The Customer’s information was correct: the Levant Company had decided at a General Court to suspend commerce with Constantinople and Smyrna temporarily, in order to “take from before the Turks those baits and occasion of temptations which the vastness of our trade hath of late years administered.” This resolution they submitted to the King and his Privy Council, for approval, justifying it by a minute account of “the many grievous oppressions” which the English merchants and Ambassador “of late years have sustained and at present labour under in Turkey, by the corruption of the Vizir Azem and other Turkish officers.”[274] It was a measure which several times in the past, at periods of similar stress, had been proposed as the only remedy for Turkish greed. But it had never yet been tried, with the result that the Turks, arguing that either the trade was lucrative enough to bear any amount of squeezing or that the English could not subsist without it (in the words of a Cromwellian Consul, “that if they should bore out our eyes to-day, yet we would return to trade with them again to-morrow”), set no limit to their rapacity.
It remained to be seen whether the remedy would prove efficacious now. Certainly the impression which the news of the strike had made on the Kehayah, “if true,” was encouraging. Also the Customer’s friendly message was comforting. These things revived Sir John’s drooping spirits somewhat. But they did not quite exorcise the anxiety that was gnawing at his heart. At no time since the Grand Vizir first declared war on him had the hope of peace seemed more remote. The only consolation Sir John had in his affliction was the knowledge that he was not the only sufferer. All his colleagues were in the same ticklish condition. The Dutch Minister’s difficulties have been described. The Bailo of Venice, notwithstanding the vast sums Kara Mustafa had already wrung from him, was faced with a fresh claim on his purse. The Resident of Genoa likewise groaned under another “avania.” Only the French Ambassador seemed exempt: though, after a full twelvemonth, he still continued to refuse audience unless he had it on the Soffah, nothing, “to all men’s astonishment,” had happened to him: yet even his position was so precarious that he bitterly repented having brought his lady and his daughter, an only child, with him.[275] Sir John noted the troubles of his neighbours with all the fortitude with which we note other people’s troubles; but, as the days went by, he was less able to endure his own.
Thus matters stood till the end of November—when the situation underwent a sudden change.
FOOTNOTES:
[259] See [Appendix XV].
[260] Finch to Jenkins, Sept. 24, 1680, S.P. Turkey, 19.
[261] The Same to Sunderland, Oct. 2-12, 1680; Life of Dudley North, p. 95.
[262] Finch to Jenkins, Sept. 29.
[263] The Same to Sunderland, Oct. 2-12.
[264] Life of Dudley North, p. 97.