1453/1492

More importantly, 1453 changed next to nothing in the spice trade since most of the goods the Venetians brought to Europe came from Mameluk-controlled Alexandria and Syria.

Historical films are not history, they are entertainment - as we all understand.  The same as Disney movies.

That's why I prefer Westerns. You know who the bad guys are and who the good guys are. Throw in some seedy bar scene with spittoons and cheap whiskey then you have a classic in the making. Nobody, unless you're an American Indian, get's offended and if you're lucky you strike it rich at some decrepit goldmine. And this is all portrayed over some fantastic scenery dubbed over by some unknnown Italian orchestra. Molto Bene!

Originally posted by Seko That's why I prefer Westerns. You know who the bad guys are and who the good guys are. Throw in some seedy bar scene with spittoons and cheap whiskey then you have a classic in the making. Nobody, unless you're an American Indian, get's offended and if you're lucky you strike it rich at some decrepit goldmine. And this is all portrayed over some fantastic scenery dubbed over by some unknnown Italian orchestra. Molto Bene!

You are funny Seko but many of the text I read, while possibly bias, use that term, even Runciman. I have read his book about 1453 two-three times. But, I think you are right!! It is a term I have picked up from various authors but really Europe was so divided while the Ottoman Empire representant a singe power like the Roman Empire. Maybe it easier to say the west vs. mentioning all the Europeans nations. Sometimes it is refered to the Christian west, is that better?

but getting back to the topic I think many of the earlier points people made are very valid but I still think it would require a much bigger study to really find the correct answer, either way.

Originally posted by es_bih Originally posted by Reginmund Just rewatched Ridley Scott's movie 1492 starring Depardieu. In it Columbus explicitly says one of the reasons for finding a western route to India is because the Turks are blocking all Christian vessels.  Sometimes I hate historical based movies because idiots get to make them instead of people that know what they are talking about

I agree and both Troy and Alexander the Great were terrible!! I did see the horse used in the movie Troy with Brad Pitt in Chanakale, Turkey.

Originally posted by eaglecap I agree and both Troy and Alexander the Great were terrible!! I did see the horse used in the movie Troy with Brad Pitt in Chanakale, Turkey.

The movie Troy, even if you didn't like it, was undeniably more historically correct than the Iliad ever was, as the filmmakers chose to leave out the mythological aspects of the story.

Well although not unimportant the trade with Constantinople was pretty one-sided for Venetians. Basically, the Venetian merchants would embark whatever they could find that would interest Turkish consumers from Venice and Crete and sell it in Constantinople.

This is true Constantinople being rich and populated and the Westerners being mercantalist and the Turks being free-traders. The trade in Constantinople was quite one-sided after 16th century. However, in the whole med, the gold flow was always from West to East. From Europe to Iran and India.  

True enough they sometimes bought some silk from Bursa but most of their trade would happen in Mamluke Syria and Egypt, they'd buy wares with the bullion acquired in Constantinople and bring it back to Europe.

'They sometimes bought some silk from Bursa'? That's a huge understatement. I will later post the volume of silk trade. It was massive.

That's only a rough model and on the individual basis things varied but overall from the 14th to the 18th century it is how European trade with the Levant functioned. If it hadn't been for Constantinople's amazing consumption European trade would have been yet more unbalanced and certainly would have been halved.

There was no 'amazing consumption' in Constantinople in the 15th century or the early 16th.  

Hmmm I'm not sure what you mean but I definitely don't agree with your statement about Venice not being Western, let alone Genoa.

You should work on your reading comprehension skills. I wrote that in the context of Med trade. These two countries had access to Eastern trade like no other Western state had. They controlled lands in the Levant and Black Sea and had agreements with the local governments in place. It means that their interests were not the same as other culturally Western states, which is why they are not Western in the context of Med trade.

Besides, it would be wrong to think that no one but the Italians had access to the Mediterranean.

