The Mediterranean in history – edited by David Abulalia – 2003 Thames & Hutton ltd, London
p.189
The Crusades mark an important moment in Western expansion, the beginning of the process of reversal of forces in the Mediterranean, to the advantage of the Latin West. In the history of the Inner Sea, the Crusades brought a major expansion of sea traffic and began the Western colonization of Islamic lands. For a long time scholars believed that the Crusades coincided with the beginning of the Levant trade: the maritime republics were supposed to have become involved in the crusading expeditions in the hope of forcing open new markets. This over-simplified view is not sustained by the evidence. In fact, Genoa, Pisa, Venice and Amalfi already had commercial ties to Egypt, Syria and the Byzantine Empire 150 years before the First Crusade; they even had their own trading stations in some of those places, as had Venice and Amalfi at Constantinople. For this reason, these cities did not show immediate enthusiasm for the Crusade following the appeal for aid made by Pope Urban II in 1095: three years and more were needed before their fleets reached the eastern Mediterranean. The fact remains, however, that their aid was indispensable in the conquest of the coastal towns of Syria and Palestine, and in establishing regular links between the Frankish states newly created in the Levant and Western Europe; for it was thence that came the money, arms, horses and finished goods that were essential for the survival of the Latins in the East.
In exchange for naval aid the crusading leaders offered quarters in the conquered towns, as well as commercial and legal privileges; these enabled the Italian merchant communities to escape from the ordinary jurisdiction of the Latin states in the East. Genoa was asked to help convey eastwards the troops of Philip Augustus and of St Louis, while Venice launched 200 ships to transport the armies of the Fourth Crusade on their journey in 1202. The direct consequences of these efforts was the almost total disappearance of Arab fleets, of which few traces can be found after the capture of Ascalon by the Franks in 1153. The Mediterranean had become a Latin sea. And within the Mediterranean Latin merchants took the place of the Jews and Muslims in the traffic carrying luxury goods of Far Eastern origin westwards.
The beginnings of European colonization were another consequence of the Crusades. In each port of Syria and Palestine which had been conquered with their help, the maritime republics obtained from the kings of Jerusalem, the princes of Antioch or the counts of Tripoli very advantageous concession of rights. Entire quarters passed into the hands of Italian communes, offering them everything they needed for daily life: a church, a warehouse or fonduk, a palace (to serve as the office block), an oven, a mill, a bathhouse, a slaughterhouse and some arable land outside the town which could help with supplies. Acre, Tyre, Beirut, Tripoli, Laodicea and Antioch were divided in this way among the Italian merchants. At the head of each community, a consul, bailo or viscount exercised four principal functions. They maintained the rights of the mother-city over its overseas possessions; they presided over courts of justice which protected their fellow citizens against the possible depredations of local lords; they administered the goods of those who died intestate. In other words, in the ports of the Latin East each privileged commune possessed all the structures necessary to conduct the social and economic life of a stable community that sought to escape from all outside interference. Other concessions included exemption from customs dues and taxes on commercial deals, generally known as comerchium, which in some cases was a total exemption, in others just a reduction; and jurisdictional privileges, permitting the members of the Italian communes to be judged solely by their own officials. The Italian (and Provençal) quarters were thus real colonies within the Latin states of Syria and Palestine.
Elsewhere, in Constantinople as in Egypt, the Italians possessed no more than trading stations still subject to the authority of the ruling power. In the metropolis, the Italian republics obtained rights to quarters hard by the Golden Horn under the Komnenian emperors (1081-1185). The Venetians, Pisans and Genoese became absorbed in fierce rivalries which culminated in skirmishes between the communities, and in a rise in xenophobia among the native Greek population. The Venetians were expelled from the Byzantine Empire in 1171, and their goods were seized, while the Genoese and the Pisans were the victims of an anti-Latin riot in 1182. Under the Angelos dynasty (1185-1203), one or another of these Italian powers, profiting from the weakness of the Byzantine Empire, managed to obtain compensation for the attacks and further trading concessions. The Fourth Crusade enabled the Venetians to make themselves effective masters of Constantinople, and to take under their wing the feeble new Latin Empire that took its place. Meanwhile, in Egypt, the activities of the Western merchants did not really give rise to the creation of a colony; the Fatimids and the Ayyubids preserved control of the fonduks which they had granted to the Italian communes, to Pisa and Venice in the twelfth century and to Genoa around 1200. They imposed restrictive measures, limiting the freedom of movement of these merchants in their lands, intervening in Latin trade and concentrating the commerce of the Western merchants in a closely delineated space, the better to watch over them. The Egyptian rulers retained the authority over the quarters conceded to the European merchants.
