In the winter of 1603-05, as Ottoman armies advanced into the Caucasus, Shah Abbas I ordered the destruction of crops and pastures across the frontier districts and the removal of their inhabitants into Iran. The Armenian population of Julfa on the Aras, a wealthy merchant town, was resettled at Isfahan in a purpose-built suburb, New Julfa, where the shah granted its merchants privileges and a monopoly of the Iranian silk export trade, making the community central to Eurasian commerce for a century. The mass of the deportees fared very differently: driven in autumn rains and cold across a river that many drowned in, wintered in the mountain districts of Azerbaijan and then scattered across the interior, they suffered heavy losses that contemporaries describe but do not count. Abbas repeated the policy in Georgia in 1614-17, deporting Kakhetian Georgians and settling Turkic tribes in their place; Georgian tradition treats these campaigns as a national catastrophe and the figures it gives are not independently attested. The events are documented above all by Arakel of Tabriz, an Armenian eyewitness, alongside Persian court chronicles.
Shah Abbas I of Safavid Iran, retreating before Ottoman armies, applied a scorched-earth policy to the Armenian and Georgian borderlands and deported their populations into the Iranian interior
The deportee totals come from contemporary chroniclers, above all Arakel of Tabriz, who gives figures in the hundreds of thousands for the 1604-05 removal from Julfa, Nakhichevan and the Ararat plain, and from Georgian and Ottoman accounts of the Kakheti campaigns of 1614-17, in which perhaps 60,000-100,000 were killed and 100,000-130,000 deported. There is no independent enumeration of the population of eastern Armenia or Kakheti before the campaigns, so any denominator would be circular, resting on the same chronicles as the numerator.
No count exists. Arakel of Tabriz and other contemporaries describe large numbers drowning in the Aras, dying of cold and hunger on the winter march and perishing in the malarial lowlands of Gilan and Mazandaran where many were settled; the proportion who died is variously described as very heavy but was never counted, and no modern reconstruction has produced a figure.
The deliberate burning of crops and pastures, the forced winter march and the resettlement of deportees on state and crown lands are described by the eyewitness Armenian historian Arakel of Tabriz and summarised in the Encyclopaedia Iranica.
Iran, Armenia, Georgia