The cause of the fall of the Ottoman Empire was climate change?

At the end of the 16th century, thousands of horse-riders entered Anatolia from the suburbs of the Ottoman Empire, plundered various villages, spread violence and chaos, and weakened the Ottoman Sultan’s grip on power.

Four hundred years later, and just a few hundred miles away, a large-scale protest in the former Ottoman Empire’s Syria escalated into a violent civil war in 2011 that continues to this day.

These dark events in the history of the Mediterranean region illustrate the fundamental nature of the potential future threats, both events that inspired the people originated at the local level. Both had their roots in politics which led to dramatic political changes. Unpredictably changing climates due to climate change were largely behind both events.

As an environmental historian I have researched and written extensively on conflict and environmental stress in the Eastern Mediterranean region. Although migration due to life-threatening droughts, hurricanes, rising sea levels, and climate disasters may seem alien and unique to our era, these and other crises of the past have some important lessons to learn. How climate change can shake up human societies. Let us examine them in detail.

A famine in the heart of a vast empire

We are breathing in an era of climate warming largely caused by unsustainable human activities. The present era is generally called the ‘Age of Man’ or the Anthropocene. This period is believed to have originated from another period of widespread global climate change in the 19th century known as the Little Ice Age.

During the Short Ice Age, many regions of the world experienced colder than average temperatures and severe weather. In contrast to the recent climate warming caused by human activities, this short ice age was caused by a large number of natural activities such as volcanic eruptions and affected different regions at different times to different degrees and generally in different ways.

Early observations of its harmful effects were seen in Anatolia in the late 16th century. The area is largely rural and was once a central part of the Ottoman Empire. It is a border region in present-day Turkey. Traditionally, most of its land was used to grow grain or graze flocks of sheep and goats. The region was a prime source of sustenance for the rural population and the citizens of Istanbul (formerly Constantinople), the turbulent capital of the Ottoman Empire.

The top two decades were particularly difficult when the Short Ice Age began around 1600. (This affected other regions of Europe and Asia as well.) But studies of tree production and ancient climates show that Anatolia experienced some of the coldest and driest climates on record for a few years. During these years there were frequent droughts, fogs and floods. At the same time, the inhabitants of the region had to bear the brunt of plague and aggressive state policies, including the need for grain and meat in the empire’s costly war against Hungary.

Continually bad harvests, war and suffering exposed the weaknesses of the Ottoman Empire’s food supply system. Harsh weather hampered state efforts to provide food, spreading famine from the suburbs to Istanbul, compounded by a deadly plague.

At the same time, the Ottoman Empire had to face another problem. Around this time, a rebellion broke out from within the empire. By 1596 a series of rebellions had taken root, collectively known as the ‘Jalali Rebellion’. It was the longest internal challenge to the state in the six centuries of Ottoman rule.

Peasants, semi-nomadic groups, and provincial leaders, unconcerned with the consequences, turned this series of violence, rebellion, and instability into a movement that lasted well into the seventeenth century. When drought, disease and bloodshed became the norm, people began to leave Anatolia, leaving their villages and lands in search of peaceful areas. On the other hand, many who did not have the resources to migrate were killed by famine.

The beginning of the process of hollowing out the Ottoman Empire

Externally, the Ottoman Empire was one of the strongest early regimes of the modern era, before the severity of the weather and epidemics of the plague, and before this series of rebellions internally. The empire covered vast areas of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East and had control over the holiest sites of Islam, Christianity and Judaism. Over the last century, Ottoman armies had reached Central Asia, annexed much of Hungary, and in 1529 reached the Hapsburg Empire, sounding the alarm to Vienna.

Far-reaching political effects of the Jalali uprising

By 1611, the Ottoman Empire was able to re-establish a relatively peaceful environment in rural Anatolia by suppressing the Jalali Rebellion, but at a heavy price. The king’s hold on the provinces was irretrievably weakened, and this internal autonomy over royal authority halted the expansion of the Ottoman Empire.

The Jalali Revolt closed the doors to the golden age of the Ottoman Empire and left the magnificent empire with decentralization, military defeats, and administrative weaknesses that would plague the Ottomans for the rest of the three centuries.

Severity of Climate Change: ‘A Hundred Times on the Dead’

Four hundred years after these events, environmental pressures combined with social unrest pushed Syria into a long and devastating civil war.

The Syrian civil war erupted against a backdrop of political exploitation, the Arab Spring movement and one of Syria’s worst droughts in modern times.

It is difficult to accurately estimate how important the environmental role was in the Syrian civil war because, like the Jalali uprising, its effects were intertwined with socio-political conditions. But the fatal combination of all these conditions cannot be ignored. This is why military experts call climate change a ‘threat intensifier’.

Now entering its second decade, the war in Syria has displaced nearly two million Syrians from their homes. About half of them have become homeless in their own country, while others have migrated to Europe and other neighboring countries, exacerbating the global refugee crisis.

Lessons for the present and the future

The Mediterranean region may have been more affected by the negative effects of global warming, but these two events are not mutually exclusive.

As the Earth’s temperature rises, climate will become a major barrier to human activity, leading to increased fears of war and displacement. In recent years, poor countries like Bangladesh have been devastated by floods, while droughts have turned life upside down in the Horn of Africa and Central America. A large number of people have migrated from these areas to other countries.

The history of the Mediterranean teaches three lessons for dealing with recent global environmental problems.

First: The adverse effects of climate change mostly fall on the poor and downtrodden sections who have little scope to get out of such a situation and start a new life.

Second: Environmental problems are extremely harmful when combined with social conditions and it is almost impossible to separate the two from each other.

Third: Climate change is a force that can lead to problems such as migration and resettlement, accelerated violence, instability of governments, and dramatic changes to human societies around the world.

Climate change will eventually affect everyone in dramatic, disturbing and unpredictable ways. We can learn a lot from our past when considering the future.

Note: This text This conversation was published on and its translation is presented with his permission.