I haven't said that. But they were the most connected. 

French trade with the Turks was alive and well as early as the 15th century (see for instance Jacques Cœur). The Brits sent their ships down to Constantinople as early as 1486 (but quickly stoped doing that).

Yes, France is a Med country. It had access, not so much as the Italians, but enough. Also later it was allied to the Ottomans, and then it had a lot of acccess, and special status, and so it really benefitted from the trade. Which I wrote above and you somehow missed.

The problem the non-Italian faced was not technical (going from Antwerp to Alexandria was doable as ealy as the 12th century without too many problems) nor religious or political, it was commercial: it would be expensive to start competing wit the Venetians and the necessary following price drop would make the trade plainly unattrative.

And why did the Italians had those advantages? Because they were closer to the centres of trade (both culturally and geographically). And believe me, if Antwerp became somehow successful in taking the Venetian share in trade, it would suddenly be not so easy to travel from Antwerp to the Levant, as the navies of the Serene Republic will see to it. How do you think the Dutch could keep their trade routes open when under Venetian attack from Cyprus, Crete, Greece, Italy? 

Well the significance of the Mediterranean trade relative to other trades decreased from 1453 to say 1680. Just look at the importance of the Levant Company in say 1620 (every single member of London's council was from the LC) and fity years later (every council mermber was from the East India Company).

Yeah, let's state the obvious. After 1450's alternative trade routes and new lands were discovered. Levant trade of course declined relatively. It would have declined relatively even if the other routes imported a bag of peanuts each, because when they did not exist they did not create any trade.

You make it sound as if the sole purpose of the Discoveries was to find a way towards the spices-producing regions while for most of the peoriod people were looking for fish, gold, slaves and land.

This is either a huge misunderstanding of what I have written or a deliberate attempt to misrepresent. Whatever, first of all, I have not used the word 'spice', you came up with it. Second, what spice comes from Iran (in volume) which I mentioned as an important source of imports into the Med?

It is true that Med in general lacked gold (which was needed to import eastern luxury products). Only the Memluks had it (came from Sudan). That's why the Ottomans (who also had no gold) attacked them in 1516, btw. (As a side note, I have read a respected western historian, who wrote in early 20th century that this move was due to the instinct of the Asiatic race to turn towards East... That's what kind of idiotic views Western history came from, and they are still sadly visible in the eaglecrap disseminated in internet forums). 

Back to the topic, Portuguese found gold in Western Africa and later used it to purchase goods form the East directly. Spain found vast amounts of Gold (also silver) in America and ruined everyone including themselves with it.

True for Portugal, but could not be further from truth regarding England which was hevily involved in Mediterranean trade and ready to fight for it (expedition of the Cromwellian navy against the Algerian pirates).

England was ally of the Ottomans when it was threatened by Spain (late 16th century). So it had special status for trade in the Ottoman lands, which was all of Levant at the time. I don't think England had any trade presence in the Levant before that. And later it was a Great Power and the Ottomans were weak, so it was able to dictate its terms to almost everyone. Anyway, none of this stopped them from trading directly with the Safavids, for instance. They tried to give them cloth in return for silk sometime in the 16th or 17th century, I don't remember exactly. 

Where did you get these ideas? I don't have my database on me but if I remember correctly there was no significant variation in trade volume in the 10 years preceding Lepanto.

They originate from Braudel. I read it from other sources. Med trade did definitely fluctuate in the 16th century. There was a decline, especially due to the Portuguese efforts. And there was a recovery after the Ottomans fought the Portuguese for naval access to the Red Sea and the Hormuz strait.   

Never heard of nationalisation of trade... Any one who reads Portuguese, French, or English history and does not get the importance of free trade is an idiot... Great 3/1 your turn.

