1 W. Heyd, Le Colonie commerciali degli Italiani in Oriente nel Medio Evo, Venice, 1866-8. ii. 167.
2Liber Secretorum Fidelium Crucis (in Bongars, Gesta Dei per Francos, vol. ii, Hanover, 1611), p. 23.
3 For the first three routes see Comte L. de Mas Latrie, PrivilÈge commercial accordÉ en 1320 À la rÉpublique de Venise par un roi de Perse, etc., Bibl. de l’École des Chartes, xxxi (1870), 79-81. For the last three routes see Marino Sanuto, loc. cit., pp. 3, 4, 22.
4 W. Heyd, Histoire da Commerce du Levant au Moyen Âge, translated by Furcy Raynaud, Leipzig, 1885, ii. 156 ff., 215 ff.
12 According to J. E. Thorold Rogers, History of Agriculture and Prices in England, iii, 518-43; iv. 680-91, Oxford, 1882, the average price of pepper in England by decades from 1259 to 1580 was as follows, in shillings per dozen pounds, pence being neglected: for the thirteenth century, beginning with the seventh decade, 11, 12, 10, 16; for the fourteenth century, 12, 11, 15, 15, 19, 25, 17, 18, 11, 12; for the fifteenth century, 12, 32, 16, 13, 9, 13, 14, 14, 17, 17; for the sixteenth century, 16, 16, 23, 23, 20, 32, 44, 34. The Vicomte G. d’Avenel, Histoire Économique de la PropriÉtÉ, des Salaires, des DenrÉes, et de tous less Prix en gÉnÉral, 1200-1800, 5 vols., Paris, 1894-1912, iv. 482-6, 502-6, 598, gives the following prices for pepper in France by periods of twenty-five years from 1300 to 1600, in francs per kilogram; for the fourteenth century, 5.50, 12, 8, 19; for the fifteenth century, 5, 3, 4.70, 4; for the sixteenth century, 5, 8, 7.50, 12. Both series give only approximate results, since they rest upon a comparatively small number of data more or less accidentally preserved. The variations depend not only upon circumstances in the Levant, but also upon conditions in the lands of production and the lands of consumption and along the entire intervening route. It will be seen that the average for the first two decades of the sixteenth century was a little below that for the previous two centuries. Lowest of all were the prices in the second quarter of the fifteenth century. It may be possible to discern here the influence of Jacques Coeur, in establishing a well-organized direct trade between the Levant and France.
15 Ibid., ii. 505; Narrative of the Embassy of R. G. de Clavijo to the Court of Timour, Hakluyt Society, 1859, pp. 89, 93, 165 ff.
16 Heyd, Commerce du Levant, ii. 427; F. E. do La Primaudaie, Histoire du Commerce de la Mer Noire, Paris, 1848, p. 158.
17 Heyd, Commerce du Levant, ii. 427, 440, 500 ff. For a list of the wares exchanged in the oriental trade, see G. Berchet, Del Commercio dei Veneti nell’ Asia, Venice, 1869, pp. 13-15.
18 Heyd, Colonie commerciali, ii. 272, note 1, quotes Peschel for the statement that a quintal of ginger which cost at Calicut 4 cruzados sold at Alexandria for 11 and at Venice for 16. But G. Priuli (in R. Fulin’s Diarii e Diaristi Venetiani, Venice, 1881, p. 160) says that one ducat at Calicut mounted to from 60 to 100 ducats in Europe. The latter statement appears to be exaggerated, since in England, at the farthest extremity of Europe, pepper could fall as low as 9d. the pound (see note 12). If Priuli be correct, the value of pepper at Calicut in his time was a farthing or less per pound, or a sou per kilogram.
19 Heyd, Commerce du Levant, ii. 352. Bortrandon de la BrocquiÈre (Wright’s Early Travels in Palestine, London, 1848, pp. 283 ff.) made the journey by caravan from Aleppo to Brusa.
22 They continued the exclusive policy of the Mamelukes in regard to the trade through Egypt and the Red Sea: Sieur J. Savary, Le Parfait NÉgociant, Geneva, 1752, p. 837.
23 J. W. Zinkeisen, Geschichte des Osmanischen Reiches in Europa, Gotha, 1840-63, ii. 576, 577, and G. Berchet, Del Commercio dei Veneti nell’ Asia, Venice, 1869, p. 18, mention the renewal of the old Mameluke treaties with Venice after the Turkish conquest of Egypt in 1517. See references to Heyd in notes 13 and 21 above.
