The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It - Course Information

152 ~ THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE WORLD AROUND IT ~
Furthermore, the slave trade was not an insignificant source of profit. By definition,
this involved commercial activities traversing the Ottoman borders, since
no subject of the sultan could be legally enslaved. Slave merchants were officially
supposed to be Muslims, although ‘unofficial’ Jewish traders were also
active. In the steppe regions north of the Black Sea, slave dealers might be
Tatars, while at least in the mid-eighteenth century, people from north-eastern
Anatolia seem to have handled the trade in Caucasian slaves. However, the latter
sustained the competition of Abaza and Circassian traders from beyond the Ottoman
borders. 98 To pay for the slaves, it was not unknown for Ottoman traders to
sell arms to the Caucasian tribesmen. 99
Muslim traders were active in the Black Sea even at the time our study ends,
in the late eighteenth century, and this activity continued well into the nineteenth.
This can be determined from the kadi records of Istanbul’s commercial suburb of
Galata, where quite a few of these men lived and conducted their businesses.
Some of them were active in the Istanbul supply trade, bringing in sheep, cattle,
grain and oil; the capital invested was often considerable. But possibly due to the
strict official controls prevailing in this branch of business, merchants often did
not continue in it for long and quite a few traders turned their hand to investments
promising higher profits, particularly the slave trade. 100
As to Ottoman Jewish merchants, these seem to have been most successful in
the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when most of them were still fairly
recent immigrants from Spain or Italy. Since these traders were far less prosperous
once they had been fully acclimatized in the Ottoman environment, their
case conforms to a pattern observed throughout the world; often so-called commercial
diasporas do best as long as there remains a significant difference
between their members and the host society. 101 At the same time, we have seen
that sixteenth-century Jewish traders were well established, not only on Ottoman
territories, but also in Venice and in other Italian towns such as Ancona. Or at
least, this was true until 1556/963–4, when the papal inquisition in this city
seized and executed a sizeable number of Marranos: Jews who had been forced
to accept baptism in Spain and who later had reverted to their previous religion.
This relative success of Jewish merchants in Mediterranean trade, after a long
eclipse due to the growing prosperity of the medieval Italian communes, was due
to the protection of the Ottoman sultan, whose subjects many of them had
become. 102
Among the successful competitors of Ottoman Jews, we have already encountered
the Armenians who predominated during the seventeenth century, while in
the eighteenth, Greeks, Albanians and Serbs gained prominence. In the Balkan
peninsula, a positive economic conjuncture came into being after the end of the
long series of Ottoman–Habsburg wars in 1718/1130–1, the war of 1737–9/
1149–52, which netted the Ottomans the return of Belgrade, being too short to
seriously disrupt trade. Carriers and muleteers, who marketed the products of
their mountain villages, now were able to found independent commercial firms.
Their representatives visited Vienna, where, as Orthodox subjects of a foreign