the early modern mediterranean 93
The Ottoman MediterraneanIn 1432 the Frenchman Bertrandon de La Broquière joined a caravan of pilgrims and
merchants in Damascus. Together with 3000 camels the travelers were heading from
Mecca to Bursa and were actually in the charge of Turkish merchants from that city,
appointed by the sultan.
The image of Venetian and Genoese ships at Alexandria, waiting to fill their holds
with spices, is a familiar one. Less well-known is the fact that the Ottomans created in
Bursa, just across the Marmara Sea from Istanbul, a second Mediterranean emporium
for spices and dyes from the east. As a rising empire, they wanted to attract the luxury
trade to lands that they controlled. Visitors to Bursa in the fifteenth century would
have rubbed shoulders with Italian, Arab and Turkish merchants, among others. The
Ottomans pursued “business-friendly” policies in their drive to develop the new com-
mercial center; in about 1470 a Florentine merchant named Benedetto Dei wrote that
the Florentines in Bursa could barter their cloth in exchange for spices, while the
Venetians were obliged to pay cash for the spices they bought in Alexandria (Inalcık,
1960: 137). Fatih Mehmet’s capture of Byzantine Constantinople made Bursa even
more important, as he set out to make the city—which had been reduced to a shadow
of its former self in the years before 1453—his new imperial capital, Ottoman Istanbul.
Until the end of the Mamluk regime in Egypt, the land and sea routes linking Syria to
Anatolia, both of which ended up in Bursa, grew and prospered.
Above and beyond the specifics of the luxury trade with the east, the Pax Ottomanica
established the importance of Anatolia as a zone of commerce. In a felicitous phrase,
Valérian has noted that Muslim merchants organized their trading networks “behind
the Mediterranean,” such as the gold trade from the African interior to the Maghrebi
ports. By the sixteenth century the Portuguese were busily chipping away at that
monopoly but, at the other end of the Mediterranean, a new interior was opening up.
Having been wracked by warfare for several centuries, the establishment of Ottoman
sovereignty over the Anatolian peninsula secured the link between the hinterland and
the numerous ports along the littoral. By the early seventeenth century Anatolian cot-
ton was being exported through the coastal port of Izmir in such great quantities that
the English, the Dutch, the French and the Venetians had all established consuls there.^1
The Ottoman arrival, then, transformed the relationship between the Anatolian
coast and the Aegean world. Previously a contested frontier between Latin
Christendom and various Turkish emirates, by the sixteenth century the Anatolian
peninsula and the islands belonged to the same Empire, thus facilitating trade. Soon
after that, the city of Izmir became a new hub of international trade, a position it held
all the way up until the dawn of the twentieth century.
Ottoman conquests stretched far to the north as well. Through its vassal states of
Moldavia and Wallachia the Empire had an extensive central European frontier, bor-
dering both Russia and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. This new configura-
tion established far-reaching, and enduring, commercial ties that, at their farthest
extent, stretched from Moscow to Arabia. Shorter distances, of course, enjoyed
particularly dense connections. This new north-south axis explains why a Turkish
merchant who had his will recorded in Bursa in the second half of the fifteenth century
was trading in both soap and ginger from Arabia and knives from Wallachia—he had
over 11 000 of the latter in his possession (Inalcık, 1960: 146).