1453/1492

Originally posted by Bernard Woolley The Ottomans did charter foreign ships to transport goods within the empire (by the 18th century, for more than half of the domestic trade, according to your Panzac article) - so it would seem there wasn't enough shipping available domestically.

... or that they had the resources to build ships, just not the market... I would go for this one, indeed Greek shipping grew handsomely after the independence if I am not mistaking, they were not held back by any of the edowment that prevented the rise of Turkish shipping.

Your point on the nomads is a very good one, indeed I hadn't considered the increase in catchment area it implied. But 1/ not the whole of the Ottoman empire was crisscrossed by nomadic herders small and medium towns don't appear to be really more common in Egypt, Algeria, or western Anatolia and 2/ herding has a very low productivity, meaning little surpluses, meaning little chances for cities to develop. Ottoman cities may have commanded very large hinterlands but not necessarily very large production. Now granted, they did not create herders, but they did not help much  for them to settle down.

Regarding the price series of S. Pamuk, Istanbul's curve is close to the ones of Amsterdam, Vienna and Warsaw, which is fairly surprising considering that Vienna was a large administrative center and an important market for eastern European good travelling westward, Warsaw was a small administrative center and Amsterdam was a financial hub. No clear trend here. So it may be said that Istanbul did not differ a lot from other European cities... or it may not mean much (you should consider real wages instead).

In theory, stagnating prices are not a good thing, it means that purchasing power does not evolve. For instance, food now is more expensive that when my grand father was my age, but unlike my grand father I can buy a car so really I don't care if tomatoes are worth ten times the amount of silver compared to 1950. There's a reason why central bankers like (a moderate) inflation.

Besides, please bear in mind that this series represents a 50 years average, lttle chance for yearly variations let alone seasonal ones to show. We can assume that if a problem arose at some point it would be fixed within ten years (if anything by outmigration). But precisely, it is that variability that matters the most, if you earn let say $1 a day, if the bread is at 10 cents for ten months and 99.9 cents for eight weeks, you'll still consider that it was a pretty bad year, enven though the average bread price was only around 24 cents.

Ultimately, the Ottoman empire suffered from its very success. It was much too big. I am convinced that one of Europe's success most important cause was the ability of a given country to pick it up when the previous leader grew exhausted. Take the example of finance, it shifted from Venice to Genoa, to Bruges, to Nuremberg to Antwerp, to Troyes, to Amsterdam to Florence to London (not in this order). Not sure this series of shift could have happened in the OE, thus at one point the development of the sector would have been stucked.
The same applies for the maritime trade, many ports in the OE had a brilliant maritime history but for five centuries none managed to take off! Indeed, if Portugal had bad institutions, Holland would not be affected, whereas bad institutions in Istanbul would affect Alexandria as well.