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 days 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 to goods. 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, metal-work, 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.7
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