collateral winners. Russia took this step not only for the lucrative income of the
monopoly license, but also as an overture to the Safavids, hoping to build an anti-
Ottoman coalition. This monopoly directly violated the 1667 New Commercial
Charter, inasmuch as it allowed Armenian merchants to traverse Russia and engage
in retail trade in Astrakhan, Moscow, and Arkhangelsk as well as deliver Persian silk
to their Dutch partners in Moscow. Armenians maintained their privileges for
decades; they were confirmed and extended in 1711.
Equally important in Russia’s Volga market were Indian merchants, like the
Armenians an age-old Eurasian trade force. Indian merchants appear in the Volga
trade by the early seventeenth century, and by mid-century had established a
community in Astrakhan. Like Astrakhan’s Armenians with their ties to New Julfa
in Persia, Astrakhan’s Indian merchants represented familyfirms headquartered in
Isfahan, Kandahar, Bukhara, and India. For them, export trade to Russia was a tiny
portion of a thriving global enterprise. By the 1670s and 1680s Astrakhan’sIndian
community had grown to almost 100 merchant families; it enjoyed privileges of
religious observation and self-government for internal disputes.
Indian merchants in Astrakhan sold spices, Iranian silk, and Indian cottons,
gems, and jewelry; they bought European re-exports and Russian goods—western
woolens and other cloth, Russian leather, fox and sable, iron and needles—to ship
back to Iran. In Astrakhan they were also famed as money lenders in a credit-starved
business environment; they were better capitalized than their Russian counterparts
because of their family-based international trade networks. According to the 1667
New Commercial Code Indian merchants were supposed to work with Armenian
or Russian partners to bring their goods to Kazan, Nizhnii Novgorod, and Moscow,
and many such shared caravans are recorded. But these protectionist regulations
were notfirmly enforced: in 1684 a small trade center (gostinnyi dvor) in the
Kitaigorod neighborhood of Moscow housed a variety of eastern traders—
Bukharans, Iranians, Armenians, and some twenty-one Indian merchants. When
Russian merchants petitioned the state to prohibit their access to Moscow (“these
Indians who live in Astrakhan without paying tribute enrich themselves because
they never serve our state”), the Indian merchants responded by pointing out how
much income they had brought the state in customs duties. The state reiterated the
regulations but continued not to enforce strictly. At the same time Russia sought
trade privileges for its merchants to trade in its eastern neighbors; ten embassies to
Persia between 1590 and 1626 and many to the Ottoman empire were unsuccess-
ful, as were repeated embassies to India (1646, 1651, 1675) until 1695.
After Persia, the second most important trading partner for Russian trade was
Central Asia. Since Mongol times goods from Central Asia and parts east were
being brought to the Volga by“Bukharan”merchants, a generic term including
traders from Bukhara, Khwarazm (Khiva), and other Central Asian centers. They
brought hides, saddles, bridles, sheepskin, horses, slaves, Chinese textiles and
goods, colonial goods including spices, tobacco, indigo,fine leather, rhubarb,
and gems. They purchased European woolen cloth, walrus tusks, Russian hats,
and wooden products, and especially furs—it is said that in 1595 they purchased so
many that theyflooded the market in Iran with black sables and foxes.
194 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801