England was the first country in the world to industrialise. So of course they benefitted from free trade. As to France and Portugal, they were both spectacular failures in industrialisation, Protectionists such as Prussia or USA fared much better. Only other country in Europe (and the world, give or take a few island states) which successfully industrialised with a free-trade regime that I know of is Belgium, which is the second country to do that after England anyway, and is positively pint-sized. So your market-fundamentalist knee-jerk counter-argument is ridiculous. Sorry.  

Moreover talking about free trade in the Ottoman empire is a good joke. The central state was rarely involved directly, but numerous Ottoman provincial high-ranking civil servants were involved in trade in a fashion not dissimilar to the way the Dutch participated to commerce. The Levant Company's archives are full of English merchants complaining against the Ottoman courts because they had suddenly found that the guy they were sueing was actually the judge's strawman.

Obviously you don't know much about the Ottoman state. What you write relates to the period after the 16th century, to begin with, when the Ottoman Empire was decentralised. What I have written refers to the earlier period, which is the subject of the thread. And at that time the state was more centralised, and it followed the classical Middle Eastern political philosophy: it encouraged imports. This kept the prices down and the people happy, and created a good supply of funds for the state through customs duties. But this led to the decline of local industry. Western countries (smart ones anyway), however, encouraged exports, which, in the long run, resulted in the develpoment of their industry. They may have had to do this, because they had excess population and were poor (Ottomans were richer and had lower population density).  

But overall, the Ottomans were neither free traders nor mercantilists. They simply did not care. Merchants were poorly regarded, the instutions were not well fitted to traders' needs (high cost for a commercial trial) and they never had the will to catch up with the European comptitors interms of maritime technology or infrastructure (so much so that the Europeans had to build their own port in Smyrna).

Complete and utter bullocks. Everything you wrote is wrong for the 15th-16th centuries. 

Ottomans had a good grasp of financial and mercantile policies of the Middle East (dates back from the Sassanids, the Caliphates and the Seljuk Empire) way before, say, the French, had such ideas. So they did care about their imports and exports, and favoured imports.

Merchants were well regarded, as Mehmed II consolidated the Black Sea trade, the trade was conducted mostly by Muslim traders. Mohammed himself was a merchant, btw, maybe that will give you an idea of how the merchants were viewed. I write this because I know you market-fundamentalist types, lacking a materialistic bases for analysis, you make a big deal of 'cultural superiority' of 'Europe' with non-Europeans regarding merchants lowly, leading to their economic weakness etc. 

As to Ottoman inferiority in infrastructure, that is another completely ridiculous claim. Ottomans were at least a century ahead of the likes France in 1500. The French had no toilets, no sewege system, and threw their shit from their windows onto the street, until when, 1800? As to roads Ottomans had the best road system with an extensive caravansarai network (even the word itself does not exist in Western languages) and bridges in Europe by any measure at least until 1600, very likely until much later. As to ports, Imperial Docks in Constantinople dwarfed anything the West had to offer in the 16th century, possibly except Venetian docks. They were capable of re-building the whole navy of the Empire in just one season, as demonstrated after Lepanto. The Venetians were shocked when they saw the new navy that came out of nowhere.

What you wrote about 'Europeans' building their own ports etc makes sense only for much later times (19th century) when the Ottomans were backward, and their economy was dependent on the Great Powers. Which I wrote about already, along with the reasons. The thread however, is mainly about the 15th and 16th centuries, and not the 18th or 19th when no new trade routes were discovered. 

Once more, European traders were not allowed to disembark in Alexandria so as to going on further East, they were forced to stay and wait for Muslim (or Muslim-ruled) merchants to bring them the goods and wares of India.

I know of no such practice. Sources and dates please? I am sure this is not a typical Ottoman practice. Western traders (from friendly lands) had a lot of freedom in the Ottoman Empire. Way too much freedom, in fact. 

