In 1514, the first battle between the Ottomans and the newly founded Safavid dynasty took place. The Battle of Chaldiran, as it came to be known, marked the beginning of a century-long struggle between the Sunni Ottomans and Shia Safavids that would draw to a close in 1639 with the Treaty of Zuhab. The human toll of this ongoing warfare over the Caucasus and Mesopotamia would be exacted not just from the soldiers of each empire, but also from the different ethnic groups that inhabited these regions. Some caught in the midst of these conflicts had their towns and homes razed by these troops. Others were forced to relocate and resettle. The Armenians were one such group, trapped between these Muslim forces, whose material and non-material well-being was under threat. Armenians had been coping with foreign incursions for centuries. Historical Armenia had been invaded and often laid to waste by the Arabs in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, the Byzantines in the eleventh, and the Mongols and Seljuks from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries. In fact, an Armenian kingdom in ancestral Armenia had not existed since the eleventh century, leaving the people of Greater (or historical) Armenia without any native sovereignty and as a politically fragmented entity. In the sixteenth century, historical Armenia had once again come to lie at the center of unremitting wars, this time fought between the Safavids and the Ottomans.
