Between 1828 and 1832, a series of environmental catastrophes struck Ottoman Baghdad. Baghdad witnessed a plague epidemic, the flooding of the Euphrates, and a military siege, culminating in a famine. Chief among the victims of these events was Davud Pasha, the governor of Baghdad and leader of the local Mamluk dynasty. While the plague epidemic devastated his army, floods and famines prevented him from paying his tribute to the central state. Far from viewing Baghdad’s environmental and fiscal collapse as a disaster, centralizing reformers in Istanbul saw the unfolding crisis as an opportunity to remove the semi-autonomous Mamluk dynasty from power by decapitating its weakened leadership. Following Istanbul’s calls for his execution, Davud Pasha was captured in his Baghdad palace. Owing to his own network of connections in the imperial center, Davud Pasha was eventually able to get his sentence reduced to exile and the confiscation of his vast properties. However, despite escaping his own death, Davud Pasha’s removal from office signaled the end of the Mamluk regime in Baghdad. As this paper argues, Istanbul’s campaign to eliminate the rule of local notables was not always the product of direct state planning or violence. In more distant frontier territories like Iraq, centralization remained a contingent negotiation between various actors, human and non-human. This paper will demonstrate how this deeply contingent confluence of environmental catastrophes represented a moment of opportunity for Istanbul’s centralizing reformers, ultimately paving the way for state violence as a viable alternative to older forms of negotiated power and layered sovereignty in Baghdad. It also demonstrates that disasters were not devastating for all existing power groups. The contingent occurrence of environmental disasters changed the nature of the reciprocal relationship between the center and Baghdad and allowed the former for increasing its bureaucratic power in the region.