Edited by Beylerbeyi - 22-Jan-2009 at 13:12

Actually Ottomans also had ideas about trade and economy and finance and whatever from Byzantium in addition to the ideas from Middle Eastern (or Islamic at that point) statecraft tradition. It is wrong to say that 'they did not care'. As to Ottomans favouring imports, it is not like they prevented their own producers like the British did in India. They just encouraged trade, when other states subsidised their production. In the long run it led to Westerners being able to undersell the local industries.     

Originally posted by Beylerbeyi This is true Constantinople being rich and populated and the Westerners being mercantalist and the Turks being free-traders. The trade in Constantinople was quite one-sided after 16th century. However, in the whole med, the gold flow was always from West to East. From Europe to Iran and India.

First of all GOLD did not flow East, SILVER did, gold went the other way.

'They sometimes bought some silk from Bursa'? That's a huge understatement. I will later post the volume of silk trade. It was massive.

No you didn't get me, I was saying that Bursa was less important than other markets just consider the importance of Aleppo and later Smyrna. Besides, I maintain that the most important transaction going on in Constantinople between European and Ottoman traders was import of European and later colonial wares. As early as 1504, at the Venetian Senate the ambassador mentions that without the money made in the capital (which also includes the transport of Egyptian wheat to the Golden Horn), the merchants of the Serenissima could not buy silk and other stuff in Syria and Egypt.

There was no 'amazing consumption' in Constantinople in the 15th century or the early 16th.

Yeah that is why a significant amount of English woolen cloth were exported to Constantinople (30% of total export in the 1620s if memory serves, 4% of cloths consumed in the city were produced in England). That's what I call an amazing level of consumption.

The figures are from the best of my recollection but there ought to be an article by Sevket Pamuk on the subject.

Hmmm I'm not sure what you mean but I definitely don't agree with your statement about Venice not being Western, let alone Genoa. You should work on your reading comprehension skills. I wrote that in the context of Med trade. These two countries had access to Eastern trade like no other Western state had. They controlled lands in the Levant and Black Sea and had agreements with the local governments in place. It means that their interests were not the same as other culturally Western states, which is why they are not Western in the context of Med trade.

It is like saying that the door is not part of the house...

And why did the Italians had those advantages? Because they were closer to the centres of trade (both culturally and geographically). And believe me, if Antwerp became somehow successful in taking the Venetian share in trade, it would suddenly be not so easy to travel from Antwerp to the Levant, as the navies of the Serene Republic will see to it. How do you think the Dutch could keep their trade routes open when under Venetian attack from Cyprus, Crete, Greece, Italy?

...
ok a few points:
1. Trading with the Turks was VERY expensive and VERY risky. Without some good connections with the major civil servants in Constantinople which were difficult and once more expensive to create you'd be robbed to you last pair of panties by the local corrupt officials. You couldn't just jump in the first port and trade, you needed the sultan to accept you.
2. So having already a trade relationship and the necessary infrastructures in place (ambassadors, etc.) gave the Italians a major advantage over the new comers. As an example, it took 20 years for the Brits to set up a decent company allowing them to trade regularly with the Ottoman Empire.
3. The Northerners did managed to travel very safely Venetians or not as soon as 1570-80. What do you think the galleys could do against the massive Dutch merchantships? They got their trade route open with big ships and big guns, even the Turks couldn’t much about it, in the 1640s an angry British ambassador had ten ships pointing their guns on Topkape.

Yeah, let's state the obvious. After 1450's alternative trade routes and new lands were discovered. Levant trade of course declined relatively. It would have declined relatively even if the other routes imported a bag of peanuts each, because when they did not exist they did not create any trade.

No, the Med never managed to create the likes of the Atlantic economy nor enjoyed the famous colonial wares that triggered the consumer revolution in the late 1600s. Under the Ottomans' watch the Mediterranean trade has grown nearly irrelevant for the Northern countries after 1670.

This is either a huge misunderstanding of what I have written or a deliberate attempt to misrepresent. Whatever, first of all, I have not used the word 'spice', you came up with it. Second, what spice comes from Iran (in volume) which I mentioned as an important source of imports into the Med?

