Imperial Ottoman

Economy · In depth

Ottoman Trade Routes and the Silk Road

A guide to the caravan and maritime trade routes of the Ottoman Empire, from the revived silk road and the Hajj to the Black Sea and the Levant.

The Ottoman Empire, at its height, was the most extensive territorial state in the early modern world, and it inherited, controlled, and in some cases created the most important long-distance trade routes between Europe, Asia, and Africa. From the Balkans and the Black Sea through Anatolia, the Levant, Egypt, and the Persian Gulf, the Ottomans operated a dense web of caravan roads, sea lanes, and pilgrim paths on which the goods, money, and people of three continents moved. Understanding these routes is essential to understanding the broader Ottoman economy and trade, for it was along them that the empire’s wealth and its connection to the wider world were produced.

The classical silk road and its Ottoman successor

The phrase “Silk Road” is a nineteenth-century coinage, and the trade it describes had long since fragmented by the time the Ottomans came to power. The Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century had briefly reopened the overland route from China to the Mediterranean, and the Pax Mongolica let merchants travel from Genoa and Venice to Beijing. The breakup of the Mongol khanates, the rise of Timur, and the gradual conversion of Central Asia to Islam disrupted the system. By the fifteenth century the overland route through Central Asia was largely closed to European merchants, and the spice trade had migrated to the Indian Ocean.

The Ottomans did not revive the classical silk road, but they operated a successor system that linked the eastern Mediterranean, Anatolia, and the Persian world. The main artery ran from Tabriz and the Persian Gulf to Sivas and Erzurum in eastern Anatolia, then westward to Tokat, Ankara, and Bursa, and finally to Istanbul or to the Aegean port of Smyrna. Persian raw silk, the most valuable commodity on the route, was carried by Armenian and Persian merchants and sold to weavers in Bursa, whose finished silk products were then exported to Italy, France, and the Ottoman court. The relationship between this route and the broader economy is examined in Ottoman silk textiles.

Branches led north to the Black Sea ports of Trabzon, Sinop, and Samsun, and south to the Levantine emporia of Aleppo, Antioch, and Sidon. Caravan travel was slow and expensive: a round trip from Tabriz to Bursa took four to six months, and the cost of transport added substantially to the price of goods. Despite this, overland trade continued to be profitable, and it gave the Ottomans an important source of customs revenue.

The Hajj routes

The annual pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj, was one of the largest organized movements of people in the early modern world. The Ottomans, who controlled the holy cities after 1517, organized the Syrian caravan from Damascus, the Egyptian caravan from Cairo, and the smaller but more dangerous route through the Arabian desert. The Hajj was a religious obligation and a political statement, and the routes it used doubled as trade arteries.

The Syrian caravan, the larger of the two, brought tens of thousands of pilgrims and a vast train of goods from Damascus southward through Transjordan and down the Hejaz to Medina and Mecca. Damascus itself was one of the great emporia of the Ottoman world, and the goods that passed through it — Levantine silk, Indian textiles, coffee from Yemen, spices, and Venetian and French cloth — supported a large merchant community. The Mamluk and Ottoman states both derived substantial revenue from the trade that accompanied the Hajj, and the security of the route was a major concern of the imperial government.

The Egyptian caravan, organized from Cairo, took pilgrims across the Sinai to Aqaba and then down the Hejaz. Because the Suez region was under Ottoman control but the Red Sea was exposed to Portuguese attack in the sixteenth century, the Egyptian route was both politically sensitive and militarily vulnerable. The Ottomans, after the conquest of the Yemen in the sixteenth century, organized a small fleet to patrol the Red Sea and to protect the spice trade that flowed through it, the subject of the spice trade under the Ottomans.

The Hajj was also a market for Ottoman manufactures. The sultans sent annual gifts to the holy cities, including finely woven textiles, prayer rugs, illuminated Qur’ans, and foodstuffs, all produced in the imperial workshops of Istanbul and Bursa. These gifts, and the goods that pilgrims bought and carried home, were an important stimulus to long-distance trade.

The Levant trade

The term “Levant” was used by European merchants to describe the eastern Mediterranean ports under Ottoman rule: roughly, the coast of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and the southern shore of Anatolia. By the sixteenth century the trade of the Levant had shifted away from the older Crusader ports of Acre and Tyre to a smaller number of larger emporia, of which Aleppo, Smyrna, and Sidon 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. English, French, Dutch, and Venetian merchants had established factories there, and the capitulations granted them the right to live under their own consuls and to trade at favorable rates. Aleppo’s most important exports were raw silk from Persia, cotton from Anatolia and Egypt, and various dyes and gums, and its most important imports were European cloth, especially British woolens, and Indian textiles.

Smyrna (modern İzmir) emerged in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the great competitor of Aleppo. The port had been largely destroyed by Timur in 1402, but it was rebuilt under the Ottomans and grew rapidly as the European demand for Levantine raw materials increased. By the eighteenth century Smyrna was the principal port for the export of Anatolian cotton, the Ottoman silk textiles of western Anatolia, opium, and the famous 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 trade

The Black Sea was, after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, an Ottoman lake. The fall of Trebizond, the last Greek successor state, in 1461 and the conquest of the Crimean Tatar khanate in 1475 brought the entire coastline under direct or indirect Ottoman control. The Crimean khans, who ruled the northern coast as vassals of the sultan, exported furs, slaves, tallow, timber, and grain to Istanbul and the Aegean, and Ottoman finished goods, particularly textiles, weapons, and metalware, moved north in return.

The slave trade of the Black Sea 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. Most of these slaves were absorbed into Ottoman households, agricultural estates, or the army through the devshirme. The trade continued to flourish until the late eighteenth century, when Russian expansion effectively closed the Black Sea to Ottoman commerce.

Istanbul, at the junction of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, was the principal beneficiary of the Black Sea trade. The city drew grain, fish, timber, and slaves from the north and exported textiles, ceramics, and metalware in return. The growth of the city, which in the seventeenth century had a population of perhaps half a million, depended on the steady flow of food and fuel from the Black Sea, and any disruption of that flow produced immediate shortages and price spikes.

Caravan organization and finance

Caravan trade in the Ottoman world was organized by large merchant houses, many of them based in Istanbul, Bursa, Aleppo, or Damascus. The most powerful firms were partnerships between Muslim, Greek, Armenian, and Jewish merchants, and they often operated through a network of agents and family connections that extended from the Balkans to India. The financing of caravans was done through a sophisticated system of bills of exchange (called süftece) drawn on Istanbul or Aleppo, and through partnerships in which investors in one city financed a merchant traveling in another.

The cost of a long caravan was substantial. A camel cost as much as a small house, and a large caravan might include several hundred animals carrying several hundred tons of cargo. Tolls were levied at every provincial boundary, and the cumbrous system of multiple jurisdictions made transit expensive. Despite this, the Ottoman state generally supported the caravan trade, because the customs revenue it generated was a major source of government income.

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 to the shift. 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 of the empire was conducted in European ships and through European-controlled emporia. The role of the capitulations in this transformation was decisive.

Conclusion

The Ottoman trade routes were among the most important commercial arteries of the early modern world. For nearly three centuries the empire’s caravan roads, sea lanes, and pilgrim paths linked the Mediterranean to India, the Balkans to the Persian Gulf, and the Atlantic to the Pacific in a way that no other state could match. The economic and political consequences of this position were immense, and they shaped the history of Eurasia well into the modern period.