest outbreaks. Yet contemporary observers, including contagionists, also emphasized local environmental factors in epizootic outbreaks, and their observations should be appreciated as more than mere holdovers from pre-contagionist Galenic medical thought.

Introduction to Part III: The Slow Recovery

To judge from accounts of the early eighteenth century, the level of population and agriculture in Ottoman lands had made little progress since the aftermath of the Celali Rebellion. In 1706, the returning Venetian ambassador could still report that “Asia is a country bereft of people with scarce revenue, full of brigands, breeding rebels, scattered with wandering tribes and people living in tents, governed by officers too far from the eye of the sovereign.” Over the following decades Ottoman lands became a trope for neglect and desertion in the literature of the Enlightenment.

This book began as an attempt to understand the impact of human land use on the environment of the Near East during early modern times. In the course of that research, I started to look at a number of climate studies, including new data from the analysis of tree rings. It was then I discovered that Ottoman lands had entered their longest drought in the past six centuries from 1591 to 1595. Recalling the outbreak of the devastating Celali Rebellion in Anatolia in 1596, I figured the timing had to be more than mere coincidence. However, as I worked at the problem, the path from climate to crisis proved more complicated than I had imagined, and the ramifications of these events proved much more far-reaching than I had anticipated. In the end, that question became the focus of a whole new study.

In the attempt to understand how the Little Ice Age triggered a general crisis in Ottoman lands, my research shot out in a number of directions. Ultimately, this work had to cover a wide range of topics from provisioning, settlement, agriculture, and land tenure, to demographics, climatology, and the course of famines and epidemics. In some cases, other historians had already cleared the way for me, but as often as not, I was forced to cut my own trails through the evidence, sometimes leading to unexpected conclusions.

By the late 1580s, the empire faced systemic threats to its stability and the functioning of its provisioning systems. However, the crisis and rebellion that would sweep Ottoman lands in the following decade was also rooted in the problems of one particular region: the province of Karaman in south-central Anatolia, especially its southeastern district of Larende. In order to understand how the crisis broke out here in this poor, inland province rather than in one of the major urban or agricultural centers of the empire, this chapter takes a closer look at Karaman's peculiar history and geography. A relatively late and difficult conquest, Karaman had once been the seat of an independent empire and had long resisted Ottoman rule. By the late sixteenth century, this region of south-central Anatolia also exemplified the worst effects of population pressure and economic turmoil in the empire, creating an explosive situation that would blow up in the Celali Rebellion of the 1590s.

What we regard as the final decade of the 1500s was for the Ottomans the dawn of a new era, in more than one sense of the word. Overlapping with the years 1591 and 1592 AD came the thousandth anniversary of Mohammed's flight from Mecca to Medina, as reckoned in lunar years. In other words, the Muslim world entered upon the year 1000 AH: the beginning of the new millennium. Although the year 1000 inspired a wave of millenarian prophecies in the Muslim world as it had among Christians some six hundred years before, the calendrical revolution passed without a corresponding revolution in human affairs, at least at first.

Introduction to Part II: The Freezing of the Bosphorus

In February 1621, the chronicler İbrahim Peçevi observed a “very rare event.” After several days of taking ice, the Istanbul Bosphorus had frozen over completely. For a brief window of time, a bridge of ice covered the narrow strip of water separating Europe and Asia, uniting the two continents and the two halves of the empire. In memory of the occasion, Peçevi quoted a poem composed that year:

Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Ottoman agriculture gradually shifted from subsistence and provisioning to commerce and export. Rural disorder and diminishing imperial authority in the provinces unraveled aspects of the old provisioning systems. The abandonment of the tımar system and relentless fiscal demands drove a transformation of imperial finance and landholding, encouraging the commercialization of farming. Meanwhile, the empire's growing military vulnerabilities encouraged the search for allies and trading partners, binding the empire more tightly to the European state system and prompting more concessions to foreign merchants. By the end of the eighteenth century, Ottoman lands were being drawn into a Europe-centered world economy.

