This piece is part of a series of articles covering the medieval and early modern great powers of each of Asia’s regions: East Asia, Central and North Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and West Asia (the Middle East). Each article discusses the great power dynamics of the main powers within that particular region as well as how the main powers of each region interacted with those of other regions. To view the full series so far, click here.
Some of the most powerful and influential great powers of the medieval and early modern Asian world were centered in West Asia (the Middle East). While East Asia was generally home to one great power centered in China, India featured multiple, competing states, and empires came and went on the Central Asian steppe, throughout history, the West Asian system was usually characterized by two roughly co-equal powers that both balanced each other and projected influence across the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and Asia. West Asian empires have often expanded beyond their region to dominate parts of Central and South Asia.
These two powers were based in the western and eastern halves of the region, in the eastern Mediterranean — with a power base in modern Turkiye or Egypt — and in modern Iran (Persia) and Iraq (Mesopotamia).
At the beginning of the period covered by this article, the region was mostly controlled by the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire and the Sassanian Persian Empire; a thousand years later, two empires, the Ottoman and the Safavid, based in the same territories as their predecessors, also dominated West Asia. One derived its power by controlling the Mediterranean sea routes; the other, the overland routes between Central Asia and the Mediterranean world.
West Asian empires were acknowledged as among the major players of the world by the Arabs, Chinese, and Indians. In fact, the region is oddly fragmented, and home now to many middle powers in a way that is historically uncharacteristic.
West Asia is the central region in the Old World, situated between all of the other major regions of the Eurasian and African landmasses. Although it is not nearly as populous as China, India, or Europe, and although it was relatively resource-poor until the discovery of oil, the region has had an oversized impact on world history due to its location, which facilitated trade and the spread of ideas, especially the world-spanning religions of Christianity and Islam. The region is the heartland of Islam, and most of the region’s population is Muslim today. Many of humanity’s early agricultural and technological developments originated in West Asia, and much of the present-day population of both Europe and the Indian Subcontinent is descended from farmers who spread out from Anatolia (in modern Turkiye) and Iran in Neolithic times.
West Asia is a relatively well-defined region, both culturally and geographically, though it blurs into the Mediterranean, Saharan, and Central Asian worlds at its edges. To the northwest of West Asia are the Mediterranean, Aegean, and Black seas, which clearly differentiate it from the peninsula that forms the western extremity of Eurasia: Europe. The Anatolian peninsula, which contains most of modern Turkiye, is also surrounded by the three aforementioned seas. Mountains stretch eastward from Anatolia, through the Armenian highlands, Caucasus Mountains, and the Alborz and Kopet Dag of northern Iran, almost up to the Hindu Kush range in central Afghanistan, walling off West Asia from the Central Asian steppe and the Indian Subcontinent. There is one exception that has been described as Iran’s “most serious geostrategic weakness”: the mountains break to allow passageway between the plains of Central Asia and Iran. The geography of Iran, in particular, has been likened to a fortress or a box, allowing it to maintain a geopolitical coherence over time, and giving rise to its Sassanian (224-651 CE) and Safavid-era (1501-1736 CE) names, Eranshahr, “fortress of Iran” (a shahr is a walled city), and mamalek-e mahruse, the guarded domains.
To the south of Anatolia and the Iranian Plateau lies the narrow cultivated band known as the Fertile Crescent, winding through the Levant and Mesopotamia. To the southwest of the Fertile Crescent lie Egypt and the Sahara Desert, while to the south are the Syrian and Arabian deserts that encompass most of the Arabian Peninsula — save some highlands in Yemen — a large landmass surrounded by the Arabian Sea of the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf. The Arabian Peninsula separates the rest of Asia from Africa. Unlike other Eurasian subcontinental landmasses, such as India and Europe, the Arabian Peninsula is sparsely populated. While deserts are an effective barrier for the mass movements of populations, especially those dependent on farming, they easily permit movement and utility for nomadic tribes. Even though agriculture arose in West Asia, over time, according to Douglas E. Streusand, a professor who has studied Islamic civilizations, during the time of the Abbasid Caliphate in the Middle Ages, “ecological conditions became less favorable to agriculture and more favorable to pastoral nomadism. Agriculture required considerable investment, while pastoral nomadism was a profitable use of land.”
