Trade and Revenue Collection in later Sixteenth-Century Salonica

Abstract

Medievalists dealing with Venetian and Genoese trade networks have come to u derstand that the ports visited by Italian m rchants must be studied not merely as the sites of the foreigners' trading activities, but also as economically active human communities in their own right. This involves, among other things, the study of local merchants active in the Byzantine empire and the territories of the Golden Horde. Especially the question to what extent Greeks inhabiting the late Byzantine empire and its Trabzon offshoot were able to participate in long-distance trade has at tracted some scholarly interest.1 A similar issue has also been studied with respect to Ottoman commerce. Customs records dating from the late 15th century have shown that by that time, Italian commercial supremacy in the Black Sea region had come to an end, and Muslim merchants con trolled most of the trade.2 This is quite the opposite of what had been as sumed by earlier scholars; the latter had been very much impressed by the 19th-century pattern, according to which Muslims neglected trade and concentrated on agriculture, administration and military careers. Without too much concrete evidence, historians had tended to conclude that the same thing applied to the 15th century as well.3 Thus, even though there has been but limited contact between Ottomanist and Byzantinist histori ans, their researches in the field of commercial history at present tend to converge. On a different level, historians have attempted to understand the man ner in which states set out to determine the conditions under which trade could be conducted. This included the activities of tax farmers and sala ried tax collectors, as well as the commercial legislation of the sultans, emperors and other relevant rulers.4 Admittedly, in the Byzantine case,