War and Peace in Qajar Persia: Implications Past and ... - Oguzlar.az

Narrowing the frontier 151witnessed, the Perso-Ottoman borderlands would still shift eastwards andwestwards in a manner roughly analogous to the historical tribulations of aPolish state trapped between Germany and Russia.This is not to argue that at certain times and along certain stretches ofthe borderlands, boundaries did not exist as fixed limits of militarized statecontrol, or that they were not respected as such. In fact Matthee argues thatthe “Ottoman–Safavid border area, moreover, was a political border asmuch as a frontier”. 5 Fixed border transit posts, frequented by merchantsand pilgrims crossing the Zagros mountains, operated with precision (mostparticularly the Kermanshah–Baghdad road route via Mandali), whilePersian sources from the Safavid era depict the western borders as a militarizedlimit, separating the alien lands and peoples to the west. 6 Yet, while aseries of frontier fortresses may have marked lines of military control – sometimesfairly rigidly, for local borderlanders the frontier represented a “hostile,unstable and insecure zone that presented an administrative challenge toboth empires”, 7 from the malarial marshlands of the south to the remotemountains and valleys further north. 8 The constant changes in the post-warbalance of power recorded by the early Perso-Ottoman territorial treaties asboth local powers tried to meet such a challenge exacerbated these classiccharacteristics of the frontier and created an unstable margin in the celebratedfashion of a border march, a zone in which both imperial fortunes and theloyalties of borderlanders fluctuated.The Persian and Ottoman empires had learned from long experience, likethe Romans and other imperial powers before them, that in these circumstancesone did not just build alliances with borderlanders up to the limitsof what was usually fleeting territorial control, but beyond them. 9 This reinforcedthe zonal function of this frontier and was a state of affairs with whichdistant central authority may not have been unhappy. As McLachlan (1989)attests,local considerations were often more important than imperial policiesin settling the spheres of Iranian and Ottoman influence in the borderlands.Furthermore, the Ottomans hesitated to define the boundary tooprecisely because of the potential loss of large revenues collected fromclient tribes in the area. 10Moreover, allying with borderlanders could only be tentative and more oftenthan not, only temporary, since tribal loyalties “might be bought but couldnever be taken for granted”. 11 If pragmatism governed Ottoman frontier policy,then the overriding Persian interest in projecting the frontier westwards(or at least rendering it more secure and stable) may have been an appreciationof a rather more basic and constant consideration, as explained byBarthold (1984): “The Shi’i rulers of Persia were . . . reluctant to leave a regionthat harbored the principal Shi’i sanctuaries and where the Shi’is constitutedthe major part of the population, in the hands of the Sunni sultans of Turkey.” 12