the early modern mediterranean 95
Ottoman merchants took up this task, which involved a combination of overland and
maritime routes. The only exception was the Alexandria–Egypt route, which was han-
dled by an official convoy. This vital waterway linked Istanbul to its richest province,
which sent a steady supply of eastern luxury goods, plus Yemeni coffee and rice from
Egypt itself, to the capital city.^4
In the seventeenth century, the Ottoman government abandoned the official con-
voy and many historians have argued that the French took over this route at the
watery center of the Empire. French ships did participate but Ottoman merchants and
mariners flocked to this new opportunity as well. Islanders from the Dodecannese,
both Muslim and Christian, began sailing the route between Alexandria and Istanbul
and the grand brick houses of Rosetta, still standing, testify to the migration of
Ottoman merchants to the Egyptian coast in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
And this Dodecannese–Egyptian connection endured; throughout the eighteenth
century French authorities complained that the islanders continued to control the
route between Rhodes and Alexandria.
The Balkan port city of Salonica (Thessaloniki) was another common destination
for goods from Egypt, particularly coffee. A study of the Ottoman court records
from that city shows that this trade was entirely in the hands of Salonica’s Muslim
merchants, while it was Greek Christians who did the actual sailing between Egypt
and the Balkans. Egypt was so closely associated with maritime trade that the main
market in the port area was called the Egyptian Market (Mısır çarsısı̧ ) (Ginio, 2006:
95 and 97).
Ottoman merchants were not only happy to replace Italian merchants at home,
they were also very interested in trading in Italy, and the Ottoman state supported
them in these efforts. This interest predated the Ottomans—it stretches back to the
late medieval period—but the consolidation of Ottoman power gave them powerful
backing that they had lacked before.^5 The city of Ancona can serve as a good example
of these sixteenth-century developments, although they were not limited to this city
alone. In the medieval period the city was a place of little consequence; the Florentines
merely passed through there on their way to the east to sell their textiles (Earle, 1969:
34). By the 1520s all this had changed. Florentine merchants, who had seen their city
suffer through political crises, economic failures, plagues and invasions, no longer
maintained agents in the Ottoman capital (Cochrane, 1973: 54). Instead, they
traveled no further than Ancona, where they sold their cloth directly to Ottoman
merchants who were now coming to them. From being a small city that handled tran-
sit trade only, Ancona had blossomed into a cosmopolitan port of call which boasted
its own annual fair. In 1532, Ancona was incorporated into the Papal States. On the
eve of his occupation of the city Pope Clement VII was disturbed by the large number
of “Turkish” merchants in the city. They came, notes the seventeenth-century
Anconite historian Giuliano Saracini, “with their large ships loaded with merchandise
and stayed in the city with security, thanks to the privileges negotiated by Sultans
Bayezit, Selim and Süleyman” (Saracini, 1968: 337–338).
For the third zone of activity we return to the north-south axis and the Black Sea.
Because the Ottomans could control access to the Black Sea through the straits it was
here that Ottoman merchants and ships enjoyed their greatest advantage. By the sev-
enteenth century the sea had truly become an exclusive Ottoman lake. But Ottoman
merchants wandered much further than the sea itself. Ottoman Greeks who served on