¹ Engelbert Kaempfer, Am Hofe des persischen Grosskönigs, 1684–1685 (Darmstadt, Germany: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984), 59.

² ʿAbd al-Husain Khatunabadi, Vaqayiʻ al-Sinin va al-Aʻvaam, ya Guzarishha-yi Saliyanah az Ibtida-yi Khilqat ta Sal-i 1195 Hijri (Tehran: Kitabfurushi-i Islamiyya, 1973), 529–30.

³ On the second coronation of Shah Sulayman, see especially Rudolph Matthee, “The Safavid King Who Was Crowned Twice: The Enthronement of Safi Mirza as Shah Safi II in 1077/1666 and as Shah Sulayman in 1078/1668,” in Mapping Safavid Iran, ed. Nobuaki Kondo (Tokyo: Tokyo Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, 2015). The tenth volume of Chardin's Voyages is devoted to a lengthy description of this coronation; John Chardin, Voyages du Chevalier Chardin en Perse et Autres Lieux de l'Orient, vol. 10 (Paris: LeNormant, 1811), 1–140.

⁴ H. R. Roemer, “The Safavid Period,” in Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 6 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 304.

⁵ A recent collection of studies on 18th-century Iranian history is fittingly titled Crisis, Collapse, Militarism and Civil War: The History and Historiography of 18th Century Iran, ed. Michael Axworthy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

⁶ Roger Savory, Iran under the Safavids (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

⁷ A. J. Newman's Safavid Iran: Rebirth of a Persian Empire (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2006), although arguing for a break from Savory's approach, follows a similar analytical framework, but with greater emphasis placed on discursive analysis of Safavid claims to legitimacy and on the rivalry between the Safavids’ Turkic and Tajik polities. He does not offer an explicit thesis about the causes behind the fall of the dynasty but emphasizes political challenges among elites and foreign military forces over social and economic factors. See especially Newman, Safavid Iran, 115.

⁸ Rudi Matthee, Persia in Crisis: Safavid Decline and the Fall of Isfahan (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2012), 139–72.

⁹ Newman, Safavid Iran, 94–95; Matthee, Persia in Crisis, 94, 158–60.

¹⁰ McNeill, J. R., “The State of the Field of Environmental History,” Review of Environments and Resources 35 (2010): 346Google Scholar.

¹¹ Hobsbawm, Eric, “The General Crisis of the European Economy in the 17th Century I,” Past & Present 5, no. 1 (1954), 33–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “The Crisis of the 17th Century II,” Past & Present 6, no. 1 (1954), 44–65.

¹² For an accessible overview of scholarship on the Little Ice Age in world history, see Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300–1850 (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

¹³ McNeill, “State of the Field,” 347.

¹⁴ Sam White used the term “imperial ecology” in his analysis of Ottoman environmental history to refer to “a particular flow of resources and population directed by the imperial center” in The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 17. To this we add two points: that the imperial center in Safavid Iran was often not so central at all to its internal linkages and exchange; and that normative systems also were important to patterning material interaction.

¹⁵ Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013) offers a broad overview of the interconnectivity of global environmental crises but has little to say about the Middle East or Central Asia.

¹⁶ White, Climate of Rebellion, 14.

¹⁷ Willem M. Floor, The Economy of Safavid Persia (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2000), 2.

¹⁸ Xavier de Planhol, “Kāriz iii. Economic and Social Contexts,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. 15, no. 6, 569–72.

¹⁹ On tribalism in modern Iran, see especially Lois Beck, The Qashqai of Iran (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986); and Arash Khazeni, Tribes and Empire on the Margins of Nineteenth-Century Iran (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009).

²⁰ Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 64–69.

²¹ On the Safavid governmental system and its gradual development, see Willem Floor, Safavid Government Institutions (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 2001). On the central chancellery from a more conceptual angle, see Colin P. Mitchell, The Practice of Politics in Safavid Iran: Power, Religion and Rhetoric (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012).

²² A. K. S. Lambton, Landlord and Peasant in Persia: A Study in Land Tenure and Land Administration (London: Oxford University Press, 1953): 105–28.

²³ On the socioeconomic significance of vaqf in the early modern Islamic world, see especially Baer, Gabriel, “Waqf as a Prop for the Social System (Sixteenth–Twentieth Centuries),” Islamic Law and Society 4, no. 3 (1997): 264–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁴ Gene R. Garthwaite, The Persians (New York: Wiley, 2008); cf. Matthee, Rudi “Was Safavid Iran an Empire?” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 53 (2010): 233–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar (he says “yes”).

