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For war also meant booty, prisoners and slaves. As Busbecq noted in the sixteenth century, ‘slaves constitute the main source of gain to the Turkish soldier’. Edward Browne, the travelling son of Sir Thomas Browne [author of the Religio Medici], was moved ‘by the pitiful spectacle of Captives and Slaves’ when he passed through northern Greece in 1668, men like the polyglot Hungarian Sigismund, a learned man who spoke ‘Hungarian, Sclavonian, Turkish, Armenian and Latin’ and had served a Turk, a Jew and an Armenian before being manumitted. French and Venetian consuls tried to get imprisoned or enslaved prisoners of war released and helped others escape: in 1700 the consulate gave a list to Paris of ‘all the soldier deserters, French, Italians, Spaniards etc., Catholics, Huguenots and infidels’ he had sent on to Marseilles. The Alsace man redeemed by another French consul in 1792, or the deserter who fled his master and made his way to Cavalla were among the dozens of fortunate individuals who were thus returned to Christendom many years after failed campaigns had first brought them to the Ottoman lands.
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The fog of war enshrouded this human traffic in a penumbra of legal uncertainty. Two Hungarians sold in the Larissa market in 1721 had to be released on the emperor’s orders after it turned out that they were not captured in battle but had merely been seized by some enterprising janissaries while about their master’s business. Moreover, peace treaties often stipulated that prisoners of war were not to be sold. ‘I learned ten days ago that in Larissa there are two Venetians, prisoners of some Albanians, who are negotiating their sale,’ writes the Venetian consul in 1739. ‘I immediately sent a trustworthy man there to the kadi with a letter informing him that they are Venetians and that according to the terms of the peace they cannot be sold as slaves. The kadi read the letter, imprisoned the Albanians and gave up the two men into my care.’
But because so many of the sultan’s troops saw the acquisition of slaves as their right, official orders were often ignored and the problem of illegal enslavement persisted, complicating efforts by the Ottoman state to organize prisoner exchanges. After the Russo-Turkish war of 1768–74, with a large number of Ottoman troops in Russian captivity, the sultan ruled that all Russian prisoners still in Ottoman hands should be released. Only those ‘Muslims willingly staying in Russia and embracing Christianity’ and ‘those Christians willingly embracing Islam in My supreme empire’ were to be exempt. One year on, however, few of the ‘Russians, Poles, Moldavians, Vlachs and Moreotes’ in Turkish hands had been liberated. The sultan accused Turks and Jews in Salonica of holding on to their captives out of sheer greed, and warned them that until they handed them back, the religious obligation to free ‘brothers of the faith’ in Russian hands remained unfulfilled. As in so many areas of eighteenth-century life, what the sultan ordered and what actually happened were two quite different things.
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The traffic in bodies formed part of the Mediterranean economy until late into the nineteenth century. During the long and complex struggle between Muslim and Catholic powers all sides bought and sold slaves, and the markets of the Barbary coast had their counterparts in the little-studied dealers of Christendom. Salonica’s own inhabitants had been sold into slavery after 1430, but as the Ottoman city grew and flourished, its new residents – Christians, Jews and Muslims – all bought slaves for domestic use, many of whom settled there in their turn. Poland, Ukraine, Georgia and Circassia, the Sudan and north Africa were the main sources of supply, and slaves from all these regions were to be found there. We do not know where its slave market was located but wars kept it well-stocked. Large numbers of Christian women and children were sold off in 1715, after the Venetian campaign, and again in 1737 after the Habsburg invasion.
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This was not, as in the Americas, a cheap route to the plantation economy, but rather a feature of the domestic household life of the well-to-do in an empire where slaves had until very recently occupied some of the highest positions in the state. In Salonica, slaves cost far more than domestic servants, especially if the latter were children; there is no evidence for their being used as cheap labour en masse in public works in the way that occurred in north Africa. Some accumulated money of their own, enabling them to buy their way out of service. Others were freed with a legacy on their master’s death. Probably worst off were those who had fled their employer’s service, or were released from the galleys with no money to support them: such individuals eked out a very precarious existence on the margins of society, joining the beggars, gypsies and wandering dervishes at one of the city’s half a dozen soup kitchens. Groups of African beggars roamed around the city and its hinterland, and these were almost certainly manumitted slaves, banding together for protection. Those on their own, in particular women, were frequently kidnapped and sold as slaves by dealers. This happened, for instance, to Amina bint Abdullah, a convert from Christianity, despite the fact that ‘she did not have anything to do with slavery in her genealogy’.
