No narrative dominates the demographic history of late Mamluk Syria more than the decline of the countryside in the fifteenth century. The general drop in the size and concentration of villages, and the abandonment of many settlements suggested by archaeological surveys (most pronounced in Transjordan), has been considered the most important local response to the collapse of the Mamluk state. While settlement fluctuations in this period transformed rural Syria in important ways, there here has been little systematic study of the issue in order to determine to what degree population levels dropped from the 14th-century, how many settlements “disappeared”, and what was the long-term legacy of this phenomenon. Critical analysis of contemporary Arabic chronicles, economic (waqfiyyat, registrations of land sale and purchase) and legal (Shari’a court) documents related to land tenure and use, early Ottoman tax registers, and travelers’ accounts, combined with the results of recent archaeological fieldwork and environmental studies, indicates a dispersal of large settlements in Transjordan forced by a confluence of political turmoil, economic trouble, and climatic change. In anthropological parlance, this could be described as a kind of “internal migration” in which settlement in large centers participating in imperial agro-industries was replaced by more modest settlements, located in more marginal zones, engaged in diversified production. This paper explores the physical and functional transformation of the Jordanian countryside in the 15th and 16th centuries as a kind of internal migration and suggests that the dispersal of towns and large villages of the period, and the partial abandonment of the plains, resulted in a shift to new agricultural regimes, new patterns of land tenure and management, and changes in the tribal-residential structures of the region that have relevance for the form the Tanzimat reforms took in Jordan in the late 19th century and the demographic structure of the country today. The study will compare settlement shifts of the period in Transjordan to those in Palestine, in order to gauge the differential impact of Mamluk decline on local societies and suggest reasons for those differences.