Imperial Ottoman

Economy · In depth

Ottoman Trade Routes and the Silk Road

Ottoman caravan and maritime trade routes — the revived silk road through Bursa, the Hajj, the Black Sea, the Levant emporia of Aleppo and Smyrna, and caravan finance.

A round trip from Tabriz to Bursa took four to six months by caravan, and the camel-load of Persian raw silk that arrived in Bursa in late autumn had cost roughly as much in transport as it had fetched at the Persian auction. The Ottomans did not inherit a Silk Road; they built their own. The overland artery that ran from the Persian Gulf through Sivas, Tokat, and Bursa to Istanbul carried the most valuable commodity in the eastern Mediterranean — raw silk — and it operated, with interruptions, for the better part of four centuries. The maritime routes — Black Sea, Levant, Red Sea, Persian Gulf — moved grain, slaves, cotton, coffee, and pilgrims across another set of distances, and the two systems together linked three continents through Istanbul. The history of these routes is inseparable from the broader Ottoman economy and trade.

Key dates

  • 1380s–1400s — Ottoman–Venetian treaties; the earliest ahdname establishing customs rates.
  • 1453 — Ottoman conquest of Constantinople; the Black Sea becomes an Ottoman lake.
  • 1461 — Fall of Trebizond; last Byzantine successor state absorbed.
  • 1475 — Crimean khanate becomes an Ottoman vassal; the northern Black Sea coastline under one rule.
  • 1517 — Ottoman conquest of Mamluk Egypt; Red Sea and Persian Gulf under Ottoman sovereignty.
  • 1552 — Piri Reis takes Muscat; Ottoman–Portuguese conflict in the Indian Ocean.
  • 1600s–1700s — Smyrna overtakes Aleppo as the principal Levant emporium.
  • 1774 — Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca; Russian access to the Black Sea.

The overland silk road

The phrase “Silk Road” is a nineteenth-century coinage (Richthofen, 1877), and the trade it describes had fragmented by the time the Ottomans came to power. The Pax Mongolica of the thirteenth century let Venetian merchants reach Beijing; the breakup of the khanates, the rise of Timur, and the conversion of Central Asia to Islam closed the overland route to European merchants by the 1400s. The spice trade, in the meantime, had migrated to the Indian Ocean. The Ottomans did not revive the classical silk road; they built an Ottoman successor system that linked the eastern Mediterranean, Anatolia, and the Persian world.

The main artery ran from Tabriz and the Persian Gulf through Erzurum and Sivas to Tokat, Ankara, and Bursa, and from there to Istanbul or the Aegean port of Smyrna. The most valuable commodity was Persian raw silk, grown on the mulberry trees of Gilan and Mazandaran, and the trade was in the hands of Armenian and Persian sarraf houses whose agents met in the great han (caravanserais) of Sivas and Tokat. The finished silk of Bursa is examined in Ottoman silk textiles; the political control of the route was a recurring source of tension with Safavid Iran, and the war-and-peace cycles of the two empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are partly intelligible as cycles of tariff and blockade on this road.

Branches led north to the Black Sea ports of Trabzon, Sinop, and Samsun, and south to Aleppo, Antioch, and Sidon. The state built a chain of imperial kervansarays (the Süleymaniye network of the 1530s–40s being the most elaborate) to shelter caravans and to standardise the cost of fodder and lodging. Despite the cost, overland trade remained profitable well into the seventeenth century, and the customs revenue it generated was a major source of government income — İnalcık estimated that the Bursa–Istanbul silk axis alone produced 5–8 per cent of state revenue in 1550.

The Hajj routes

The annual Hajj brought tens of thousands of pilgrims to Mecca and Medina, and the trade that accompanied it was a substantial item in the budget of the empire. Three principal routes converged on the Hijaz. The Syrian caravan, the largest, left Damascus each year under the escort of the surra (imperial pilgrim escort) and travelled south through Transjordan and down the Hejaz; the Egyptian caravan crossed the Sinai to Aqaba and then descended the coast; the smaller and more dangerous Arabian desert route was used by Iraqi and Persian pilgrims.

Damascus was both a Hajj staging point and a great emporium in its own right. The goods that passed through it — Levantine silk, Indian textiles, coffee from Mocha, spices, and Venetian and French cloth — supported a large merchant community of Muslims, Christians, and Jews. The security of the route was an imperial concern, and the Mamluk and Ottoman states both derived substantial revenue from the trade it carried. The Ottomans, after the conquest of 1517, organized a small Red Sea fleet at Suez to protect the spice and coffee trade that flowed through it; the details are in the spice trade article.

The sultans sent annual gifts to the holy cities — finely woven textiles, prayer rugs, illuminated Qur’ans, and foodstuffs, all produced in the imperial workshops of Istanbul and Bursa. The gifts, and the goods the pilgrims bought and carried home, were an important stimulus to long-distance trade, and the religious endowment (vakıf) of the Holy Cities was a substantial item in the sultan’s budget.

