The Notion of Frontier in Ottoman-Iranian Relations

The borderland was the physical locus of the wars fought between the Ottomans and the Safavids, and later between the Ottomans and the Afshar, Zand, and Qajar dynasties. This meant that the borderland peoples, who on occasion participated actively in such wars, suffered most directly from this long history of violent interstate disputes. While the real impact of such violence was felt on the ground, theoretical conceptualizations of the frontier shaped the evolution of Ottoman-Iranian relations. For example, from the emergence of the Safavids in 1501 until 1639, the Ottomans defined in Iran, and by extension its frontiers, in two distinct ways. In times of peace, when an uneasy coexistence prevailed, it was a rather vague dâr al-Islâm. However, such vagueness lent itself to instability; thus, in times of war, Iran easily became a dâr al-harb, or abode of war, and its borderland a space of religiously sanctified wars of submission, very much like the Ottoman frontiers with Europe. The long peace that followed the 1639 Treaty paved the way for yet another set of formulations, which were first put to paper in 1746. It was, however, only in 1823 that the Ottoman and Iranian states agreed to put religious differences aside, signing a treaty that contained no reference to sectarian grievances and related definitions of the frontier which in turn, set in motion the final delimitation and demarcation of the Ottoman-Iranian frontier.
My paper would examine the historical transformation of various notions related to border and the borderland in the context of the Ottoman-Iranian relations. It will, however, do this from an Ottoman perspective with references to the Iranian chronicles as well.