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What worried non-Muslims was not so much the idea of slavery itself – for this they were familiar with – as the prospect that enslavement might lead to conversion and the loss of Christian [or Jewish] souls. ‘Various Turks have come here,’ reports the Venetian consul in June 1770, following unsuccessful Greek uprisings in the islands and on the mainland, ‘with twenty of those children, male and female, and they sell them to other Turks, who make little Turks [tourkakia] of them.’ The Jesuits and Jews had organizations devoted to redeeming slaves who were of their faith. Other Christians handled matters more informally. In the 1720s, for instance, a female Ukrainian slave who had been badly treated by her captors was brought to Salonica to be sold. She had some hidden savings and sought help in arranging a ransom, or at least a Christian buyer, ‘so that she does not fall into the hands of a Turk’. Because the woman belonged to the Orthodox rite, some of the town’s European merchants questioned whether, being Catholics, they should be involved and proposed that ‘Mikalis, the Greek physician’ should take responsibility, especially since he knew that ‘she can sew and embroider excellently and weave and can cook in the Turkish style very well.’ But Mikalis did not want to pay the asking price, and anyway the Greeks had a reputation for being more reluctant than the Turks to manumit their slaves, ‘especially when the slaves are Polish or Kazak or of any different nation.’ The Catholic Father Superior found a solution by organizing a lottery among the French merchants in the city: within three days he had raised the money and arranged for the woman to be bought and given to the winner. The sale was completed and the necessary deed of sale was signed by the local customs officer, handed over with the woman herself. She was lodged in a French-owned house ‘until she learns the catechism and other mysteries of the Christian confession, which the priest promised to teach her in Turkish, because [she] speaks only Turkish and Russian.’ She had not been freed, but her soul at least was safe.
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Captives of a different kind, fewer in number but equally reliable indicators of far-off troubles were the distinguished guests whom the authorities in Istanbul sent to Salonica as political exiles. The city provided a suitable home where they could live in some style, hunt if they wished and hold court at official expense, remaining all the while under the watchful eye of the authorities. At a time when many were living on the margins, they were treated extremely well. We still have the list of foods provided for Mirza Safi, a Persian pretender, when he was held there in 1731. It includes ‘bread, rice, clarified butter, yoghurt, cumin, sugar, starch, boiled grape-juice, clove, cinnamon, chicken, eggs, almonds, pistachios, pepper, saffron, coffee, coriander, olive oil, flour, honey, bees-wax, grapes, salt, chick peas, vinegar, onions, lemon-juice, black cumin, chestnuts, quinces, tobacco (from Shiraz), soap, meat, barley, straw and vegetables’ – a respectable diet by any standards.
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Patriarchs and grand viziers were parked there when their careers suffered eclipse. Sultan Abdul Hamid II himself was deposed by the Young Turks in 1909 and sent into gilded captivity. Hungarian aristocrats passed through, as did the Pole Jan Potocki, the multi-talented author of that remarkable novel, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, who blew his brains out with a silver bullet a few years later. Following the suppression of the Wahhabi uprising in 1814, the Sherif of Mecca arrived with an entourage of forty and was treated with the greatest honour: he lasted a few years before succumbing to the plague. His son and successor, Abdul Muttalib – ‘a grand old man of sixty, tall, but slender, with the grand manner, distinguished in every way, of very brown colour, almost black, fine skin, a long blue robe, a Kashmir turban’ – eventually followed in his father’s footsteps and even erected a domed tomb in his father’s memory which survived into the early twentieth century.
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Among all these, however, the man who stayed the longest and left the most important record of his experiences was a little-known early eighteenth-century Ukrainian political emigré called Pylyp Orlyk. After years fighting against the Muscovite tsars, Orlyk fled first to Sweden, and then passed through central Europe to the relative safety of the Ottoman lands. On 2 November 1722 – in the month of Moharrem 1135 according to the dating of the imperial firman – the fifty-year-old Orlyk was ordered by the Porte to Salonica. There this cultivated and warm-hearted man spent no less than twelve years in exile, watching the twists and turns of European politics from the sidelines while his impoverished wife remained in Cracow and his eight children were dispersed throughout Europe. Only in March 1734 was he released, thanks to French intervention, and allowed to move north; still trying to organize an uprising in the Ukraine, he died in poverty nine years later.