This book has offered a new interpretation of Ottoman history from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. It has argued that in order to understand the empire's successes, crises, and transformations, historians must take into account the ecological conditions of the early modern Near East and the profound impacts and repercussions of the Little Ice Age. In Part I, this study made the case for an expansive “imperial ecology” that underlay the empire's rapid expansion in the classical age but which became increasingly vulnerable to war and natural disaster as population pressure set in over the late 1500s. Part II examined the impact of Little Ice Age climatic fluctuations from the late sixteenth through the early eighteenth centuries, demonstrating the strong links between extreme climate events and the outbreak of the Celali Rebellion and the recurring disorders of the 1600s. Finally, Part III made the case that transformations in human ecology – particularly the spread of nomadic pastoralism, migration to urban areas, and a shift to new crops for commerce and exports – slowed the demographic recovery of Ottoman lands, leaving the empire relatively depopulated by the mid-nineteenth century.

For centuries, scholars have speculated about the nature of climate fluctuations and their consequences in historical times. However, only recently have historians and climatologists found ways to reliably and accurately reconstruct these changes. Global warming, in particular, has inspired the creation of ever longer and more comprehensive climate histories based on proxy data, such as tree rings and ice cores, and on events recorded in historical sources. While such efforts have focused principally on early modern Europe, the wealth of weather-related information in Ottoman writings and documents, together with contemporary European reports and modern climatology studies, permit a similar if less detailed reconstruction of climate in the Near East. This climate history reveals both likenesses and disparities with Little Ice Age weather in Europe and in other parts of the world. Both factors – the local forces at work in Near Eastern climate and the global forces that created the Little Ice Age – played a key role in the atmospheric and human drama of the Ottoman crisis.

The aftermath of the Celali Rebellion witnessed a great nomad invasion into large parts of Anatolia, Syria, and northern Iraq. Tribes once restricted to mountainous or desert land in the eastern provinces poured almost to the western end of Turkey. The movement proved sudden, surprising, and – for over two hundred years – irreversible. As discussed in previous chapters, a combination of state policy and demographic expansion had gradually forced back the bounds of nomadic pastoralism since the early 1500s, paving the way for settled villages. Tribal resistance, though persistent, had been unable to stop the encroachment of farming into former grazing lands. The Little Ice Age crisis, however, offered the nomads a chance to push back. In the space of a few years, this pastoral movement virtually wiped out the settlement gains of a century. As in past disasters, both human and environmental factors played important roles.

It was not population pressure alone, but population pressure combined with natural disaster and imperial missteps that drove the empire into rebellion and crisis. To understand how the catastrophe unfolded, we need first to examine the empire's vulnerabilities and responses to natural disaster more closely. In the generation leading up to the crisis of the 1590s, the Ottomans weathered a number of violent storms, both literal and metaphorical. These events tested the strength of imperial authority and its systems of population and resource management against the vagaries of man and nature. The threats came from the usual suspects: famine, pestilence and death, and war – the classic Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The underlying causes of disaster, however, were frequently meteorological, above all the severe winters and spring droughts that characterized the onset of the Little Ice Age.

This is the story of how a climate event, the so-called “Little Ice Age,” nearly brought down the Ottoman Empire around 1600 AD. And although that would be a story worth telling on its own, this study offers to explain much more. Through the narrative of climate and crisis, the following pages will explore the rise of an empire and its provisioning, settlement, and population. We will see how a complex set of circumstances conspired to create a climate-led catastrophe; and how the crisis of the Little Ice Age marked a critical conjuncture in the human ecology of Ottoman lands, as centuries of growth and expansion turned for a time to contraction and retreat. The story that follows describes much more than a single episode in the life of an empire. It represents nothing less than a turning point in the history of the Near East and by extension the making of the modern world.