96 molly greene
diplomatic missions to the Russian Tsar were at one and the same time fur traders.
Michael Kantacuzenus, the immensely powerful and wealthy Greek tax farmer who
was executed by the sultan in 1576, received 60 000 ducats a year from the sultan to
import furs from Russia.^6 Two centuries later the Greeks were still supplying the
Istanbul elite with furs from the far north (Stoianovich, 1960: 262). Ottoman mer-
chants were also active further west, in Poland, another relatively-underdeveloped
area which lacked its own merchant class. They brought spices and silks, the tradi-
tional luxury goods of the east, and in return brought home furs and hides. Early in
the sixteenth century, the sultan helped yet another Constantinopolitan Greek,
Andrea Carcacandella, obtain the right to trade freely throughout Poland. In 1548,
the little town of Lublin, in today’s south-eastern Poland, obtained the privilege of
testing the spices that were coming in from the south and its annual fair grew in
importance.^7
Later on, in the eighteenth century, another, closer northern zone opened up
which was the route connecting the Balkan interior to Vienna. The peace settlement
between the Hapsburgs and the Ottomans in 1699 allowed commerce to blossom in
a way that had not been the case before. At the same time, population expansion in
central Europe created a sustained demand for Balkan primary goods—grains, hides,
meat, oil, wax, silk, wool, cotton, tobacco, and timber (Stoianovich, 1960: 255). As
with the cases discussed above, the Hapsburgs lacked a mercantile class and thus, once
again, Ottoman merchants stepped into the breach. At the same time, western
merchants—particularly the French—were bringing more and more goods into the
now-booming Balkan entrepôt of Salonica. But they hesitated to take those goods
(textiles were prominent among them) into the interior where they didn’t know the
languages, the routes or the customs. This, too, provided tremendous opportunities
for Ottoman merchants. The eighteenth century was truly, to quote from Stoianovich’s
foundational article, the age of “The Conquering Balkan Orthodox Merchant.”^8
The significance of these northward extensions extends far beyond the commercial
realm. The history of the Greeks in the Russian lands is inextricably linked to the
fortunes of Christian Orthodoxy, both north and south, to Catholic Reformation
struggles in eastern Europe (those Greek fur merchants in Moscow also hoped to
persuade the Tsar to attack Catholic Poland and thus bring Uniate campaigns amongst
the Orthodox to a halt) and to the establishment of the Greek national-state in 1830.
The “Society of Friends”, the revolutionary organization which plotted the Greek
revolution, was born in Odessa where Catherine the Great had been building up a
Greek colony since the late eighteenth century. Similarly, the establishment of a
Serbian presence in the Hapsburg lands would prove to be of fundamental impor-
tance in the subsequent unfolding of Serbian national history.
The Mediterranean viewed from the eastOne of the reasons for having dwelled on the dense networks of the eastern
Mediterranean, including the developing hinterland of Anatolia and the northern
routes which extended far beyond the Empire itself, is to present a picture of how the
Mediterranean appears viewed from the Ottoman east. The view to the west, I think,
is one of steadily-diminishing interest and opportunity, a wide angle that narrows to a
thin line at the Straits of Gibraltar. In their home territory, in the east, the Ottomans