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Orlyk’s misfortune has proved to be the historian’s gain, for from the day of his arrival he kept a diary which offers a unique insight into the eighteenth-century city. No other journal of comparable detail from Salonica has survived. His urgent scrawl gives access not merely to his voluminous political correspondence, most of which – in Latin, French, Polish and Ukrainian – was duly copied into his journals, but also to the rigours of daily life in his place of exile. The misbehaviour of his loutish servants, the local fare, his bag after a day’s shooting in the plains, stories told him by tailors, interpreters and bodyguards enliven its pages. Jesuits, consuls, doctors, spies and the Turkish judges and governors who ran the city all encountered the busy exile.
Much of the time, he lived well, considering his predicament. He hunted partridge, hogs and hares, which he distributed generously among his acquaintances. There was a lot of drinking, especially among the Christians – the French wandered drunkenly through the streets of the European quarter during Carnival, while parties at the house of the Greek metropolitan apparently went on for days at a time, with chicken, salted olives and lemon jam washed down with copious quantities of vodka, wine and coffee. Orlyk and his entourage were fond of the bottle too and he coped easily enough with his often inebriated Jewish interpreter and his manservant ‘Red’, found more than once sprawled in the gutter after a hard night. But the dangers and risks of urban life hemmed him in. At the minor end of the scale they included frequent indigestion from over-eating, the ‘horrid muck’ of the city streets, and the bribery necessary to smooth relations with Greek and Ottoman officials alike. He was shocked by the corruption of the church and the readiness of Christians to use the Ottoman courts when it served their interests. His diary is also sensitive to disturbing portents – a full moon cleft with deep black fissures, earth tremors and ‘great lights flying in the air like a big lance’. Meanwhile, crimes went unpunished, pirates threatened voyagers by sea, and as the streets echoed with the sounds of gunfire, janissaries and irregulars acted much as they wished. Of all the numerous dangers Orlyk’s diary describes, however, none was more frightening, murderous or unpredictable than what an earlier traveller described as ‘the terrour of horrid Plagues’. Arriving in the city in the aftermath of the epidemic of 1718–1719, Orlyk quickly became familiar with the biggest killer of the early modern Ottoman world.
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Plague
‘Thank God the plague is not here!’ wrote a relieved traveller arriving in Salonica in 1788. Borne on the trade routes from Central Asia and the Black Sea through to the Mediterranean, it could come by both land and sea. A century before Orlyk, an epidemic in Istanbul had killed one thousand a day, according to the British ambassador there, and forced more than two hundred thousand to flee into the countryside. Izmir lost perhaps one-fifth of its entire population in 1739–41, and as many as a quarter may have died between 1758 and 1762: the historian Daniel Panzac estimates it lost the equivalent of its entire population to the plague in the course of the century. At such times, one saw ‘the Streets … filld with infected bodies as well alive as dead; the living seeking remedies either from the Phisitians or at the Bathes, the Dead lying in open Beers, or else quite naked at theyr dores to be washd before theyr buryalls.’
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In Salonica, athwart the empire’s main carrying routes, warm summers and a humid climate offered the plague bacillus a near-ideal environment in the lethal months from April to July. Compared with Izmir, with 55 plague years in the eighteenth century, and Istanbul [65], Salonica got off lightly: even so plague struck one year in three. Outbreaks in 1679–80, 1687–9, 1697–99, 1708–9, 1712–13 – which supposedly claimed 6,000 victims – 1718–19, 1724 and 1729–30 were just the start. In 1740, a ‘bad plague’ carried off 1337 Christians, 2239 Turks and 3935 Jews. That was not the only really serious outbreak: in 1762 10–12,000 people, roughly 16–20% of the population, died. The figures were similar in 1781 when as a survivor put it, one could ‘die of fright’, and again in 1814. Over the century, roughly 55–65,000 victims were carried off, something close to the mid-century population of the city itself. Only the constant inflow of new, mostly Christian migrants from the countryside and high mostly Jewish local birth rates can account for the lack of a very steep decline in numbers. It is testimony to the resilience of the city’s economy that unlike ports such as Alexandria and Aleppo, its growth was not more seriously checked.