The Levant trade: Aleppo and Smyrna

The “Levant” — the eastern Mediterranean ports under Ottoman rule, including the coast of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and southern Anatolia — was the principal theatre of European trade with the empire. By the sixteenth century the older Crusader ports of Acre and Tyre had given way to a smaller number of larger emporia, of which Aleppo and Smyrna were the most important.

Aleppo, the inland capital of northern Syria, was for most of the early modern period the chief mart of the eastern Mediterranean. The city was at the meeting point of Persian, Anatolian, Indian, and European trade, and English, French, Dutch, and Venetian merchants maintained faktori (factory-trading-houses) there under the capitulations. Aleppo’s principal exports were raw silk from Persia, cotton from Anatolia and Egypt, and various dyes and gums; its principal imports were European woollens (especially British) and Indian textiles. The khan al-Sabun (the soap khan) and the al-Jalloum market are still standing.

Smyrna (İzmir) overtook Aleppo in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The port had been largely destroyed by Timur in 1402, but the Ottomans rebuilt it, and the European demand for Levantine raw materials drove a rapid expansion. By the eighteenth century Smyrna was the principal port for the export of Anatolian cotton, the carpets of Uşak, the raw silk of Bursa, opium, and the dried figs and currants of the region. The Greek and Armenian merchants of Smyrna were the most cosmopolitan merchant class of the Ottoman world in the eighteenth century, and the city became a major node in the European trade with the East.

The Black Sea

The Black Sea was, after 1453, an Ottoman lake. The fall of Trebizond (1461) and the reduction of the Crimean khanate to vassalage (1475) brought the entire coastline under direct or indirect Ottoman control. The Crimean khans exported furs, slaves, tallow, timber, and grain to Istanbul and the Aegean, and Ottoman finished goods moved north in return. The Black Sea slave trade was one of the largest in the early modern world: Tatar raiders captured or purchased large numbers of Slavic and Circassian slaves, who were sold in the great slave markets of Caffa (Kefe), Azov, and Istanbul, and absorbed into Ottoman households, agricultural estates, or the army through the devshirme.

Istanbul, at the junction of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, was the principal beneficiary. The city, perhaps 400,000–700,000 strong c. 1600, drew grain, fish, timber, and slaves from the north and exported textiles, ceramics, and metalware in return. Disruption of the Black Sea flow produced immediate shortages and price spikes: the Anatolian wheat crop failure of 1598 produced an Istanbul famine that the chronicles record as one of the worst of the century. Russian expansion from the 1770s gradually closed the Black Sea to Ottoman commerce, and the 1774 Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, by granting Russia the right to trade in the Black Sea, marked the end of the Ottoman monopoly.

Caravan organization and finance

Caravan trade was organized by large merchant houses based in Istanbul, Bursa, Aleppo, or Damascus. The most powerful firms were partnerships between Muslim, Greek, Armenian, and Jewish merchants, operating through a network of agents and family connections that extended from the Balkans to India. The financing was done through bills of exchange (kambiyo or poliçe) drawn on Istanbul, Bursa, or Aleppo, and through partnerships in which investors in one city financed a merchant travelling in another. A camel cost as much as a small house; a large caravan might include several hundred animals carrying several hundred tons of cargo; and tolls were levied at every provincial boundary.

Insurance arrangements developed particularly in Aleppo and Istanbul, where wealthy Greek and Armenian merchants underwrote long-distance shipments against the risk of banditry, shipwreck, and political confiscation. The sarraf houses of Galata performed functions that are usefully compared to those of early modern European banking houses — discounting bills, holding deposits, financing tax farms, and acting as the Sultan’s bankers. Lloyd’s of London (founded 1686) was a slightly later institution, and the comparison with the sarrafs is imperfect, but the type of risk-pooling the two practiced was cognate.

“A kervan of forty mules carrying raw silk from Tabriz to Bursa pays at Sivas 200 akçes in bac (transit), at Tokat another 150, at Bilecik another 80, and a further 100 at the gates of Bursa. The bac is a third of the value of the silk, and the merchant must double the price at the Bursa khan to make a profit.” — Evliya Çelebi, Seyahatname, vol. 3 (c. 1640), on the road to Bursa.

The end of the overland trade

By the seventeenth century the overland silk road was in clear decline. The instability of Safavid Iran, the rise of Dutch and English maritime power in the Indian Ocean, and the increasing dominance of European shipping in the Mediterranean all contributed. By the eighteenth century the overland trade of the Ottoman world was a shadow of what it had been, and much of the long-distance commerce was conducted in European ships and through European-controlled emporia. The capitulations were a large part of the reason, and the loss of the Black Sea to Russian commercial penetration after 1774 was the closing blow.

Sources and further reading

  • Halil İnalcık, “The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy,” in The Ottoman Empire: Conquest, Organization and Economy (Variorum, 1978).
  • Suraiya Faroqhi, The Ottoman Empire: A Short History (Markus Wiener, 2009).
  • Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
  • Bruce McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe: Taxation, Trade and the Struggle for Land, 1600–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1981).
  • Christine Woodhead (ed.), The Ottoman World (Routledge, 2011).
  • Ralph S. Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses (University of Washington Press, 1985).