24 Zinkeisen, loc. cit., in a note quotes Paruta to the effect that in 1517 Selim ‘desiderava l’amicitia de’ Venetiani e che nel principio del nuovo imperio procurava d’accrescere i traffichi in quella provincia per particolare utile e commodo di quei sudditi e per interesse dell’ entrate publiche’.
26 Savary. pp. 770. 707, says that the Turks never required two payments of duties on merchandise brought to one province and transported to another, ‘comme il se pratique en boaucoup d’autres États do l’Europe,’ and that the penalty for false declarations of weight was not confiscation but correction.
27 See my Government of the Ottoman Empire in the Time of Suleiman the Magnificent, pp. 30 ff.
29 Q. B. Depping. Histoire du Commerce entre l’Europe et le Levant depuis les Croisades, 1832, ii. 227, 228; P. H. Mischef, La Mer Noire, p. 17. Privileges to navigate in the Black Sea were regularly granted to Venice by the Porte in treaties before that of 1540.
30 Heyd, Commerce du Levant, ii. 351; Savary, pp. 822, 827.
32 See the price averages, above, p. 680, note 12. The absence of marked influence upon prices exerted by the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks deserves special attention, since that conquest has been imagined to have closed the routes of the Levant to such an extent as to force the western Europeans to seek now routes. If this had been the case the price of spices must have shown a marked increase between 1453 and 1498, which it did not do. Nor was it the agencies engaged in the Mediterranean trade which sought the new routes, but Atlantic powers in no relation with the Turks. It is not even certain that the desire to profit from a more direct spice trade emerged in the consciousness of western Europeans before 1490 (see H. Vignaud, Histoire critique de la Grande Entreprise de Christophe Colomb, Paris, 1911, i. 213). The entire hypothesis seems to be a legend of recent date, developed out of the catastrophic theory which made the fall of Constantinople an event of primary importance in the history of mankind. The great discoveries had their origin in a separate chain of causes, into which the influence of the Moslems of Spain, North Africa, and the Mameluke empire entered, but not that of the Ottoman Turks.
33 R. Fulin, Diarii e Diaristi Veneziani, Venice, 1881, pp. 155 ff. (Dal Diario di Girolamo Priuli, 1494-1512); Marino Sanuto, Diarii, 1496-1533, Venice, 1879-1903; passim.
35 Faria E. Souza, as epitomized by J. Briggs in his History of the Rise of the Mohamedan Power in India, London, 1829, iv. 501 ff. Of 114 ships sent in the first ten years 55 returned; Heyd, Colonie commerciali, ii. 277.
36 Albuquerque took Ormuz in 1507, and made an attempt on Aden in 1513. Lorenzo Almeida was killed while fighting the Mameluke fleet in 1508, and his father destroyed the Egyptian fleet in 1509. Thus began a long struggle; in which the Portuguese tried to stifle the direct trade between India and the Levant. See, for a general statement, Heyd, Colonie commerciali, ii. 273.