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Through Orlyk’s entries during the epidemic of 1724 – a serious year but not nearly as bad as 1713 or 1762 – we can see the astonishingly rapid trajectory from rumour to full-scale panic and mass death. It all started fairly quietly: ‘On Wednesday morning, after I came back from the Orthodox Church after mass, I was told by my people that the small daughter of a man who lives close by the cemetery at the Orthodox Church is extremely sick with the plague.’ Hearing this, Greeks from the vicinity had already started moving out to villages in the mountains. And there were omens: ‘My people told me they heard an owl on my inn, and this is a fatal bird, which is proven by experience.’
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The next day the girl was dead and the church had closed. Orlyk asked his servant to find lodgings for him in a nearby village, together with the English consul and some other members of the community, in order to escape ‘God’s awful punishment’. But the villagers, as often happened, were understandably reluctant to take in refugees from the city and started arming and erecting barricades to prevent them coming. Reportedly they were being encouraged by the pasha of Salonica who planned to make wealthy foreigners pay handsomely for the privilege of leaving.
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As a political exile Orlyk had particular difficulties getting out. When he presented himself to the mollah, ‘this heathen made me more annoyed, telling me there is nothing written down in the emperor’s order that I can go wherever I want and choose inns, but that it is written down that I shall stay at the inn in this town and have to stay here. I discussed it a long time with him and put forward lots of arguments; he promised to speak about it with the aghas tomorrow and to tell me what they decide at their stupid council.’ Despite Orlyk’s efforts, the mollah stuck to his guns, perhaps fearing the consequences if he absconded. Meanwhile, the younger son of his landlord fell ill as well, which scared the household so much ‘that all of us ran away from the inn, and left our stuff and also the carriage on the street, at which the servants slept the whole night in the rain, and I slept over in some monastery house … where I slept in great fear.’ Two days later, Orlyk tried again and this time he informed the mollah that the entire street where he lived was infected, including the house next door, and that he had given up sleeping in the inn. Even this had little effect. Only when the English consul intervened, and promised to be responsible for his eventual return, was he allowed to depart.
After the usual difficulties with the janissaries guarding the gates, who blocked his way until they received payment, he and his party set off, their carriages loaded down with clothes, provisions, guns, books, and tents. They had left the walls far behind and were heading for the prosperous little town of Galatista in the wooded hills to the southeast when they heard that its inhabitants were threatening to burn down their own houses and retreat to the mountains if they came. Neither Orlyk nor the British merchants he was travelling with took the threats seriously. Desperate to put the infected city behind them, they travelled together to protect themselves against robbers and sent their Jewish interpreter to deal with the village headman. Eventually they arrived, settled into an inn, and over the coming weeks got used to the scanty rations – olives, salted fish – which made up the local diet, passing the time teaching country children phrases in French.
In an effort to stem the plague’s progress, the mollah had ordered all the inhabitants of the city who had left for the villages to stay where they were. No one appears to have obeyed, however, and into their mountain refuge trickled word of developments eight hours’ ride away down in the plain. ‘A young English merchant who went yesterday to Thessalonica, came back from there this evening and told me that the plague spreads more and more, that every day thirty people die and even more leave the town.’ The next day they heard of the death of a Jesuit monk who had recently arrived from Smyrna. Even more alarmingly, a local peasant had been stricken while in the city and had died since returning to the village. ‘Others say also that he was carried out of the village while he was still alive so that he doesn’t infect the rest.’ Down in the city ‘the plague spreads more and more and especially among the Turks and Jews; just yesterday they carried 250 dead out of the town.’ One could see the sense of the Islamic injunction – derived from a hadith of the Prophet, but only partially obeyed by Salonica’s own Muslim population – that those living in a place afflicted by the plague should accept whatever their fate held in store for them and not budge. Constant movement between the villages and the city extended the range of the epidemic, for as Orlyk himself noted – ‘people from here incessantly go to the city to sell their wares, and another village, very close by, is also infected.’