The ecology of West Asia has meant that a few regions are agricultural and densely populated — though with limited capacity to grow — while most others, such as deserts and high plateaus, have been dominated by nomadic pastoralism. Unlike the steppe nomads of Central Asia, who practiced pastoralism, but sometimes created states that ran the affairs of nomadic and conquered settled populations separately, in West Asia, the same peoples who spoke the same languages engaged in both agriculture and pastoralism. Journalist Tim Mackintosh-Smith, author of “Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empire” described a duality between the settled and nomadic Arabs, whose lifestyles complement each other: “the two meet, and overlap, and interact, and never more fruitfully than when the stationary and the mobile intersect at halts on highways: oases and suqs, caravanserais and pilgrim shrines.” Most medieval and early modern West Asian states — dominated by Turks or Arabs — ruled through both nomadic and settled populations. By the 19th century, half of Iran’s population was nomadic, according to historian Abbas Amanat of Yale University. Governed by the Qajar Dynasty of nomadic Turkic origin, nomads and tribes dominated political life in Iran and elsewhere, but the state used the revenues of agriculture to support the bureaucracy and army.
Although in ancient times, West Asia had been home to numerous small states, starting with the Assyrian Empire in the 10th century BCE, the region had witnessed a series of large empires — Babylonian, Achaemenid Persian, and Alexander the Great’s domain — that consolidated rule over vast amounts territory. But the empires of the region were unlike the highly centralized bureaucratic state of China. Peoples and tribes enjoyed autonomy, and often the writ of the state barely extended to the nomads and clans who lived in the mountains and deserts. At the beginning of the period covered by this article, around the time of the rise of Islam in the 7th century CE, West Asia had been dominated by two empires for over 600 years: the Romans in the west — the eastern Roman polity is often known as the Byzantine Empire — and a succession of two Iranian states, the Parthians and Sassanians in the east. Both empires maintained contact with a variety of steppe tribes and used them against each other, as well as with China. Persian relations with China were especially close, with the last members of the Sassanian Dynasty seeking refuge there after the Arab conquest of their state.
After the Byzantines and Persians nearly destroyed each other in a war lasting nearly 30 years, the Arabs, newly empowered by Islam, conquered much Roman territory and the entirety of the Sassanian Empire in the period between the 630s and 650s CE. Later, the Umayyad Caliphate (661-750 CE) extended Arab territory and Islam into Central Asia and the northwestern parts of the Indian subcontinent. The geopolitical impact of the Arab state on the trajectory of Asian history was enormous: it swept away old states and tribes and brought to power new ones, such as the Turkic mercenaries it hired. The Turks would go on to have a major impact on South and West Asian history. Arab armies permanently checked Chinese expansion into Central Asia and diminished the sphere of Indian, Hindu-Buddhist influence. Islam continued to spread, going on to have an impact on the lives of millions of Asians in places such as Indonesia and Bengal.
The Abbasid Caliphate, which succeeded the Umayyads in 750 CE, effectively ruled the West Asian region for two centuries. Although it was a cultural golden age, the Abbasid period also witnessed the fragmentation of the empire, losing territory in North Africa and Central Asia. The region reverted to a geopolitical type, dominated by two major states, one in the east and the other in the west. In the west, the Fatimid Caliphate came to power in Egypt in the early 10th century, extending its control over the Levant and Syria, while in the east, the Persian Buyids, and then the Turkic Seljuks, extended their control over Iran and Iraq, reducing the Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad to a puppet. The Seljuks also conquered most of Byzantine Anatolia, laying the groundwork for future Turkish rule there. Over the next two centuries, a variety of events occurred in West Asia: state fragmentation, Crusades, but none had more impact than the Mongol invasions. In 1258 CE, the Mongols destroyed the Abbasid Caliphate and reduced most of the region, including the Turkic successor states of the Seljuks in Iran and Anatolia to either tributary status or direct rule. But Egypt and the Levant remained independent after defeating the Mongols at the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260 CE. For some time, the two dominant powers in the region were the Mamluk Dynasty of Egypt and the Mongol successor state based in Iran and Iraq, the Ilkhanate.