²⁵ See, for instance, Matthee's perspective on the economic history of the Safavids in Rudolph P. Matthee, The Politics of Trade in Safavid Iran: Silk for Silver, 1600–1730 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

²⁶ See, for instance, the detailed geographical focus of the work of one of the founding figures of the Annales school in Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009).

²⁷ Hodgson, Venture of Islam, vol. 2, 69–84

²⁸ Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 270.

²⁹ Notable recent works include Londa L. Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); the works of Carolyn Merchant, especially Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); and Corey Ross, Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire: Europe and the Transformation of the Tropical World (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2019).

³⁰ Merchant, Ecological Revolutions, 6.

³¹ Chardin, Voyages, vol. 9, 6.

³² Adam Olearius, “Isfahan,” in The Voyages and Travels of the Ambassadors from the Duke of Holstein, to the Great Duke of Muscovy, and the King of Persia . . ., trans. John Davies (London: Dring and Starkey, 1662; ed. Lance Jenott, 2000), 291–303, https://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/olearius/travels.html.

³³ The most famous example is found in Nizam al-Mulk's 12th-century Siyasatnama. Numerous similar formulations are found in political literature throughout the Islamic world, as surveyed in Jennifer A. London, “The ‘Circle of Justice,’” History of Political Thought 32, no. 3 (2011): 425–47.

³⁴ Safavid administrative manuals include the frequently referenced Vladimir F. Minorski, Tadhkirat Al-Mulūk: A Manual of Safavid Administration, circa 1137/1725 (Cambridge, MA: E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Trust, 1980).

³⁵ Willem Floor, A Fiscal History of Iran in the Safavid and Qajar Periods, 1500–1925 (New York: Bibliotheca Persica Press, 1999); Matthee, Politics of Trade.

³⁶ Mitchell, Practice of Politics, 180.

³⁷ Floor, Safavid Government Institutions, 3. Tuyul grants were a form of land grant, usually granting tax farming rights over a territory in lieu of salary for administrative and military officials, similar to the iqta system of previous periods; W. Floor, “Fiscal System iv. Safavid and Qajar Periods,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, online edition: https://iranicaonline.org/articles/fiscal-system-iv-safavid-and-qajar-periods.

³⁸ Matthee, Politics of Trade.

³⁹ Laurence Lockhart, The Fall of the Safavi Dynasty and the Afghan Occupation of Persia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1958). See also the Cambridge History of Iran account of late Safavid history, which explains the empire's “decline” as a result of the inattention of Safavid shahs, the growing influence of women in the harem, and unchecked incursions along the frontiers under Sulayman and Sultan Husayn; H. R. Roemer, “Safavid Period,” 306–13. This narrative parallels Bernard Lewis's famous modernization theory narrative of Ottoman decline, first published in 1961; The Emergence of Modern Turkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

⁴⁰ Matthee, Persia in Crisis, 154–60.

⁴¹ Parker, Global Crisis, 25.

⁴² Melville, Charles, “Meteorological Hazards and Disasters in Iran: A Preliminary Survey to 1950,” Iran 22 (1984): 132CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴³ Peter Christensen, The Decline of Iranshahr: Irrigation and Environment in the Middle East, 500 BC–AD 1500 (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2016): 247–48. Christensen went as far as to suggest that much of the devastation of the medieval period in greater Iran that has been blamed on the Mongol conquests was, in fact, a product of long-term environmental decline. G. Parker made the argument in Global Crisis that there was a common sensitivity among early modern agrarian states to climatic fluctuations, given their material grounding in agriculture.

⁴⁴ Mikhail, Alan, “Climate and the Chronology of Iranian History,” Iranian Studies 49, no. 6 (2016): 963CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁵ Newman, Safavid Iran, 64; Matthee, Persia in Crisis, 63, 158, 215.

⁴⁶ Parker, Global Crisis, 12.

⁴⁷ Sam White, A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe's Encounter with North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 4–6.

⁴⁸ Wakeman, Frederic, “"China and the Seventeenth-Century Crisis,” Late Imperial China 7, no. 1 (1986): 1–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁹ White, Climate of Rebellion, 163–86.