There were several reports that it had eased off or abated entirely before Orlyk and his party judged it safe to return. Having escaped the worst, a final frisson of terror awaited him back in Salonica. He had spent the summer months wearing a light coat made for him by his Jewish tailors. Now, as they brought him his new winter furs, they confessed that one of them had already been plague-stricken – the tell-tale swellings had appeared under the arm – when he had delivered Orlyk’s summer coat: ‘He could hardly finish his job for the pain, which tormented him and as soon as he got back home he laid down on his bed. I was thrilled when I heard this and thanked God that he kept me and my son alive. I wore this coat through the whole summer and September too, without knowing about the plague-ridden Jews. When I asked them today why they hadn’t told me, these heathens answered that if I had known about it, I wouldn’t have wanted the coat.’
It was not until a century later – well after quarantine restrictions had become customary in Europe, and imposed upon travellers from Ottoman lands – that the city’s vulnerability to plague, cholera and other epidemics began to diminish. Until then, nothing so clearly marked man’s vulnerability to the external world. The rabbis often managed to isolate the houses of victims, sometimes barricading them up, at others setting guards at the doors, but since such measures were not implemented comprehensively, those who could leave did. In 1719 two-thirds of the population escaped, and the city was abandoned. The pashas, beys and notables fled into the villages; the poor remained behind and were disproportionately afflicted, especially in the densely packed Jewish quarters of the lower town. ‘The only prey of the epidemic left are the poor most of whom are dying,’ writes the Venetian consul in 1781. Many tried prayer, seeing in their sufferings the signs of God’s vengeance for their sins. An English merchant reported that some Greek peasants opened up the graves of the victims, and stabbed and mangled the corpses ‘in a fearful manner’ in the belief that the Devil had entered them. Others took a kind of revenge of their own, seizing the opportunity offered by the empty mansions, locked stores and shuttered shops in the markets to loot and steal: ‘More than a few villains have stayed here and there are fears lest they set fires to create the opportunity for looting the abandoned houses.’ Orlyk’s translator turned out to head a gang of Jewish thieves which plundered unguarded warehouses, and stole jewels and cloth. The first Orlyk heard about it was when he was contacted by his former employee from prison, promising to work free for a year for him if he got him out. Wisely, no doubt, he refused. Meanwhile the cemeteries expanded on the slopes of the Upper Town where the thousands of plague victims were usually buried.
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Managing the City
One of the questions raised by the Ottoman experience of plague is what it tells us about the attitude of local officials to the management of the city. Although soldiers returning from wars, pilgrims and merchants all carried the deadly disease into the unprotected port, preventative measures were more or less non-existent. Infected houses were sometimes sprinkled with vinegar, limed or even occasionally demolished. But each community took its own measures and there was no overall governmental response. According to the reformer John Howard, who visited Salonica in 1786, the Greeks and the Jews each ran a small hospital, the former enclosed by high walls, the latter ‘lightsome and airy, and better accommodated for its purpose than any I had seen’, situated in the midst of the cemetery, and utilising tombs as tables and seats. But the small European community was far less well equipped than in Izmir, and evidently relied on flight into the countryside. And with no public health service, at least before the administrative reforms of the mid-nineteenth century, Ottoman officials were no better informed than anyone else about where and when the epidemic struck. In 1744 when rumours of plague ran through the town, the only way the Venetian consul could establish their veracity was by approaching the chief rabbi who got the Jewish grave-diggers to say on oath whether they had observed signs of illness among the deceased. The Ottoman town officials themselves had no idea.
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Here as in so many areas, they approached municipal governance in a spirit of extreme disengagement. The plague – like the other risks of urban life such as fire and violent crime – highlighted the limited resources and ambitions of the eighteenth-century Ottoman state. The truth was that the kadi and the pasha of the city had few means at their disposal, for the city and its interests were often squeezed between the demands of the capital, on the one hand, and the powerful regional land-owners on the other. Criminal justice was generally solved through mediation and fines, and imprisonment was limited for many years by the lack of a proper prison in the town. The so-called Tower of the Janissaries was usually used for this but rarely had many inmates and was not designed for large numbers. A considerable amount of alcohol, coffee and opium was being consumed. The city was notorious for its dozens of taverns, coffee-houses and drinking shops – Evliya had been astonished at the brazenness of the unbelievers who would openly get drunk on wine or boza [a drink made from fermented millet] – but they too were largely outside official control, and frequented by janissaries who did much as they pleased. Taxes and the setting of market prices did concern the authorities. But even there, as we have seen, the resources they commanded were limited.