40 A. Vandal, in his Voyages da Marquis de Nointel (1076-80), Paris, 1900, p. 12, says: ‘La Mer Rouge se ferma totalement vers 1630 et l’Égypte devint une impasse.’ P. Masson, Histoire du Commerce franÇais dans le Levant au XVIIe SiÈcle, Paris, 1896, pp. i, 386 and 411, refers to the continuance of this trade (as late as 1670), but he finds no mention in the records at Marseilles of the importation of spices from Aleppo and Cairo after 1700. Nevertheless a number of pieces of evidence can be adduced to show that the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf were far from being closed, and that if Indian wares rarely passed through to Europe, this was only because it was not profitable to purchase them at Cairo and the Syrian entrepÔts and ship them westward in competition with the Cape route. See, for example, Pierre Belon du Mans, Observations, 1555, pp. 121a, 158b; Travels of P. Teixeira (translated), London, 1852 (Hakluyt Society), pp. 118 ff. et passim (the Venetians bought at Aleppo in 1605, among other wares, cinnamon, cloves, nutmegs, and mace); J. de ThÉvenot (translated), Travels into the Levant, London, 1686, part i, pp. 152 ff., part ii. pp. 72 ff. F. Vansleb (translated), The Present State of Egypt, London, 1678, pp. 118-27, gives a long list of commodities exchanged between Europe and Egypt, with their prices, and mentions all the ordinary spices as purchasable by Europeans in Egypt in 1673. Hasselquist, writing on the Levant about 1749, describes the caravan trade which was bringing Indian stuffs and spices from Mecca to Egypt, North Africa, and Syria (i. 124 ff.), and the Indian trade by the Red Sea and Persian Gulf into Turkey (ii. 101, 124). Baron de Tott, in his MÉmoires, Amsterdam, 1784-5, part iv, pp. 54 ff., found Cairo a great entrepÔt between East and West: ‘le choc des ballots marquÉs À Madras & À Marseille semble fixer un centre À l’univers.’ C. T. Volney in his Voyage en Syrie et en Égypte, published 1783-5 (i. 189 ff., ii. 138 ff.), describes the same trade in some detail. G. A. Olivier in his Voyage dans l’Empire Othoman, l’Égypte, et la Perse, Paris, an XII, iii. 327 ff., iv. 273 ff., finds the same double trade active and flourishing, and he states that after 1498 all the products of the Orient for the use of the Moslems continued to come through Bagdad and Egypt (iv. 430).
41 Heyd merely states that no gain accrued to the trade of Syria and Egypt from the Turkish conquest (Commerce du Levant, ii. 546). Thorold Rogers (op. cit., iv. 653-7) affirms that before the Portuguese discoveries the Turks ‘appear to have blocked every passage but one’, and that ‘their conquest of Egypt proceeded to block the only remaining road’, It has been shown that they ‘blocked’ no roads, that two (through Syria and Egypt) were out of their power until 1516 and 1517, and that they were actually desirous of keeping these roads open. Rogers finds confirmation of his view in the rise of the prices of oriental wares after 1520. At first sight he might seem justified. By twenty-year periods the price of a dozen pounds of pepper in England in the sixteenth century was 16, 23, 26, and 39 shillings. But the price of a quarter of wheat, by his own figures, was 6, 7-1/2, 13, and 15 shillings for the same periods. The fact is that pepper and other oriental wares rose with the general rise of prices in the sixteenth century, almost certainly caused by the addition to the European stock of gold and silver from the Americas. The evidence of price cannot be said to indicate disturbance from the Turkish conquest of Egypt; indeed it shows singularly little from the doubling of the Cape, which might be presumed to have caused a noticeable fall in prices.
42 For light on the beginnings of French trade at this time see Marino Sanuto, lvii. 267, 436, 503; lviii. col. 86, &c.
48Ibid., p. 374, shows that the English took pepper and spices to Alexandretta in 1681. See also pp. 412, 505.
49 Berchet, pp. 21, 25, explains the causes of this decline.
50 For this drainage of the precious metals eastward see Masson, pp. xxxii, 371, 374, 487; Savary, op. cit., p. 835; Vansleb, op. cit., pp. 110, 127, 128; ThÉvenot, op. cit., ii. 77, 156. ThÉvenot says (p. 77), ‘it may be said of Persia, that it is a Kervanserai that serves for passage to the money that goes out of Europe and Turkey to the Indies; and to the Stuffs and Spices that come from the Indies, into Turkey and Europe, whereof it makes some small profit in the passage.’ See also Olivier, iv. 434, and P. Blancard, Manuel du Commerce des Indes, Paris, 1806, pp. 70, 106.
51 In fact, it may be said that the great discoveries displaced approximately only about one-third of the traffic along the old routes through the Levant. Except for the precious metals, the Cape route finally took practically all of the through exchanges between southern and eastern Asia and western Europe. But the ‘short haul’ trade between western Europe and the Moslem lands and between the Moslem lands and India nearly all passed as before. Masson says, p. ii, note 1, that about 1682 the Levant trade of England and Holland was almost equally important with their East Indian trade, while that of France was her most extensive foreign trade. For the new trade in Arabian coffee, see ibid., 410; Blancard, p. 82 (the coffee that was carried round Africa was damaged on the long voyage); Olivier, iii. 326. Silks and other Persian products were brought across Turkey by caravan to Mediterranean ports; Berchet, 15; Masson, op. cit., and Savary, passim; Olivier, v. 320.
