Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 (21 page)

T
HE
R
OUTES OF
T
RADE

A
CCORDING 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.
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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.” 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.
²

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 weeks 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. 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.”
³

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.”
⁴

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.
⁵

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.
⁶

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, metalwork, 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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It is not hard to see in such language the sterotypes of cultural immobility and stagnation which have long underpinned the Western diagnosis of Ottoman decline. Yet economically, there was nothing wrong with the empire, and if consumption was low—Captain William Leake noted that “Turks as well as Jews” often carried parsimony “to excess”—this may have reflected life under a government “which makes every one feel danger in displaying his wealth and renders property and life insecure even to its most favoured subjects.” Wills left half a century later show that even wealthy members of the city lived a surprisingly modest lifestyle, with scanty furnishings—apart from carpets, chests and lamps—adorning their homes, and few other possessions to leave their heirs.
⁸

Elsewhere in the city, however, it was a very different story, and new tastes, clothes and manners were leaving their mark upon the tiny but growing European and Europeanizing elite. The French were the
first to establish a consulate in the city—in 1685—a sign that the Levant trade now encompassed Salonica on a significant scale. Before 1698 only two Frenchmen actually resided in the city; but by 1721 there were eight French trading houses and about thirty-seven members of the “French nation,” including servants, a baker, inn-keepers and a tailor. An English agent of the Levant Company arrived in 1718, and the same year began the commercial boom which followed the ending of the Venetian–Ottoman war and brought more and more European residents and merchants. By the middle of the century, Venice, Naples, the Duchy of Tuscany, Ragusa, Holland had representatives; Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Spain and Prussia arrived a little later. The consuls—symbols of the power of Europe—had appeared in force, even if at this stage they still had to demonstrate their respect for Ottoman power by lavish gifts to the town’s chief officials, and humble and respectful behaviour.
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Frank Street (Odos Frangōn), now lined with rag-trade outlets and commercial agents housed in gloomy postwar concrete office blocks, still winds past the Catholic church on the western edge of the modern city centre. In this area, taverns opened for foreign sailors, and wine dealers, bakers and butchers provided them with familiar fare. Teachers, doctors, priests, secretaries and housemaids served in the houses of the city’s merchants. Overland mails, run by the Neapolitans, the Austrians and the French, made news from central Europe a mere ten days distant from the city. Each group formed, in the parlance of the day, a “nation” unto itself. Yet mostly the European residents of the city got on with one another. Despite the tensions engendered by the Napoleonic wars, wrote John Galt, “their social intercourse is maintained on a pleasant and respectable footing.” Henry Holland enjoyed several
conversazioni
at the house of the Austrian consul, where the entertainments included cards and recitals of Greek and Turkish songs, as well as dinner parties hosted by German merchants.

On the other hand, assertive Christians threatened the hierarchies of authority carefully established by Ottoman rule. Through the eighteenth century, even the consuls remained at the mercy of the whims of a pasha or
kadi
, a target of resentment and a useful scapegoat when needed. When over-enthusiastic Jesuits built a church without permission, and, still worse, constructed illegal bells hidden behind a brick wall, the local authorities quickly had them taken down. Venetian sailors celebrated their religious festivals so noisily they woke up the town. Janissary violence often expressed popular anger at such
Frankish arrogance, especially when it broke the silence of the Ottoman city at night. In 1752 a Greek Venetian merchant, recently back from Cairo, was dining and singing with friends in his home when a passing city patrol was disturbed by the noise, entered the premises and on being told angrily by the owner that “I am a Venetian, can’t I enjoy myself in my own house?” beat him up and threw him in prison.
¹⁰

T
HE
B
ERATLI

T
HE
E
UROPEAN TRADERS
knew that despite their growing economic influence they could not function unaided. Few spoke the necessary languages, or understood the Ottoman legal system or local patronage networks. Moreover what had basically brought them to Salonica was the wool export trade, to tap which they required the cooperation of local Jews who controlled the regional supply. Without their help, they had no means of purchasing the wool itself, or of getting round the official restraints on the sale and export of this and other commodities such as cotton, leather and wheat. Credit too was short in the city, and this market was also mostly under local control. This was why, in addition to the usual panoply of servants, bodyguards and attendants, every merchant and consul acquired a
dragoman
, or interpreter, as well as a general business agent, or
censal.
These postholders were officially recognized by the Porte through its issue of licences (
berats
) which brought their holder under the protection of the nation concerned and exempted him from Ottoman taxes, justice and—not least—clothing restrictions. As a result, the post of
beratli
became highly sought after, and
berats
changed hands for thousands of piastres. In theory their possessors had obligations to the foreign nationals whom they nominally served; in practice, the consuls competed with each other to issue
berats
to the leading merchants of the place, hoping in this way to gain influence for their country. David Morpurgo, for instance, scion of a distinguished Italian Jewish family, who had settled in Salonica before 1710, was fought over by the French, Dutch and English consuls. Consuls grumbled at the “disgraceful chaffering” of
berats
, but they were all at it.
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