In general, whilst not quite as anarchic as some other Ottoman cities – Aleppo, for example, seems to have been in a state of virtual civil war as notable families and local power-brokers fought out their differences – eighteenth-century Salonica was a place where the authority of the central state could only be enforced sporadically and intermittently. When events threatened to spiral into large-scale violence, the strangulation of janissary ringleaders or the expulsion of troublemakers restored order for a time. But so long as the city fulfilled its role as provider of grain and wool for the capital, the Porte was prepared to tolerate high levels of street violence, and substantial power remaining within the hands of local elites. Food riots were the townspeople’s way of signalling that local land-owners and merchants needed to remember the poor. Controlling the janissaries themselves was almost impossible, and together with the Albanians, they were the main internal challenge to imperial rule. As soldiers rampaged through Salonica’s streets, and the plague carried off thousands a year, it could seem as if this was a city on the verge of chaos. Yet this was a chaos of vitality, not decline.
6 Commerce and the Greeks (#ulink_387f0e67-58a5-5fd7-a8e3-53807facd14e)
The Routes of Trade
ACCORDING TO THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY Ottoman cartographer Piri Reis, Salonica’s harbour could hold at least three hundred vessels. A hundred years later ships were calling from ‘the Black Sea, the White Sea [the Aegean], the Persian Gulf, Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Suez, Tripolis, France, Portugal, Denmark, England, Holland and Genoa’, while the languages used by the city’s traders and shopkeepers included Italian, French, Spanish, Vlach, Russian, Latin, Arabic, Albanian and Bulgarian as well as Greek and Turkish. None of this sounds like a city in the doldrums. And indeed, despite plague, war and the janissaries, the population rose steadily – after stagnating throughout much of the seventeenth century, it was up to 50,000 by 1723 and around 70,000–80,000 by the 1790s. The motor of trade was humming, and even with the decline of the traditional cloth manufacturing industry, and the emigration of some Jewish weavers and businessmen, it was bringing new prosperity.
The Russian monk Barskii, who visited in 1726, was impressed. ‘They come to Salonica from Constantinople, Egypt, Venice, France, by English trading vessels, and by land,’ he wrote. ‘Germans, Vlachs, Bulgarians, Serbs, Dalmatians, people from the whole of Macedonia and the Ukraine, traders in wholesale and retail visit here to import grain and every kind of good.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The bazaars themselves were extensive, well-stocked and ‘perpetually crowded with buyers and sellers’ and the shops contained abundant manufactured goods and colonial produce. The city’s inland trade flourished, there was a carrying trade to the thriving regional fairs in the hinterland, and increasingly, a longer-range overland traffic to the expanding markets of Germany and central Europe. Once Catherine the Great conquered the Tatar lands and founded Odessa, the Black Sea grain trade took off as well, passing through Salonica on its way to southern Europe.
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By the century’s end, the old, small wooden landing stage, unable to handle more than two or three vessels a day, was clearly insufficient for the volume of traffic. Goods lay for days in the open, quickly ruined by winter rains, the customs officials were notoriously corrupt, and the Jewish and Albanian hamals had a reputation for helping themselves to goods. Yet despite these obstacles, some merchants amassed substantial fortunes; they were, wrote one observer, the ‘possessors of the treasures of Egypt’. The city could not compete with Izmir, still less Naples or Genoa. Nevertheless, when one Ottoman official compiled a geography of Europe, he mentioned Salonica as one of the three key ports of the northern Mediterranean, along with Venice and Marseille. Henry Holland visited in 1812 and was impressed by the ‘general air of splendour of the place’: ‘We passed among the numerous vessels which afforded proof of its growing commerce,’ he wrote, ‘and at six in the evening came up one of the principal quays, the avenues of which were still crowded with porters, boatmen and sailors, and covered with goods of various descriptions.’