Benefiting from these privileges, the Italian maritime republics had no other aim than the establishment of their dominion of the sea.
p.226
The Ottoman Mediterranean: trade
In trade, as in so many other areas, the Ottomans sought to restore an imperial unity an order that had been lost in the eastern Mediterranean with the proliferation of small states and the decline of large ones. The Ottoman sultans had no desire to prevent Western merchants, or any other merchants for that matter, from trading in the Ottoman lands; nor did they seek to impose a barrier between themselves and the world of international commerce. It would have made no sense for them to do so; the customs revenue from trade was a vital source of revenue and of course the goods themselves were important as well. They were determined, however, to assert their sovereignty and thereby avoid the extreme dependency that had characterized Byzantine-Latin relations in the late medieval period. Kate Fleet has made the fascinating observation that the Ottomans seem to have been more determined economic managers than the other Turkish emirates. Why this should be so is not clear. By contrast, Spain and the papacy actually forbade trade on ideological grounds. Under the Muslims, attitudes to trade in the Iberian peninsula had to some extent been laissez-faire; Christian Iberia would be much less so. The Latins, principally the Genoese and the Venetians, would no longer be able to enjoy full exemption from tariffs nor unlimited access to markets. This change has come down to us as Ottoman obstruction of Western traders. Steve Runciman, for instance, blames the demise of the Genoese trading colonies in the Black Sea in part on the fact that ‘fewer and fewer merchants were prepared to pay the tolls demanded by the Sultan’s officials there.’ The notion that Mehmet the Conqueror raised tolls on trade after 1453 is now disputed; the extant archival material shows no complaints about the tolls by Genoese merchants. It is again Kate Fleet who demonstrates the continuity of Ottoman policy before and after 1453. This suggests, as she points out, that the Genoese withdrawal from the eastern Mediterranean most likely had little to do with Ottoman policy.
Once they had captured Istanbul in 1453, the Ottomans attempted to reconstitute in full the trading links that had allowed Byzantine Constantinople to flourish, even to the point of utilizing the same Byzantine buildings to promote commerce, and keeping the same business centres. They were determined that the imperial city would once again be a grand capital; and any discussion of the eastern Mediterranean under the Ottomans must understand first and foremost the enormous pull of Istanbul. By the sixteenth century it was the most populous city in Europe. The crucial link was with the Black Sea, which was a vital source of cheap provisions, much more so than the relatively crowded and resource-poor Aegean. Indeed it is not going too far to say that the wheat, meat and salt from the sparsely populated northern coasts of the Black Sea made Istanbul’s growth possible, just as they had done for the Byzantines before 1204. Mehmet the Conqueror acknowledged the importance of the Black Sea when he styled himself ‘the Sultan of the two lands and the Khatan of the two seas’. The state that controls the Straits has always striven to establish control over the Black Sea as well. In order to ensure Istanbul’s provisioning, Mehmet prohibited foreign ships from exporting certain goods from the Black Sea area, among which were grains, cotton, leathers, beeswax, animal fat and slaves. As we have seen, all ships had to stop at the castles on the Bosphorus for inspection. The international trade of the area, already in decline even before 1453, necessarily shrank even further after that date. But its regional trade underwent a huge expansion as ports such as Akkerman, Caffa, Constanta and Burgas shipped massive amounts of wheat, raw materials and slaves to the fast-growing capital.
p.235
The seventeenth century: trade wars
The seventeenth-century Mediterranean sits uneasily between the age of Ottoman expansion which preceded it and the European-led commercial boom of the eighteenth century. A murky time of corsairs, free-wheeling consuls and converts of uncertain identity, it has often been overlooked by historians with their orientation towards the state. Throughout much of the period, no one power was able to dominate the sea. The Italian city-states had lost their position of dominance – the strength of the Venetian merchant marine was cut in half between 1550 and 1590 – but France, due to internal turmoil, was not yet in a position to replace the Italians: in his monumental study of the trade of Marseilles Paul Masson characterized the seventeenth century as one crisis after another and one in which the French were continually threatened with the ruin of their commerce. In fact, French commerce in the ports of the eastern Mediterranean fell from 7 million livres in 1648 to between 2.5 and 3 million livres in 1660. It did not begin to recover till 1685. The Dutch and the English were maritime powers of the first order, certainly, but their presence, at least east of Italy, was intermittent. Thus late in the 1630s the Venetian bailo observed that there were only two Dutch merchant houses in Constantinople and that Dutch ships were a rare sight in Constantinople: ‘the ships which sail to Constantinople from this nation are rare and they have only two merchant houses here’. The Ottomans had to struggle just to maintain a minimum amount of order in certain key sea lanes, like the route between Cairo and Istanbul. Because of this, the Mediterranean world was more multinational and fragmented than it had been since the fourteenth century. Underneath the surface, however, a historic change was in the making. It was during this time that certain European leaders, particularly the French monarchs, fought hard and ultimately successfully to impose something like a nation-state grid on what had traditionally been a cosmopolitan world defined more by religion and empire than by nation or state. In the first half of the century, however, Europe was sunk in the miseries of the Thirty Years’ War, and the corsairs ruled the seas. Their supremacy was made possible by the decision of both the Ottomans and the Spaniards, after battling each other nearly continuously throughout the sixteenth century, to call a truce. The two empires turned their attention elsewhere, the Ottomans to the East and the Spanish to the New World.