... ok spice and silk if you prefer
The ELC still imported numerous dyes stuff and drugs which are traditionally counted as spices. For instance here is a list of what the ELC imported into England in 1660.

England was ally of the Ottomans when it was threatened by Spain (late 16th century). So it had special status for trade in the Ottoman lands, which was all of Levant at the time. I don't think England had any trade presence in the Levant before that. And later it was a Great Power and the Ottomans were weak, so it was able to dictate its terms to almost everyone. Anyway, none of this stopped them from trading directly with the Safavids, for instance. They tried to give them cloth in return for silk sometime in the 16th or 17th century, I don't remember exactly.

As it happen I wrote a whole dissertation on the subject a couple of years ago so what the Brits did was 1. on their way to the Med sell stuff to the Portuguese and Spaniards for bullion 2. carry fret for about every one (the Maltese, the Barbaresque, the Italians) 3. bring cheap clothes and expensive products (clocks, books) to Constantinople and sell it for bullion and 4. exchange woolen cloth and metal for silk and other goods.
There was a significant period during which England was not yet the sole ruler of the seas and still traded with the Levant (roughly from 1580 to 1680). Besides, the fact that England was the objective ally of the sultan against Spain doesn't mean much since nearly every one was the enemy of Spain at that time. A permission to trade with the Empire was even granted to ... the subjects of the Pope (from the port of Ancona mostly) and Genoa.

They originate from Braudel. I read it from other sources. Med trade did definitely fluctuate in the 16th century. There was a decline, especially due to the Portuguese efforts. And there was a recovery after the Ottomans fought the Portuguese for naval access to the Red Sea and the Hormuz strait.

Yeah, just that's the 1498-1515 period, two generations from Lepanto. I think chronology does matter a lot when it comes to trade history. I see no connection between trade fluctuation and the Ottoman long term naval offensive (roughly from 1555 to 1575).

England was the first country in the world to industrialise. So of course they benefitted from free trade. As to France and Portugal, they were both spectacular failures in industrialisation,

... hmm... so free trade can be beneficial.. if you're British? Besides, I'm not sure how you can qualify France as a sectacular industrial failure; granted they did not fare as well as the Brits but they remained at the third position in the continent for the whole 19th century.

Protectionists such as Prussia or USA fared much better. Only other country in Europe (and the world, give or take a few island states) which successfully industrialised with a free-trade regime that I know of is Belgium, which is the second country to do that after England anyway, and is positively pint-sized. So your market-fundamentalist knee-jerk counter-argument is ridiculous. Sorry.

You do have problems not to be insulting do you?
Moreover.... wait that's not the debate. We can start another thread to talk about the Industrial Revolution.

Obviously you don't know much about the Ottoman state. What you write relates to the period after the 16th century, to begin with, when the Ottoman Empire was decentralised. What I have written refers to the earlier period, which is the subject of the thread. And at that time the state was more centralised, and it followed the classical Middle Eastern political philosophy: it encouraged imports. This kept the prices down and the people happy, and created a good supply of funds for the state through customs duties. But this led to the decline of local industry. Western countries (smart ones anyway), however, encouraged exports, which, in the long run, resulted in the develpoment of their industry. They may have had to do this, because they had excess population and were poor (Ottomans were richer and had lower population density).

What you discribe for the Ottoman empire is not FREE trade. State involvement (regardless whether it is to boost import or export) is contrary to free trade. Now granted before the 1560s the Ottoman state was leaner, smaller and more effective, but based on the Venetian consuls' reports making business there was not easy, there were de facto fiscal and institutional barriers to trade in place.

Complete and utter bullocks. Everything you wrote is wrong for the 15th-16th centuries.

Where are the important sea-going Turkish traders under Suleyman?

Ottomans had a good grasp of financial and mercantile policies of the Middle East (dates back from the Sassanids, the Caliphates and the Seljuk Empire) way before, say, the French, had such ideas. So they did care about their imports and exports, and favoured imports.

