Havoc

Abstract

This chapter recounts a dramatic turning point in the Ottoman Empire’s relationship to the Tigris and Euphrates. In the late seventeenth century, a prolonged drought event and a botched canal project triggered an abrupt shift in the Euphrates’ channel southwest of Baghdad. Beset by plague outbreaks and rural uprisings, the Ottoman provincial administration could not mount an effective response to deal with the chaos unleashed by the channel shift. The Ottoman imperial center, on the other hand, was preoccupied with a prolonged war on its western front. An engineering expedition dispatched from Istanbul in late 1701 came too late to restore the Euphrates to its original bed. The Ottoman Empire had to come to terms with the new fluvial landscape.