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The seventeenth century saw the growth of two great trading emporia that were able to capitalize on the chaotic and violent conditions of the time. Livorno and Smyrna (today’s Izmir) symbolized their age, just as Genoa and Venice had earlier stood for the rise of the Italian maritime republics. The port of Livorno (Leghorn), which grew from a small settlement of roughly 500 to a commercial centre of over 12,000 people by the middle of the seventeenth century, was the creation of the Medici of Florence. The Medici, beginning with Ferdinand I (1587-1609), realized success in part because they were innovative in facing the problems of the age. In their prime, Genoa and Venice passed port regulations designed to favour their own merchants and their own shipping to the exclusion of others (thus a Cretan merchant named Costa Michel managed to ship a cargo of pepper to Venice early in the fourteenth century, but when he reached the city the pepper was seized because his name did not appear on a list of Venetian citizens). By the seventeenth century, however, the naval capability and the merchant vitality of all the Italian port cities was in decline.
The key to success lay not in excluding foreigners, but rather in attracting them to one’s port rather than the port of one’s neighbour. This was difficult for older cities with well-established hierarchies, such as Venice, which offered no special privileges to foreigners in order to protect its own merchants.
Livorno, as a new settlement, was free of such obstacles. The Medici passed a series of privileges, known as the Livornine, in 1591 and 1593. These laws invited foreign merchants to come and settle in Livorno and offered them such things as freedom of trade, tax exemptions, good housing, storage facilities and a relative freedom of religion. Special attention was paid to the Jewish refugees from Spain, many of whom were now settled in the Levant and North Africa. They would be ideal intermediaries between Tuscany and the Ottoman Empire. While multinational port cities were commonplace in the Ottoman Empire, they were still remarkable enough in Christian Europe for Livorno to become known as ‘the ideal city and the fatherland of everyone’ (la città ideale e la patria di tutti). The Medici also skilfully promoted Livorno as a free port (porto franco), a place where the transit trade was not taxed and foreign merchants settled in the city paid less duties than elsewhere. The Livornine profited by an extended grain crisis in the Mediterranean that hit the Italian peninsula hard. For the first time, shipments of grain from northern Europe – Germany, Poland, England – became widespread and the Grand Duke of Tuscany was at the forefront of the movement. In 1590 he became the first Italian ruler to send agents to Danzig (Venice followed soon after), and over time Livorno became the master of the grain trade. Not surprisingly, northern merchants were also invited to settle in Livorno, and the new port became the favourite of the English, under the slightly bizarre name of ‘Leghorn’.
While Livorno drew great profit from the transit trade between East and West, it also benefited from its propinquity to the ports of North Africa. As a city of the seventeenth century, Livorno was deeply implicated in the corsair economy that linked the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean. A Venetian report from 1624 explained how it worked: ‘Livornese, Corsican, Genoese, French, Flemish, English, Jewish, Venetian and other merchants are settled in Algeria and Tunisia. They would buy up all the stolen merchandise and send it to the free port of Livorno and from there it is distributed all over Italy.’ These ties, although widespread and well known, were not publicized for obvious reasons. Publicly, the Medici supported the Christian Crusade against the infidel, despite the policy of religious tolerance in Livorno itself. The port was the home base of the Knights of Santo Stefano, founded in 1562 in imitation of their more famous counterparts on the island of Malta. Owing to the Knights’ raids, Livorno enjoyed a lucrative trade in captured Muslim slaves, whether Turkish or North African, and Cosimo II (1609-21) made sure that ten galleys were always at the ready for such forays. In 1607, to cite just one example, the Knights burned Bône, the principal commercial port of eastern Algeria, killing 470 people and taking 1,500 captives.
