Iranian Empire and Caucasian Borderlands 17able to dock along the shore. As a result, the city functioned as the
primary regional trade center for neighboring khanates, Gilan, and
Astrakhan. Even most of the Russo-Iranian trade went via Baku. No
other east Caucasian city could compete. Yerevan was a poor second
to Baku. It was a market for slaves and domestic agricultural pro-
ducts. The capital of Shirvan had been a serious rival until the early
eighteenth century, but that was ended by a series of military disas-
ters: the anti-Shia massacre in 1721, the looting by Nader Shah's
army and Avar raiders from the high mountains, and the political
collapse of the 1770s and 1780s. Two other places Russia believed
to be important for trade, the city of Derbent and Saleyan (a district
near the mouth of the Kura), had no harbor facilities at all. In its
days of greater strength, Derbent had maintained stone jetties to cre-
ate an artificial harbor, but these had been in ruins since the sixteenth
century. Derbent conducted a modest level of trade with Russia, but
Baku was the intermediary in most of this. Astrakhan merchants
made semiannual fishing trips to the waters around Saleyan. These
regular visits encouraged the development of an impromptu market
as nomads who pastured their flocks in the vicinity and inhabitants
of several khanates came to sell their wares to the Russians and buy
goods brought from Astrakhan. Yet there were serious obstacles to
the development of Saleyan as a great market even apart from its
lack of a proper harbor. There was no town, but there were many
poisonous snakes and lethal endemic diseases. The Russians discovered
some of Saleyan's liabilities when they occupied the area on the or-
ders of Peter the Great. In a single year, an entire Russian garrison of
400 men was killed by disease. However, that did not deter Russian
hopes of developing Saleyan as a great commercial center.
The eastern Caucasus' uneven economic picture was matched by
widespread political turbulence. Many of the ruling dynasties had
only recently gained power. Every khanate, except the peripheral
Nakhjavan and Talesh, was the scene of savage domestic power strug-
gles, attacks from without, or both. The most important principalities
of earlier times were reduced in size and strength. Shirvan had been
an independent or at least autonomous principality from the ninth
century to the sixteenth, when the Safavis made it an integral part of
their empire. Over the centuries, it lost more than half of its territory.
Derbent broke away during the Mongol era; the Ottomans severed
Baku and Shakki during periods in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies when they took the region from the Safavis. In the second half
of the eighteenth century, Shirvan's political fortune reached its nadir.
The leader of the Khan Chopan tribe seized power in the early 1760s