Seems to me all they cared about was on land and mostly agrarian, their fiscal and military power bases were there, they did not care about the merchants, otherwise why so few Ottoman merchants around the Med and why most of them came from the peripheries (Greek islands, Maghrib) and were commonly Christians (cf Armenia traders in Aleppo)?

Merchants were well regarded, as Mehmed II consolidated the Black Sea trade, the trade was conducted mostly by Muslim traders.

You're talking wheat trade, almost all the governments got involved in that it is not relevant.

Mohammed himself was a merchant, btw, maybe that will give you an idea of how the merchants were viewed. I write this because I know you market-fundamentalist types, lacking a materialistic bases for analysis, you make a big deal of 'cultural superiority' of 'Europe' with non-Europeans regarding merchants lowly, leading to their economic weakness etc.

Confused you'd be kind not to take me for an absolute jerk. I know Mohammmed was a merchant.. and so what? Jesus was a carpenter, it does make carpenters specials in Medieval Europe!
I'm not saying anything about the culture of the Ottomans, I am just saying that their commercial institutional framework was crap, which is more significant. So much so that the European had to ask not to be judged by Ottoman courts because they were too expensive, slow and partial. The “avanies” suffered by the merchants were no joke.

As to Ottoman inferiority in infrastructure, that is another completely ridiculous claim. Ottomans were at least a century ahead of the likes France in 1500. The French had no toilets, no sewege system, and threw their shit from their windows onto the street, until when, 1800? As to roads Ottomans had the best road system with an extensive caravansarai network (even the word itself does not exist in Western languages) and bridges in Europe by any measure at least until 1600, very likely until much later. As to ports, Imperial Docks in Constantinople dwarfed anything the West had to offer in the 16th century, possibly except Venetian docks. They were capable of re-building the whole navy of the Empire in just one season, as demonstrated after Lepanto. The Venetians were shocked when they saw the new navy that came out of nowhere.

That's why the European traders had to pay for their own protection on land and at sea, to repay bridges, to build the ports of Alexandrette (Iskanderun) and Smyrna, etc. The Ottomans had basically three operating ports on the Med (Constantinople, Alexandria and Tripoly of Lebanon but barely) and nothing more. I’m glad they managed to rebuild a whole fleet in one year, but they proved utterly incapable of improving much on the design of the ships they had inherited. Regarding the caravanserai network, it is true that it was functioning well, but admittedly it was scarcely used by European merchants so is of little relevance here.

What you wrote about 'Europeans' building their own ports etc makes sense only for much later times (19th century) when the Ottomans were backward, and their economy was dependent on the Great Powers. Which I wrote about already, along with the reasons. The thread however, is mainly about the 15th and 16th centuries, and not the 18th or 19th when no new trade routes were discovered.

No Iskanderun it’s 1600 and Smyrna it’s 1650-60. Not the 19th century.

I know of no such practice. Sources and dates please? I am sure this is not a typical Ottoman practice. Western traders (from friendly lands) had a lot of freedom in the Ottoman Empire. Way too much freedom, in fact.

I was speaking pre-Ottoman times. After 1516, Alexandria loses its significance for traders (except wheat traders), until the rise of the French “caravane maritime” in the 18th century. But the European merchants rarely left their base towns for more than a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

So to sum up, the Ottoman Empire was flawed on a financial, economic and commercial point of view. The costs of trading there were huge, much higher than in most places of the world (getting capitulations and having them renewed was long, painful and took a lot of money). These costs more than anything else explain the inability of other Europeans to break Venice’s monopoly on trade with the Grand Signior for over a century.



Edited by Maharbbal - 23-Jan-2009 at 05:17

Well, 1492 was just one event more -perhaps the more important, but not the only one- in the "Ocean-sea" race among European powers that was started in Portugal.