The Ottoman–Safavid settlement of 1639 followed the Ottoman recovery of Baghdad. It became an important reference for later frontiers, but Kurdish borderland politics and the eventual surveyed boundary cannot be reduced to one permanent line drawn that year.

Black-and-white print of Murad IV standing in a long robe and plumed turban beside columns, with an obelisk to the right
A posthumous representation of Sultan Murad IV, published in Happel’s Thesaurus exoticorum, Hamburg, 1688. This later book illustration is not a portrait drawn at the 1639 negotiations. Happel, Thesaurus exoticorum (1688) · Library of Congress, LCCN 90705896 · Wikimedia Commons · Public domain.

What happened in 1639?

The settlement commonly called the Treaty of Zuhab, Zohab or Qasr-e Shirin is dated 17 May 1639. It followed the Ottoman reconquest of Baghdad in 1638 and belongs to relations between Murad IV’s Ottoman Empire and Shah Safi’s Safavid state. [1] Baghdad’s continued Ottoman possession was a major result of the conflict. The agreement matters to Kurdish history because imperial claims divided Kurdish-inhabited borderlands. Its significance does not depend on imagining a modern national frontier, completely surveyed and uniformly administered, appearing in a single day.

Why Baghdad mattered

Rudi Matthee explains that Baghdad and Iraq were important to the Safavids for religious as well as strategic reasons. Shiʿi shrines attracted pilgrims and royal patronage; the Baghdad approach through Hamadan, Kermanshah and Qasr-e Shirin connected the Iranian plateau to central Iraq. Basra added trade and access to the Indian Ocean. [2] These interests show why the conflict cannot be described as a war fought exclusively over Kurdish identity or only on Kurdish soil. The struggle concerned several landscapes, populations and imperial priorities, even though Kurdish communities occupied a crucial frontier position.

A frontier zone rather than a finished survey

Keith McLachlan’s historical account places Zuhab within a succession of Ottoman–Iranian settlements beginning before 1639. The settlement provided a general territorial framework, while local control, revenues and competing claims remained problematic. [1] An imperial agreement could assign or acknowledge authority without producing the precise, continuous boundary familiar from a modern political map. For that reason, a claim that exactly seventy percent of Kurdish territory went to one empire and thirty percent to the other needs a defined territorial measure and supporting evidence. No such calculation is established by the sources used here.

Kurdish communities and local power

Matthee describes frontier government through alliances with Kurdish and Arab tribal leaders: defence obligations could be exchanged for payments and local autonomy. Imperial control of the countryside was uneven. [2] That evidence complicates the assertion that the treaty instantly abolished every form of Kurdish self-government or ended all cross-border contact. It also does not turn local autonomy into independent Kurdish sovereignty. A useful distinction is between an empire’s territorial claims and the authority exercised by particular chiefs, governors and communities. Their relations with the courts remained part of the frontier’s history after the agreement.

Peace still required diplomacy

Ayfer Karakaya-Stump’s 2025 review of Selim Güngörürler’s study of 1639–1682 describes continuing missions, correspondence and border crises. The review highlights the protracted ratification and promulgation process in 1639–1643 and the role of local actors in subsequent relations. [3] This is a review of the book, rather than a claim that the entire archival study has been reproduced here. Its findings help explain how a settlement could endure through active management. Peace did not mean that every jurisdictional dispute disappeared, or that the two governments stopped pursuing advantage in frontier districts.

Later boundaries and the treaty’s legacy

The Erzurum agreements of 1823 and 1847 and subsequent commissions belong to later stages of delimitation and surveying. McLachlan discusses four-power involvement in the nineteenth-century process. [1] These later negotiations are essential to explaining how earlier imperial arrangements contributed to modern borders. Zuhab remains an important landmark in the political division of Kurdish-inhabited lands, but it cannot alone explain the later borders of Iran, Turkey and Iraq, much less every subsequent restriction on Kurdish rights. Reading the agreement alongside local histories and later boundary documents gives a more useful account of both its durability and its limits.

Sources and further reading

  1. Keith McLachlan, Boundaries i: With the Ottoman Empire, Encyclopaedia Iranica: selected account of Amasya, Zuhab and the Erzurum settlements.
  2. Rudi Matthee, Iraq iv: Relations in the Safavid Period, Encyclopaedia Iranica (2006), introduction: geography, Baghdad, shrines, trade and frontier alliances.
  3. Ayfer Karakaya-Stump, review of Selim Güngörürler, The Ottoman Empire and Safavid Iran, 1639–1682, Iranian Studies 58 (2025), pp. 1052–1055; opening discussion and chapter summaries, pp. 1052–1053.
  4. Wikimedia Commons / Library of Congress, LCCN 90705896: Murad IV illustration published in Happel, Thesaurus exoticorum (1688), public-domain image record.