The port of Smyrna (Izmir), on the western coast of Anatolia, was remarkably similar to Livorno in the seventeenth century, although the context was different. Throughout most of the sixteenth century, Smyrna was just one of many small port towns along the Anatolian coast. Whatever modest amount of agricultural surplus might become available was sent along to the Imperial capital. Istanbul encouraged this relationship; the Sultan was anxious to ensure the provisioning of the city and did not want the Empire’s foodstuffs diverted to Western merchants. Towards the end of the century this quiet situation began to change. There had always been some Western merchants operating in the area, and low-level smuggling, made easier by the jagged coastline with its many inlets, was an enduring fact of life. With the repeated grain crises of 1590s, the number of Western merchants – first Venetian, then Dutch, English and French – began to grow, as did the amount of smuggling, Smyrna was at the centre of this trade. Grain-hungry Western merchants and their Ottoman collaborators were helped enormously by a series of disorders in western Anatolia known as the celali revolts which extended well into the seventeenth century. Low levels of security made it difficult for the Ottoman government to enforce provisioning of the capital (at state-mandated low prices) as it had been in the past and locals quickly took advantage. In a document from 1592 we read about a ‘rogue and a robber’ named Fırıncıoğlu Reis in the vicinity of Smyrna who wandered about and presented himself as the captain of a royal galley, sent down to buy grain for Istanbul. He bought copious amounts of grain in this manner, at the official low price, and then turned around and sold it at an enormous profit to Western merchants. Attracted initially by grain, the Westerners soon discovered that the fertile valleys of western Anatolia produced many other products as well: honey, fruit, nuts, cotton, wools and tobacco to name just a few. Later on in the seventeenth century Smyrna became famous as the Mediterranean outlet for silk coming from the East. Fuelled by a combination of Western demand, Anatolian insecurity and local complicity, Smyrna began to grow rapidly. In 1600 fewer than 5,000 souls inhabited the town; by 1650 that number had risen to 30,000 or 40,000. Whereas no European consuls were resident in Smyrna in 1600, the Dutch, the English, the French and the Venetians all had their representation by 1620.
Like Livorno, then, Smyrna was a new city which began to surpass older commercial centres like Aleppo in the seventeenth century. And as with the Italian port, those who drove the city’s growth, those who throve there, were newcomers, particularly from northern Europe. The Dutch and the English favoured Smyrna, in part because its commercial networks were still developing, and thus not already dominated by the older Mediterranean powers such as the Venetians and the merchants of Marseilles. Venetian traders were present, of course, in Smyrna but they proved much less able to adapt to the changed conditions of the seventeenth century, whereas the Dutch and the English flourished. The Venetians, through long force of habit and bureaucratic rigidity, complained to Istanbul about bandits and corrupt officials who were hindering their trade. The English and the Dutch paid these same people off and worked steadily to extend their reach into the hinterland. Part of this effort involved the recruitment of local middlemen – Jews, Greeks and Armenians – and thus seventeenth-century also foreshadows the rise of the non-Muslim Ottoman communities, particularly the Christians. This development was specific to the eastern Mediterranean. The Jewish community expanded and experienced a great cultural revival as the result of the immigration of large numbers of Jews of Spanish descent; as well as being home to many Jewish artisans, the city was a centre of Hebrew printing from the mid-seventeenth century, and of Jewish mysticisms (it was the birthplace of Shabbetai Zevi who claimed to be the Messiah and attracted a huge following).
Two cities, then, newly sprung, filled with foreign merchants who did not hesitate to trade with pirates and make deals with bandits. There was, however, a vital difference between Livorno and Smyrna. Livorno’s commercial prosperity marked the successful realization of the ambitions of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Smyrna’s rise, while beneficial to a number of Ottoman individuals, was not the result of Ottoman policy and in important ways came into conflict with goals of the political class in Istanbul. This was not to raise up, yet again, the worn-out spectre of Ottoman decline. Recent scholarship has shown that, over time, the Ottomans were able to respond to and take advantage of increased commercialization in the eastern Mediterranean. This does not change the fact that Istanbul was not making the new rules.
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The collapse of Ottoman power had other effects in the Levant. After 1883 Egypt emerged as a client state, with a king, of Albanian extraction, who shared with the British control of the Sudan (which simply means the ‘south’) down the Nile from Egypt. It thus possessed a special strategic role, not simply because of its position beside the Suez, but also because the Nile gave access to British possessions in central and eastern Africa: Kenya, Uganda and also Tanganyika, which Germany had lost following its defeat in the First World War (Zanzibar was acquired in the 1880s when Great Britain exchanged it for Heligoland). For a period of fifty years, Alexandria acted as a particular cultural magnet, as the home to Italians, Sephardic Jews, Greeks, Albanians, French, Coptic Christians, with an élite that eschewed their native tongue for French, a world brilliantly recreated in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. Nationalism had not yet become so fierce that several of these distinctive groups were unwelcome away from their place of birth.
Nowhere in the Mediterranean were foreign and national interests so inextricably interwoven than in Egypt, and nowhere in Egypt more than in Alexandria, the ultimate cosmopolitan city. British influence, at first largely financial, grew more overtly political, though its exact legal and constitutional status was ill defined. With the outbreak of the First World War Britain assumed a protectorate over Egypt. This lasted officially only until 1921, but the British did not renounce their influence (they controlled defence, for instance) until after the Second World War.