⁵⁰ Hobsbawm, “General Crisis” and “Crisis of the 17th Century”; cf. H. R. Trevor-Roper, The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), which argues that the crises were more or less isolated political events, reflecting a growing divide between state and society.

⁵¹ Sam White, John Brooke, and Christian Pfister, “Climate, Weather, Agriculture, and Food,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Climate History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 338–40.

⁵² The International Tree-Ring Databank is housed on the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) website (https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/paleoclimatology-data/datasets/tree-ring). We downloaded twenty-seven tree-ring records (chronologies) from the International Tree-Ring Databank originating from the eastern Mediterranean region. We screened these chronologies for accurate tree-ring dating using the program COFECHA and rejected any chronologies that were not well-dated. Then we standardized the series using the program ARSTAN, utilizing an age-dependent spline with a twenty-year kernel that allowed the removal of any age-related signal from the tree rings while preserving low-frequency signals such as long-term droughts. We retained fourteen chronologies that had a strong expressed population signal (EPS) of 0.85 or higher back through 1670 (Table 1).

⁵³ We conducted a principal component analysis (PCA) with varimax rotation on the fourteen chronologies that made it through our dating and standardization filters. This combined the common signal from related chronologies by weighting them as significantly unique eigenvectors. All eigenvectors with a sum of squares loading greater than 1.0 were examined for a climate response using KNMI Climate Explorer. The first and second eigenvectors (that carried most of the signal from the combined chronologies) were significantly correlated with a three-month average of the Standardized Precipitation Evaporation Index (SPEI 03; Fig. 2) and the July temperature from the Climate Research Unit T4.0 data set, respectively.

⁵⁴ Matthee, Persia in Crisis, 94.

⁵⁵ V. Gholami, M. Ahmadi Jolandan, and J. Torkaman, “Evaluation of Climate Change in Northern Iran during the Last Four Centuries by Using Dendroclimatology,” Natural Hazards 85 (2017): 1846.

⁵⁶ P. Flohr, D. Fleitmann, E. Zorita, A. Sadekov, H. Cheng, M. Bosomworth, L. Edwards, W. Matthews, and R. Matthews, “Late Holocene Droughts in the Fertile Crescent Recorded in a Speleothem from Northern Iraq,” Geophysical Research Letters 44 (2017): 1534.

⁵⁷ Faisal H. Husain, Rivers of the Sultan: The Tigris and Euphrates in the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 113–14.

⁵⁸ Vali Quli ibn Daʿud Quli Shamlu, Qisas al-Khaqani (Tehran: Saziman-i Chap va Intisharat-i Vizarat-i Farhang va Irshad-i Islami, 1995), 306–8.

⁵⁹ Raphael DuMans, Estat de la Perse en 1660 (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1890), 14.

⁶⁰ Rudi Matthee, “Solayman I,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, online ed., 2015, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/solayman-1.

⁶¹ Chardin, Voyages, vol. 9, 571.

⁶² Ibid.; Ibid., vol. 10, 2–4; Matthee, Persia in Crisis, 94.

⁶³ Chardin, Voyages, vol. 8, 435.

⁶⁴ Ibid., vol. 8, 130. Chardin also notes a “plague” gate, the finest city gate that led directly to its main thoroughfare, which the townspeople dared not open out of fear it would lead to a return of plague. He claims that Shah Abbas I built a new grand entrance to the city to humor the locals and their superstition. Ibid., vol. 8, 132–33.

⁶⁵ Ibid., vol. 10, 6. See also further commentary by Newman, Safavid Iran, 94–95, 221n6; and Matthee, Persia in Crisis, 94.

⁶⁶ Newman, Safavid Iran, 94; Matthee, Politics of Trade, 176–78; Matthee, Persia in Crisis, 63, 167.

⁶⁷ Chardin, Voyages, vol. 10, 2.

⁶⁸ Ibid., vol. 10, 3.

⁶⁹ Okazaki, Shoko, “The Great Persian Famine of 1870–71,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 49, no. 1 (1986): 192CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Seyf, Ahmad, “Iran and the Great Famine, 1870–72,” Middle East Studies 46, no. 2 (2010): 289–306CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁰ See Kazemi, Ranin, “Of Diet and Profit: On the Question of Subsistence Crises in Nineteenth-Century Iran,” Middle East Studies 52, no. 2 (2016), 335–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and, applied to a particular case study, Kazemi, Ranin, “The Black Winter of 1860–61: War, Famine, and the Political Ecology of Disasters in Qajar Iran,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 37, no. 1 (2017): 24–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷¹ James M. Gustafson, Kirman and the Qajar Empire: Local Dimensions of Modernity in Iran, 1794–1914 (New York: Routledge, 2015).

