This paper will reassess the "long fall” of the Safavid Empire (1501-1722) from the perspective of environmental history. The heritage of the Safavid Empire is generally understood as a cultural one: from the rise of modern Shi’ism, to thriving artistic, philosophical, and scientific movements under the powerful Safavid state. Not surprisingly, then, understandings of the sudden Safavid decline in the late 17th and early 18th century tend focus on the attentiveness of the court and high religious functionaries, in step with socio-cultural trends of the time. Arguments on the Safavid decline have ranged from a series of ineffective rulers succeeding Shah 'Abbas I, to changing patterns of global trade, to an ideological crisis of legitimacy. Save for economic historians, scholars have paid surprisingly little attention to material conditions in the empire. We are missing, namely, more specific attention to the Little Ice Age and the related “General Crisis” affecting societies throughout the world at the time. This paper will bring together narrative sources from late 17th and early 18th century Safavid chronicles and travelogues with new evidence available in the environmental sciences (namely tree ring samples and climate reconstructions) to present a clearer picture of the regularity and severity of the droughts, crop failures, famines, and epidemics that plagued the Iranian plateau, Caspian littoral, and surrounding regions from the 1660s onward. In contrast to the prevailing declensionist approach in late Safavid historiography, this paper will contend that the imperial networks of the Safavid Empire were resilient enough to weather more than a half-century of climatic crisis before they dramatically break. While a decline certainly occurs, we must locate this properly as a decline in agricultural productivity which undermined the material base of the Safavids’ imperial ecology, and is connected to a global climate crisis that reshaped the modern world.