This paper examines the migration of North Caucasian Muslims in the Ottoman Empire, focusing on the geography of refugee resettlement and Ottoman objectives in providing refuge for foreign Muslims. Between the 1850s and World War I, about a million North Caucasian refugees arrived in the Ottoman Empire. Many of them, especially western Circassians, were survivors of ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the Russian army during the Caucasus War of 1817–64. Others, especially Chechens, Kabardians, Ossetians, and Dagestanis, were pushed out during Russia’s civil reforms after 1864. The Ottoman government pursued an open-door policy for Muslim refugees and resettled North Caucasians throughout the Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant. In this paper, I argue that the Ottoman government had three major objectives in resettling North Caucasians. The first one was economic. North Caucasians were resettled almost exclusively in the countryside. The government expected refugees to cultivate wheat, barley, and corn, export their agricultural surplus, and become tax-paying subjects. The second objective was to bring nomadic territories under state control. The settlement of refugees necessitated surveying the land, building roads, and bringing state officials and tax collectors into the empire’s remote provinces. The Ottoman government readily used refugees as settlers to extend Ottoman sovereignty in its far-flung provinces. The third objective was sectarian. After the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–78, the Ottoman government settled many refugees in provinces with large non-Muslim populations. By changing demographic ratios in favor of Muslims, the Hamidian government sought to prevent territorial losses and to counter any future claims by national movements. The geography of North Caucasian resettlement reflected the government’s objectives and the manner of refugees’ arrival. In the 1860s, refugees arriving by sea, mostly western Circassians, settled in the northern Balkans and northern and western Anatolia, as the government could expeditiously move refugees there from port cities. Refugees arriving by land, including Kabardians and Chechens, settled primarily on the nomadic frontier in central Anatolia and Syria. After 1878, the government directed North Caucasians fleeing the Balkans to Ottoman ports in western Anatolia, Lebanon, and Palestine, and from there to settlements in central Anatolia and the interior of Syria and Transjordan. This paper is based on years of archival research in Turkey, Jordan, and Bulgaria and provides a structured model of late Ottoman refugee resettlement. It further demonstrates how the Caucasus was “mapped onto” the modern Middle East through the process of refugee migration.