For a long time Aleppo was one of the chief trade centers in the East of the Levant and East India companies. During the period of their greatest prosperity the amount of business transacted here was enormous. For, in addition to these two great organizations, the British Factory here counted no fewer than eighty firms, besides which all the leading countries of Europe had here their factories or organizations of factors or agents for the purpose of securing their share of the great trade of the Orient.
At that time a great part of the commerce of the Far East came to Aleppo by way of Basra and Bagdad. Then the population of Basra exceeded two hundred thousand whereas it does not now count more than one-fourth of that number. The number of Bagdad’s inhabitants has diminished in proportion. The great decrease in the commercial importance of these two cities was partly due to war and pestilence. But the great discovery by Vasco da Gama of an all-sea route between the West and the East and the opening of the Suez Canal reduced the overland traffic between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf to a small fraction of what it was in the palmy days of the great European factories of Aleppo, Basra, and Bagdad. According to the plans of its projectors, the Bagdad Railway is to restore this overland trade to its former magnitude and even greatly add to its amount and value.
It is difficult for the modern traveler as he passes along the present overland routes between Aleppo and Basra to form any true conception of the stupendous scale on which the old caravan trade between the two emporia was formerly conducted. Although the distance between the two places is nearly eight hundred miles and most of the road passes through the inhospitable Syrian and Arabian deserts and the difficulties to be encountered, at the time of which we are speaking, were as grave as they were manifold, the number of merchants and capitalists who ventured fortune and life in this forbidding and dangerous part of the world seems almost incredible. And the magnitude of the caravans and the value of the merchandise they transported in a single journey was yet more astonishing.
In the caravan with which Della Valle traveled there were, he informs us,[270] fifteen hundred persons and forty or more large tents. That of the celebrated French traveler, Tavernier, counted six hundred camels and four hundred men. When in 1745 the Englishman, William Beawes, crossed the desert there were two thousand camels! But this was far less than the number that was in the caravan of his countryman, John Eldred, when a century and a half earlier he made the journey from Bagdad to Aleppo with four thousand camels “laden with spices and other rich merchandise.” But the largest of these caravans was much smaller than the one which in 1750 went from Bagdad to Aleppo and which was composed of five thousand camels and eleven hundred men. When trade between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean was most brisk, caravans of from two to five thousand camels crossed the desert twice a year between Aleppo and Bagdad. The Dutch traveler, John Huyghen Van Linschoten, attributes the great prosperity of Ormuz to the fact that it was located on the great trade route to India.[271]
The value of the merchandise carried by these caravans was often very great. Thus we are told of the caravan of an English trader, one Carmichael, which consisted of thirty mules, fifty horses, and twelve hundred camels, “six hundred of which were laden with merchandise valuing nearly 300,000 pounds. The caravans that carried on the trade between Aleppo and Mocha were,” in the words of a writer of the time, “esteemed indifferently rich if they carry less than two million dollars or one hundred thousand ducats of gold either Hungarian, Venetian, or Moorish.”
The foregoing statements are illuminating in the information supplied respecting the size of the caravans and the amount of merchandise they transported, but they give us no idea of the great fatigues and dangers that were incurred in the long journeys through the cheerless deserts which were inhabited for the most part by hostile and plunder-seeking Bedouins. The Venetian traveler, Cæsar Frederick, throws some light on the character of the country which the caravans had to traverse. Returning in 1581 from his long wanderings of eighteen years in India and beyond he tells us that:
From Babilon to Aleppo is forty days’ journey, in which they make thirty-six days over the Wilderness, in which thirty-six days they neither see houses, trees nor people that inhabit it, but only a plaine and no signe of any way in the world.... I say in thirty-six dayes we passe over the wildernesse. For when we depart from Babilon two dayes wee passe by villages inhabited until we have passed the river Euphrates. And then within two dayes of Aleppo we have villages inhabited.[272]
As a precaution against attacks by Arab robbers, Pietro della Valle informs us that it was always necessary to post at night a strong guard around the caravan. “During the entire night this guard runs around the camp shouting—as is their custom—to their friends to be on the alert and their enemies to keep away.”[273] How conducive to sleep was all this to the anxious and way-worn members of the caravan!
But
While beasts and men together o’er the plain