The Crusades mark an important moment in Western expansion, the beginning of the process of reversal of forces in the Mediterranean, to the advantage of the Latin West. In the history of the Inner Sea, the Crusades brought a major expansion of sea traffic and began the Western colonization of Islamic lands. For a long time scholars believed that the Crusades coincided with the beginning of the Levant trade: the maritime republics were supposed to have become involved in the crusading expeditions in the hope of forcing open new markets. This over-simplified view is not sustained by the evidence. In fact, Genoa, Pisa, Venice and Amalfi already had commercial ties to Egypt, Syria and the Byzantine Empire 150 years before the First Crusade; they even had their own trading stations in some of those places, as had Venice and Amalfi at Constantinople. For this reason, these cities did not show immediate enthusiasm for the Crusade following the appeal for aid made by Pope Urban II in 1095: three years and more were needed before their fleets reached the eastern Mediterranean. The fact remains, however, that their aid was indispensable in the conquest of the coastal towns of Syria and Palestine, and in establishing regular links between the Frankish states newly created in the Levant and Western Europe; for it was thence that came the money, arms, horses and finished goods that were essential for the survival of the Latins in the East.
In exchange for naval aid the crusading leaders offered quarters in the conquered towns, as well as commercial and legal privileges; these enabled the Italian merchant communities to escape from the ordinary jurisdiction of the Latin states in the East. Genoa was asked to help convey eastwards the troops of Philip Augustus and of St Louis, while Venice launched 200 ships to transport the armies of the Fourth Crusade on their journey in 1202. The direct consequences of these efforts was the almost total disappearance of Arab fleets, of which few traces can be found after the capture of Ascalon by the Franks in 1153. The Mediterranean had become a Latin sea. And within the Mediterranean Latin merchants took the place of the Jews and Muslims in the traffic carrying luxury goods of Far Eastern origin westwards.
The beginnings of European colonization were another consequence of the Crusades. In each port of Syria and Palestine which had been conquered with their help, the maritime republics obtained from the kings of Jerusalem, the princes of Antioch or the counts of Tripoli very advantageous concession of rights. Entire quarters passed into the hands of Italian communes, offering them everything they needed for daily life: a church, a warehouse or fonduk, a palace (to serve as the office block), an oven, a mill, a bathhouse, a slaughterhouse and some arable land outside the town which could help with supplies. Acre, Tyre, Beirut, Tripoli, Laodicea and Antioch were divided in this way among the Italian merchants. At the head of each community, a consul, bailo or viscount exercised four principal functions. They maintained the rights of the mother-city over its overseas possessions; they presided over courts of justice which protected their fellow citizens against the possible depredations of local lords; they administered the goods of those who died intestate. In other words, in the ports of the Latin East each privileged commune possessed all the structures necessary to conduct the social and economic life of a stable community that sought to escape from all outside interference. Other concessions included exemption from customs dues and taxes on commercial deals, generally known as comerchium, which in some cases was a total exemption, in others just a reduction; and jurisdictional privileges, permitting the members of the Italian communes to be judged solely by their own officials. The Italian (and Provençal) quarters were thus real colonies within the Latin states of Syria and Palestine.
Elsewhere, in Constantinople as in Egypt, the Italians possessed no more than trading stations still subject to the authority of the ruling power. In the metropolis, the Italian republics obtained rights to quarters hard by the Golden Horn under the Komnenian emperors (1081-1185). The Venetians, Pisans and Genoese became absorbed in fierce rivalries which culminated in skirmishes between the communities, and in a rise in xenophobia among the native Greek population. The Venetians were expelled from the Byzantine Empire in 1171, and their goods were seized, while the Genoese and the Pisans were the victims of an anti-Latin riot in 1182. Under the Angelos dynasty (1185-1203), one or another of these Italian powers, profiting from the weakness of the Byzantine Empire, managed to obtain compensation for the attacks and further trading concessions. The Fourth Crusade enabled the Venetians to make themselves effective masters of Constantinople, and to take under their wing the feeble new Latin Empire that took its place. Meanwhile, in Egypt, the activities of the Western merchants did not really give rise to the creation of a colony; the Fatimids and the Ayyubids preserved control of the fonduks which they had granted to the Italian communes, to Pisa and Venice in the twelfth century and to Genoa around 1200. They imposed restrictive measures, limiting the freedom of movement of these merchants in their lands, intervening in Latin trade and concentrating the commerce of the Western merchants in a closely delineated space, the better to watch over them. The Egyptian rulers retained the authority over the quarters conceded to the European merchants.
