Foreign Merchants and the Minorities in Istanbul during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

ROBERT MANTRAN

The presence of a population alien to the ruling group in Istanbul was not an innovation of the Ottoman period. Due to the role it played as the capital and especially as a great commercial center during the Byzantine period, particularly under the Comneni and Palaeologi dynasties, the city had already known not only colonies from the West -- Genoese, Venetians, Amalfitans, Pisans, Catalans, and Provenqals -- but also from the East -- Armenians, Arabs, Turks, Georgians, Jews (the latter under the guise of either Venetian or Genoese subjects.) 1 Contacts between Italians and Greeks or Jews were frequently limited and Venetian Baili had, upon more than one occasion, sought to "naturalize" Jews, Gasmoule (mixed Latins and Greeks), and even Greeks. In fourteenth-century Venetian Romania, the Jewish community was considered to be a separate "nation," the equivalent of a millet, and was thereby permanently obligated to pay an annual tax. As individuals or as a collective group, Jews could be subjected to varied taxation. 2 There were also Greeks who, according to legislation of the Baili of Constantinople, were looked upon as Venetians. They were known as the "White Venetians" (veneti albi). 3 The same applied to the Genoese, established since 1261 at Galata, where they maintained permanent contact, not only with Greeks, but with other groups of the urban population as well.

Michael VIII Palaeologus and his successors are known to have accorded the Genoese, and subsequently the Venetians, particularly favorable conditions of trade and settlement, which can be called "capitulations." Following the conquest, Sultan Mehmed II, moreover, renewed the privileges granted the Genoese and other Italian merchant colonies. 4

Furthermore, in his desire to convert Istanbul into an active capital, Mehmed II took measures to repopulate the city whose Greek population had been transferred to Edirne, Bursa, Plovdiv, and Gallipoli, and whose Jewish population remained in the outskirts of the Balat area. It does not seem likely that other elements of the city's population, who had remained where they were,... 5

facilitated contacts with high Ottoman officials: e.g., Demetrios Cantemir who made it possible for Grand Vezir Rami Mehmed Pasa to know certain Westerners.

The growing commercial influence of the West during the seventeenth century gave more importance to minority intermediaries and enhanced the role they played especially since the Turks continued to shun international trade. There arose an alliance between the minorities and the Westerners to the detriment of the empire. As middlemen the Greeks in particular sought the protection of a great power to profit from their two-fold position. Some gained wealth and a variety of new contacts. Faced with the inefficiency and stagnation of the Ottomans, they began to consider the possibility of playing a political role. Feeling superior to the Turks, they considered working against their authority, by promoting a "national" resistance based on a "national anti-Ottoman consciousness" which eventually cleared the way to independence. In the eighteenth century the Greeks began the process; 46 the Slavs followed suit. To a large degree counting on the support, open or tacit, of the Western Powers, they persevered. With the blessing of the Powers, this process brought about the independence of the Balkan states, the reforms of the nineteenth century in the Ottoman Empire, and the growing preserrce -even in the highest positions -- of minorities in the administration and government of the Ottoman Empire during the second half of the nineteenth century. The disintegration and the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire had begun with the economic. and later political penetration of Westerners, and was to culminate in the close ties of cooperation which the West established with the minorities who were the ones to gain the greatest advantage.

Notes
1. L. Brehier, Le Monde byzantin, Paris, 1950, vol. 3, pp. 85-86; G. Bratianu, Le commerce genois clans la Mer Noire au XIIIesiecle, Paris, 1929, pp. 89, 101-105.
2. F. Thiriet, La Romanie venitienne, Paris, 1959, pp. 227, 298-301, 406-409.
3. F. Thiriet, Regestes des deliberations du Senat de Venise concernant la Romanie, Paris-La Haye, 1961, vol. 3, no. 2994, p. 206.
4. F. Babinger, Mahomet II le Conquerant et son temps, Paris, 1954, p. 127.
5. Ö. L. Barkan, "Bir iskan ve kolonizasyon metodu olarak sürgünler", IFM, 13( 1951-52), pp. 56-78 and references to Aĩikpaĩazade and Neĩri.
6. A. Galante, Histoire des Juifs d'Istanbul, Istanbul, 1942, vols. 1 and 2, passim; P. Grunebaum-Ballin, Joseph Naci, duc de Naxos, Paris, 1968.
7. A. Galante (cited no. 6), pp. 192-194.
8. Evliya Çelebi, Seyahatname, Istanbul, 1898, vol. 1, p. 114.


Read more in:
Christians and Jews in the Ottoman empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society. Contributors: Benjamin Braude - editor, Bernard Lewis - editor. Publisher: Homes & Meier Publishers. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1982.