⁷² Matthee, Persia in Crisis, 85.

⁷³ Keith McLachlan, The Neglected Garden: The Politics and Ecology of Agriculture in Iran (London: I. B. Tauris, 1988), 17–25.

⁷⁴ Kazemi, “Black Winter.”

⁷⁵ Abbas Amanat, Iran: A Modern History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 411–15.

⁷⁶ Ahmad Ketabi, Qahtiha-yi Iran (Tehran: Daftar-i Pizhuhishha-yi Farhangi, 2005), 81. See also Muhammad Ibrahim Bastani-Parizi, Siyasat va Iqtisad-i ʿAsr-i Safavi (Tehran: Intisharat-i Safi ʿAlishah), 175, 267.

⁷⁷ Khatunabadi, Vaqayiʿ al-Sinin, 537–44. This account is corroborated by VOC (Dutch East India Company) papers; see Matthee, Persia in Crisis, 215.

⁷⁸ Khatunabadi, Vaqayiʿ al-Sinin, 539–40.

⁷⁹ Ibid., 544.

⁸⁰ Mikhail, Alan, “The Nature of Plague in Late Eighteenth Century Egypt,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82, no. 2 (2008): 249–75Google ScholarPubMed.

⁸¹ Abu al-Hasan ibn Ibrahim Qazvini, Favayid al-Safaviyya: Tarikh-i Salatin va Umra-yi Safavi pas az Suqutt-i Dawlat-i Safaviyya (Tehran: Muʿsasa-yi Mutalaʿat va Tahqiqat-i Farhangi, 1988), 59.

⁸² Parker, Geoffrey, “Crisis and Catastrophe: The Global Crisis of the Seventeenth Century Reconsidered,” American Historical Review 113, no. 4 (2008): 1053–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁸⁴ Muhammad Qasim Hindu Shah Astarabadi Firishtah and Alexander Dow, The History of Hindostan, vol. 3 (London: John Murray, 1792), 363–64.

⁸⁵ Richards, Mughal India, 236–37.

⁸⁶ Muhammad, Abdulla, “Climatic Fluctuation and Natural Disasters in Arabia between Mid-17th and Early 20th Centuries,” GeoJournal 37, no. 1 (1995): 176Google Scholar.

⁸⁷ White, Climate of Rebellion.

⁸⁸ Matthee, Persia in Crisis, 215, n108.

⁸⁹ Khatunabadi, Vaqayiʿ al-Sinin, 567–68.

⁹⁰ Rota, Giorgio, “The Man Who Would Not Be King: Abuʾl Fath Sultan Muhammad Mirza Safavi in India,” Iranian Studies 34, no. 4 (1999): 513–35Google Scholar.

⁹¹ Qazvini, Favayid al-Safaviyya, 75–77.

⁹² Kaempfer, Am Hofe, 59–60.

⁹³ Rudi Matthee, “Soltan Hosayn,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica, online ed., 2015, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/soltan-hosayn.

⁹⁴ See, for instance, the memoirs of Father Krusinski, who notes that Sultan Husayn paid little attention to governmental affairs and spent the country's money on his personal pleasure, including one particular pilgrimage on which he was accompanied by six thousand people and which “not only completely drein'd his Exchequer, but also ruin'd all the Provinces through which he pass'd.” Father Krusinski, The History of the Late Revolutions of Persia: Taken from the Memoirs of Father Krusinski, Procurator of the Jesuits at Ispahan, vol. 1 (London: J. Pemberton, 1733), 127.

⁹⁵ Krusinski, Late Revolutions, vol. 2, 6.

⁹⁶ Krusinski, Late Revolutions, vol. 2, 90.

⁹⁷ David Morgan, Medieval Persia, 1040–1797 (Harlow, UK: Longman, 1988), 151.

⁹⁸ Parker, Global Crisis.

⁹⁹ Muhammad Fath Allah ibn Muhammad Taqi Saravi, Tarikh-i Muhammadi: Ahsan al-Tavarikh (Tehran: Muʿassasa-yi Intisharat-i Amir Kabir, 1992).

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¹⁰² Kazemi, “Black Winter.”