Benefiting from these privileges, the Italian maritime republics had no other aim than the establishment of their dominion of the sea.
p.226
The Ottoman Mediterranean: trade
In trade, as in so many other areas, the Ottomans sought to restore an imperial unity an order that had been lost in the eastern Mediterranean with the proliferation of small states and the decline of large ones. The Ottoman sultans had no desire to prevent Western merchants, or any other merchants for that matter, from trading in the Ottoman lands; nor did they seek to impose a barrier between themselves and the world of international commerce. It would have made no sense for them to do so; the customs revenue from trade was a vital source of revenue and of course the goods themselves were important as well. They were determined, however, to assert their sovereignty and thereby avoid the extreme dependency that had characterized Byzantine-Latin relations in the late medieval period. Kate Fleet has made the fascinating observation that the Ottomans seem to have been more determined economic managers than the other Turkish emirates. Why this should be so is not clear. By contrast, Spain and the papacy actually forbade trade on ideological grounds. Under the Muslims, attitudes to trade in the Iberian peninsula had to some extent been laissez-faire; Christian Iberia would be much less so. The Latins, principally the Genoese and the Venetians, would no longer be able to enjoy full exemption from tariffs nor unlimited access to markets. This change has come down to us as Ottoman obstruction of Western traders. Steve Runciman, for instance, blames the demise of the Genoese trading colonies in the Black Sea in part on the fact that ‘fewer and fewer merchants were prepared to pay the tolls demanded by the Sultan’s officials there.’ The notion that Mehmet the Conqueror raised tolls on trade after 1453 is now disputed; the extant archival material shows no complaints about the tolls by Genoese merchants. It is again Kate Fleet who demonstrates the continuity of Ottoman policy before and after 1453. This suggests, as she points out, that the Genoese withdrawal from the eastern Mediterranean most likely had little to do with Ottoman policy.
Once they had captured Istanbul in 1453, the Ottomans attempted to reconstitute in full the trading links that had allowed Byzantine Constantinople to flourish, even to the point of utilizing the same Byzantine buildings to promote commerce, and keeping the same business centres. They were determined that the imperial city would once again be a grand capital; and any discussion of the eastern Mediterranean under the Ottomans must understand first and foremost the enormous pull of Istanbul. By the sixteenth century it was the most populous city in Europe. The crucial link was with the Black Sea, which was a vital source of cheap provisions, much more so than the relatively crowded and resource-poor Aegean. Indeed it is not going too far to say that the wheat, meat and salt from the sparsely populated northern coasts of the Black Sea made Istanbul’s growth possible, just as they had done for the Byzantines before 1204. Mehmet the Conqueror acknowledged the importance of the Black Sea when he styled himself ‘the Sultan of the two lands and the Khatan of the two seas’. The state that controls the Straits has always striven to establish control over the Black Sea as well. In order to ensure Istanbul’s provisioning, Mehmet prohibited foreign ships from exporting certain goods from the Black Sea area, among which were grains, cotton, leathers, beeswax, animal fat and slaves. As we have seen, all ships had to stop at the castles on the Bosphorus for inspection. The international trade of the area, already in decline even before 1453, necessarily shrank even further after that date. But its regional trade underwent a huge expansion as ports such as Akkerman, Caffa, Constanta and Burgas shipped massive amounts of wheat, raw materials and slaves to the fast-growing capital.
p.235
The seventeenth century: trade wars
The seventeenth-century Mediterranean sits uneasily between the age of Ottoman expansion which preceded it and the European-led commercial boom of the eighteenth century. A murky time of corsairs, free-wheeling consuls and converts of uncertain identity, it has often been overlooked by historians with their orientation towards the state. Throughout much of the period, no one power was able to dominate the sea. The Italian city-states had lost their position of dominance – the strength of the Venetian merchant marine was cut in half between 1550 and 1590 – but France, due to internal turmoil, was not yet in a position to replace the Italians: in his monumental study of the trade of Marseilles Paul Masson characterized the seventeenth century as one crisis after another and one in which the French were continually threatened with the ruin of their commerce. In fact, French commerce in the ports of the eastern Mediterranean fell from 7 million livres in 1648 to between 2.5 and 3 million livres in 1660. It did not begin to recover till 1685. The Dutch and the English were maritime powers of the first order, certainly, but their presence, at least east of Italy, was intermittent. Thus late in the 1630s the Venetian bailo observed that there were only two Dutch merchant houses in Constantinople and that Dutch ships were a rare sight in Constantinople: ‘the ships which sail to Constantinople from this nation are rare and they have only two merchant houses here’. The Ottomans had to struggle just to maintain a minimum amount of order in certain key sea lanes, like the route between Cairo and Istanbul. Because of this, the Mediterranean world was more multinational and fragmented than it had been since the fourteenth century. Underneath the surface, however, a historic change was in the making. It was during this time that certain European leaders, particularly the French monarchs, fought hard and ultimately successfully to impose something like a nation-state grid on what had traditionally been a cosmopolitan world defined more by religion and empire than by nation or state. In the first half of the century, however, Europe was sunk in the miseries of the Thirty Years’ War, and the corsairs ruled the seas. Their supremacy was made possible by the decision of both the Ottomans and the Spaniards, after battling each other nearly continuously throughout the sixteenth century, to call a truce. The two empires turned their attention elsewhere, the Ottomans to the East and the Spanish to the New World.
