In 1603, Abbas I recaptured Tabriz and Nakhchivan from the Ottomans, territories which the Safavids had been forced to cede in 1590. In the same year, the Ottomans were already fighting on two fronts—in Hungary against the Habsburgs and in Anatolia against the Jelalis. Abbas I proceeded to recover Erivan the next year, in June 1604. In the same month, the Ottomans dispatched Cığalazade Yusuf Sinan Pasha (hereafter, simply "Sinan Pasha") from Constantinople, Istanbul, towards Erzurum with a large number of Janissaries to fight Abbas and his men. Around the time of Sinan Pasha's march, Abbas I had reached Kars, at the frontier of Georgia. He ordered the destruction of the countryside between Kars and Erzurum, employing similar scorched earth tactics his grandfather Tahmasp I (1524–1576) had employed against the Ottomans. When Abbas realized that Sinan Pasha did not intend to spend the winter in the region before continuing the campaign in the spring and was therefore moving straight towards Kars, he ordered the immediate mass evacuation "of the entire population, most of them Armenian Christians, over a wide area to the north of the Aras River, and embracing the three towns of Erivan, Nakhichivan and [Old] Julfa".