After another period of fragmentation brought about by the collapse of the Ilkhanate in 1335 CE, the region began to see the emergence of two new powerful states, both dominated by Turkic dynasties: the Ottomans (1299-1923 CE) and the Safavids (1501-1736 CE). The Ottomans, who successfully deployed muskets and cannon, conquered the remainder of the Byzantine Empire and the Balkans before also annexing Egypt and all of its territories in the Levant and Arabia in the 16th century. It also seized Iraq from the nascent Safavid Empire. By this time, the Ottoman Empire’s territory mirrored and exceeded that of the late Eastern Roman Empire, and the Sunni Ottoman sultan assumed the mantle of the caliphate. The empire’s influence and impact ranged quite far. Arab tribes deep in the Sahara and Arabian deserts paid it tribute, the empire gained suzerainty over parts of Somalia, Muslim rulers in Gujarat in India sought Ottoman help against the Portuguese, and the Sultanate of Aceh in Indonesia became its vassal.
Meanwhile, the Safavid Dynasty in Iran held its own, though it hardly had the geopolitical impact or influence of the Ottomans. It succeeded in creating a Persian state that united Iran for the first time in centuries, and spread Shia Islam, laying the groundwork for modern Iran. By keeping the Uzbeks of Central Asia out and establishing a firm border with the Ottomans and the Mughals, it distinguished Iran firmly from its Sunni neighbors. But the empire also had its limits. Previous Iranian-based dynasties — even those such as the Ghaznavids and Seljuks, who had conquered Iran — were able to wield more influence throughout West, Central, and South Asia. Throughout the Safavid and subsequent Qajar eras, Persian cultural influence began to wane, even though Persian culture had previously dominated the Ottoman and Mughal courts. In the shadows of these larger, geopolitically dominant, culturally influential, and more confident empires, Iran began to experience a culture of strategic loneliness, according to political scientist Vali Nasr.
Safavid Iran is considered one of the three major gunpowder empires of the early Islamic world, but the population of its core territories may not have exceeded six million, while the Mughal Empire was home to over 100 million people and the Ottoman Empire somewhere in the range of 20-25 million. The Ottoman and Mughal empires also depended less on tribal manpower and made use of rich, agricultural land in their newly conquered territories to build more effective states and institutions that could extract more taxes and support larger armies.
A clear geopolitical pattern thus emerges in West Asia as we near the present day. Two empires, one based around modern Turkiye and another based around modern Iran dominate the region, and divide up the Fertile Crescent for much of history. Both also project power and influence other parts of Eurasia. Over time, though, power shifts toward the western, more Mediterranean-oriented of the two empires, because of trade, demographics, ideology, and the efficiency of state institutions.
The interesting geopolitical pattern in West Asia is that the western, Mediterranean power in the region has steadily grown more powerful than the eastern, Persian-oriented one. The Achaemenid Persian Empire (550-330 BCE) controlled all of West Asia, including Turkiye, as well as Egypt, parts of northwest India, and Central Asia. The Sassanid Empire was much smaller, dominating only modern Iran, Iraq, and parts of western Afghanistan and the Caucasus range. While it was able to hold its own against the Roman Empire, it was significantly smaller and less populous, and was usually at the losing end of the Roman-Persian wars. The Safavid Empire shrunk further, losing Iraq to the Ottomans and present-day Afghanistan to the Mughals or the new Afghan national state that grew up in the 18th century. The Qajar Empire (1789-1925 CE) contracted even further, such that it was no longer regarded as a great power by anyone. With the brief exception of the conqueror Nader Shah’s (who ruled Iran from 1736 to 1747 CE) career, Persian influence virtually disappeared from Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent by this time. Meanwhile, even though the Ottomans also entered a period of decline, their empire lasted longer, and remained geopolitically relevant throughout many regions for much longer. Even during World War I, the Ottomans were players in the Arabian Peninsula, Caucasus Mountains, and in Russian Central Asia.
The modern Middle East is a very different place than medieval and premodern West Asia. The old empires are gone, replaced by a large number of nation-states, most of which are independent Arab nations, few of which existed until a century ago. Yet among the two most influential geopolitical players in the region — and in the larger world — remain Turkiye and Iran. In some ways, their odds are now more even than before because Turkiye has lost its empire and is of a similar size and population to Iran, while Iran has built modern state institutions over the course of the last century. Both Turkiye and Iran have been able to exert their influence over neighboring Arab states, to varying levels of success; after all, these Arab states also desire geopolitical autonomy and the ability to wield influence. Both Turkiye and Iran also epitomize some of the strengths and weaknesses of their predecessors: Iran remains strategically lonely, home to a branch of Islam that is still a minority in the Islamic world, and struggles to project real power, especially given its diminished economic prowess as a result of its limited integration into the world economy. Meanwhile, Turkish companies, diplomacy, geopolitical reach, and popular culture have a much wider currency today.