p.242
The seventeenth century saw the growth of two great trading emporia that were able to capitalize on the chaotic and violent conditions of the time. Livorno and Smyrna (today’s Izmir) symbolized their age, just as Genoa and Venice had earlier stood for the rise of the Italian maritime republics. The port of Livorno (Leghorn), which grew from a small settlement of roughly 500 to a commercial centre of over 12,000 people by the middle of the seventeenth century, was the creation of the Medici of Florence. The Medici, beginning with Ferdinand I (1587-1609), realized success in part because they were innovative in facing the problems of the age. In their prime, Genoa and Venice passed port regulations designed to favour their own merchants and their own shipping to the exclusion of others (thus a Cretan merchant named Costa Michel managed to ship a cargo of pepper to Venice early in the fourteenth century, but when he reached the city the pepper was seized because his name did not appear on a list of Venetian citizens). By the seventeenth century, however, the naval capability and the merchant vitality of all the Italian port cities was in decline.
The key to success lay not in excluding foreigners, but rather in attracting them to one’s port rather than the port of one’s neighbour. This was difficult for older cities with well-established hierarchies, such as Venice, which offered no special privileges to foreigners in order to protect its own merchants.
Livorno, as a new settlement, was free of such obstacles. The Medici passed a series of privileges, known as the Livornine, in 1591 and 1593. These laws invited foreign merchants to come and settle in Livorno and offered them such things as freedom of trade, tax exemptions, good housing, storage facilities and a relative freedom of religion. Special attention was paid to the Jewish refugees from Spain, many of whom were now settled in the Levant and North Africa. They would be ideal intermediaries between Tuscany and the Ottoman Empire. While multinational port cities were commonplace in the Ottoman Empire, they were still remarkable enough in Christian Europe for Livorno to become known as ‘the ideal city and the fatherland of everyone’ (la città ideale e la patria di tutti). The Medici also skilfully promoted Livorno as a free port (porto franco), a place where the transit trade was not taxed and foreign merchants settled in the city paid less duties than elsewhere. The Livornine profited by an extended grain crisis in the Mediterranean that hit the Italian peninsula hard. For the first time, shipments of grain from northern Europe – Germany, Poland, England – became widespread and the Grand Duke of Tuscany was at the forefront of the movement. In 1590 he became the first Italian ruler to send agents to Danzig (Venice followed soon after), and over time Livorno became the master of the grain trade. Not surprisingly, northern merchants were also invited to settle in Livorno, and the new port became the favourite of the English, under the slightly bizarre name of ‘Leghorn’.
While Livorno drew great profit from the transit trade between East and West, it also benefited from its propinquity to the ports of North Africa. As a city of the seventeenth century, Livorno was deeply implicated in the corsair economy that linked the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean. A Venetian report from 1624 explained how it worked: ‘Livornese, Corsican, Genoese, French, Flemish, English, Jewish, Venetian and other merchants are settled in Algeria and Tunisia. They would buy up all the stolen merchandise and send it to the free port of Livorno and from there it is distributed all over Italy.’ These ties, although widespread and well known, were not publicized for obvious reasons. Publicly, the Medici supported the Christian Crusade against the infidel, despite the policy of religious tolerance in Livorno itself. The port was the home base of the Knights of Santo Stefano, founded in 1562 in imitation of their more famous counterparts on the island of Malta. Owing to the Knights’ raids, Livorno enjoyed a lucrative trade in captured Muslim slaves, whether Turkish or North African, and Cosimo II (1609-21) made sure that ten galleys were always at the ready for such forays. In 1607, to cite just one example, the Knights burned Bône, the principal commercial port of eastern Algeria, killing 470 people and taking 1,500 captives.
