102 molly greene
in particular. Now, this is not a new story; as discussed earlier, from the very beginning
Ottoman subjects were important participants in internal imperial trade, including
maritime trade. Nor was this their first expansion into international trade, as the con-
ventional narrative would have it. That narrative ignores the commercial world which
extended north of the Empire’s borders, deep into eastern Europe and Russia; the
sultan’s subjects had been trading there already for several centuries. But it was in
the 1700s that Ottoman Christians managed to emerge as serious competitors to the
French across the Mediterranean, as well as to gain access to western Europe itself.
Greek shipping received an enormous boost during the Seven Years’ War (1754–
1763) when the Greeks served as privateers for various powers, especially the British.
During the Russo–Ottoman war (1768–1774) the same opportunities presented
themselves. On the eve of the French Revolution, the Greek merchant marine totaled
400 ships (Leon, 1972: 27 and 31). In the meantime, Greek and Armenian mer-
chants had settled in Amsterdam, Livorno, Venice, and Vienna where, in the eighteenth
century, they would come to dominate international exchange between the Empire
and western finance. French fear of this “local” competition was on full display when,
in 1781 and 1793, the French government decided to end Marseille’s monopoly over
trade with the Levant and open up the area to foreign competition. Traders in
Marseilles and the Levant were violently opposed to such a change and it is striking
that it was the various Ottoman communities—the Armenians, the Greeks and the
Jews—whom they feared the most, more than the British or the Dutch.^19
It is interesting that this upward curve continued into the Napoleonic period, par-
ticularly for the Greeks who seized the opportunities created by the war to control, by
1800, nearly three-quarters of the Levantine trade (Leon, 1972: 32). Despite this, the
extension of the French Revolution into the Mediterranean arena—where they
destroyed the Republic of Venice, expelled the Knights of St John on Venice, captured
the Ionian Islands and invaded Egypt—was certainly the end of an era in the
Mediterranean and thus it is appropriate to end our narrative there. By the time the
Congress of Vienna met in 1815, French trade in the Mediterranean had been
destroyed and the century to come would belong to the British. It would be in the
nineteenth century that the enduring equilibrium between the Ottoman Empire and,
indeed, between the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean would finally
give way. From the Sicilian and Andalusian migrants who swarmed into French Algeria
to stake their claim to a plot of land, to Lord Cromer taking up residence in Cairo at
the end of the century, this was Europe’s moment in the Mediterranean.
To return, briefly, to the beginning of our period, the advent of the early modern
Mediterranean is still most reliably captured by the conventional dates of political his-
tory. The year 1453 is a crucial turning point, not so much because of the Ottoman
conquest of Constantinople, but because by controlling the straits, the sultans were
able to turn the Black Sea into an Ottoman lake. This was part of a larger shift, not
yet complete in 1453, away from a highly-internationalized commercial regime of
long-distance routes, with multiple players, to one where commerce more closely fol-
lowed the boundaries of political sovereignty. Just as the previous constellation had
been a reflection of Byzantine weakness, the latter was the result of Ottoman strength.
The change that characterizes the end of the early modern period—the upsetting
of the balance between the European and the non-European Mediterranean—is clear
and easy to demonstrate. But whether this is truly a nineteenth-century phenomenon