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Intra-imperial trade – with north Africa, the Black Sea and the Middle East – still overshadowed the markets of Europe. The Ottoman economy was a closed circuit, efficient and prosperous on its own terms, only gradually becoming linked to the wider, global economy. Macedonian tobacco went to Egypt and the Barbary coast, even though demand was growing in Italy and central Europe. Armenian merchants travelled to and from Persia with jewellery and other precious goods. Thick woollen capots from the Zagora went mostly to the islands, Syria and Egypt, though some were exported as far afield as the French West Indies. In addition, the obligatory grain shipments to Istanbul were often accompanied by other orders – for silver and metal tools. In return, the city was importing blades and spices from Damascus and further east, coffee, slaves and headgear from the Barbary coast, flax, linens, gum and sugar from Egypt, soap, wood, pepper, arsenic and salted fish from Izmir. From the islands came lemons and oil from Andros, and wine from Evvia. Much of this trade remained in the hands of Muslim merchants and the demand was so substantial that the city ran a deficit on its trade with the rest of the empire. Perhaps we can understand why a well-travelled Ottoman diplomat, Ahmed Resmi Effendi, was so scathing about commerce in Europe. ‘In most of the provinces, poverty is widespread, as a punishment for being infidels,’ he wrote: ‘Anyone who travels in these areas must confess that goodness and abundance are reserved for the Ottoman realms.’
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Nevertheless, during the eighteenth century, the balance of economic activity within the empire was changing as wars with Persia hit the Anatolian trade and Europe’s new prosperity made Rumelia more commercially important. Salonica, as the chief port for the Balkans was poised to profit. Izmir was busier, but a much higher proportion of Salonica’s traffic was directed west and north and its trade deficit with Asia and the Middle East was more than outweighed by its surplus on the growing exchange with Europe. Exports of locally-produced grain, cotton, salt and tobacco as well as wax, hides, furs and fats from the Danubian Principalities and Russia paid for Murano glass, books, fine velvets, Italian paper and even furniture. Mid-century also saw a boom in the illegal smuggling of antiquities – one Venetian shipment included five entire columns plus another one hundred ‘stones’ – until the exporters [mostly French and Greek] damaged the roads, houses and even cemeteries so badly that the authorities put a stop to it.
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Despite the increasing competitiveness of French and English textiles, indigo and American coffee, the trade gap in Salonica’s favour remained. It was filled by coin – Ottoman aspres and piastres, the Cairene fundukli and the Stambul zermahboub as well as German and Hungarian thalers, Spanish doubloons and Venetian ducats and sequins. Demand was so high that counterfeits entered the market produced in bulk by enterprising villagers in the Ionian islands – under Venetian control – and the towns of western Macedonia. Both the Ottoman and the Venetian authorities tried vainly to stop them. But despite the constant depreciation in the value of the Ottoman piastre, it was generally traded above its official rate, such was the foreign demand.
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Some European items did appeal to the elite. Heavy English watches, encased in silver, and preferably made by George Prior or Benjamin Barber sold thirty dozen annually, reflecting the scarcity of public clocks. Lyons carpets and gold-fringed Genoese damasks adorned the wealthier haremliks, while the beys, as they had always done, wintered in caftans lined with Russian ermine, sable, fox and agneline. Tastes were slowly changing. The French consul Cousinéry was impressed by the contrast in living styles between the old Albanian bey of Serres, Ismail, who had ‘banished all interior luxury’ which he regarded as ‘useless and ruinous’, and his son Yusuf, who spent the substantial fortune he acquired as deputy governor of Salonica on his country palace, its walls painted to imitate marble, the whole ‘a melange of Oriental ostentation and European taste’ – elegant divans, richly decorated wood-panelled doors and windows, combined with Bohemian crystal in the window-panes, English carpets and gilt-framed pictures in the harem. Yet someone as wealthy and ambitious as Yusuf Bey – the most powerful man in the city in his heyday – was probably the exception. In general, Muslim taste was far less profligate and directed not to European manufactures but to coffee, fruits, metal-work, spices and fabrics which the empire itself supplied. In fact, according to one irritated consul, the average Salonican Muslim simply did not consume enough:
Always the same in his way of being, of living, and of dressing, the pleasures and the wants of yesterday are to him the pleasures and wants of tomorrow. Rich or poor, he puts on every morning the same woollen cloth, and lays it aside only when he has worn it entirely out, in order to purchase another of the same quality, the same price, and the same colour. He has drunk coffee in his childhood, he will drink it in his old age. He will not forsake old habits, but he will not imbibe new ones. This stupid monotony in habits and taste must set constant limits to the consumption of our commodities.
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