The port of Smyrna (Izmir), on the western coast of Anatolia, was remarkably similar to Livorno in the seventeenth century, although the context was different. Throughout most of the sixteenth century, Smyrna was just one of many small port towns along the Anatolian coast. Whatever modest amount of agricultural surplus might become available was sent along to the Imperial capital. Istanbul encouraged this relationship; the Sultan was anxious to ensure the provisioning of the city and did not want the Empire’s foodstuffs diverted to Western merchants. Towards the end of the century this quiet situation began to change. There had always been some Western merchants operating in the area, and low-level smuggling, made easier by the jagged coastline with its many inlets, was an enduring fact of life. With the repeated grain crises of 1590s, the number of Western merchants – first Venetian, then Dutch, English and French – began to grow, as did the amount of smuggling, Smyrna was at the centre of this trade. Grain-hungry Western merchants and their Ottoman collaborators were helped enormously by a series of disorders in western Anatolia known as the celali revolts which extended well into the seventeenth century. Low levels of security made it difficult for the Ottoman government to enforce provisioning of the capital (at state-mandated low prices) as it had been in the past and locals quickly took advantage. In a document from 1592 we read about a ‘rogue and a robber’ named Fırıncıoğlu Reis in the vicinity of Smyrna who wandered about and presented himself as the captain of a royal galley, sent down to buy grain for Istanbul. He bought copious amounts of grain in this manner, at the official low price, and then turned around and sold it at an enormous profit to Western merchants. Attracted initially by grain, the Westerners soon discovered that the fertile valleys of western Anatolia produced many other products as well: honey, fruit, nuts, cotton, wools and tobacco to name just a few. Later on in the seventeenth century Smyrna became famous as the Mediterranean outlet for silk coming from the East. Fuelled by a combination of Western demand, Anatolian insecurity and local complicity, Smyrna began to grow rapidly. In 1600 fewer than 5,000 souls inhabited the town; by 1650 that number had risen to 30,000 or 40,000. Whereas no European consuls were resident in Smyrna in 1600, the Dutch, the English, the French and the Venetians all had their representation by 1620.
Like Livorno, then, Smyrna was a new city which began to surpass older commercial centres like Aleppo in the seventeenth century. And as with the Italian port, those who drove the city’s growth, those who throve there, were newcomers, particularly from northern Europe. The Dutch and the English favoured Smyrna, in part because its commercial networks were still developing, and thus not already dominated by the older Mediterranean powers such as the Venetians and the merchants of Marseilles. Venetian traders were present, of course, in Smyrna but they proved much less able to adapt to the changed conditions of the seventeenth century, whereas the Dutch and the English flourished. The Venetians, through long force of habit and bureaucratic rigidity, complained to Istanbul about bandits and corrupt officials who were hindering their trade. The English and the Dutch paid these same people off and worked steadily to extend their reach into the hinterland. Part of this effort involved the recruitment of local middlemen – Jews, Greeks and Armenians – and thus seventeenth-century also foreshadows the rise of the non-Muslim Ottoman communities, particularly the Christians. This development was specific to the eastern Mediterranean. The Jewish community expanded and experienced a great cultural revival as the result of the immigration of large numbers of Jews of Spanish descent; as well as being home to many Jewish artisans, the city was a centre of Hebrew printing from the mid-seventeenth century, and of Jewish mysticisms (it was the birthplace of Shabbetai Zevi who claimed to be the Messiah and attracted a huge following).
Two cities, then, newly sprung, filled with foreign merchants who did not hesitate to trade with pirates and make deals with bandits. There was, however, a vital difference between Livorno and Smyrna. Livorno’s commercial prosperity marked the successful realization of the ambitions of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Smyrna’s rise, while beneficial to a number of Ottoman individuals, was not the result of Ottoman policy and in important ways came into conflict with goals of the political class in Istanbul. This was not to raise up, yet again, the worn-out spectre of Ottoman decline. Recent scholarship has shown that, over time, the Ottomans were able to respond to and take advantage of increased commercialization in the eastern Mediterranean. This does not change the fact that Istanbul was not making the new rules.
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The collapse of Ottoman power had other effects in the Levant. After 1883 Egypt emerged as a client state, with a king, of Albanian extraction, who shared with the British control of the Sudan (which simply means the ‘south’) down the Nile from Egypt. It thus possessed a special strategic role, not simply because of its position beside the Suez, but also because the Nile gave access to British possessions in central and eastern Africa: Kenya, Uganda and also Tanganyika, which Germany had lost following its defeat in the First World War (Zanzibar was acquired in the 1880s when Great Britain exchanged it for Heligoland). For a period of fifty years, Alexandria acted as a particular cultural magnet, as the home to Italians, Sephardic Jews, Greeks, Albanians, French, Coptic Christians, with an élite that eschewed their native tongue for French, a world brilliantly recreated in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. Nationalism had not yet become so fierce that several of these distinctive groups were unwelcome away from their place of birth.
Nowhere in the Mediterranean were foreign and national interests so inextricably interwoven than in Egypt, and nowhere in Egypt more than in Alexandria, the ultimate cosmopolitan city. British influence, at first largely financial, grew more overtly political, though its exact legal and constitutional status was ill defined. With the outbreak of the First World War Britain assumed a protectorate over Egypt. This lasted officially only until 1921, but the British did not renounce their influence (they controlled defence, for instance) until after the Second World War.