In the development of our system of commerce the Company of Turkey Merchants played a most important part, second perhaps only to the great East India Company, and its history is the history of one of those pillars on which British prosperity has been constructed. It was a marked feature of the sixteenth century, when all those Companies—the African Company, the Muscovy Company, the East India Company—all had their rise, and by them was laid the foundation of our subsequent mercantile successes. The Levant Company lived an active life of 244 years; and, besides the amount of wealth it accumulated for this country, it did infinite service in the development of art and research, geography and travel, the suppression of slavery, and the spread of civilisation in countries which would still have been unapproachable had not the continued efforts of the 244 years been towards civilisation and humanity.
The history of the capitulations or treaties with which foreign nations sought to establish themselves in the greatest centre of commercial enterprise before the opening out of other routes to India is a very interesting one, and dates back to remote ages, when commercial bodies were formed in the city of Constantine, at the time when the power of the Greek emperors was on the wane. As far back as the ninth and tenth centuries of our era, the emperors of the East granted to the Warings or Varangians from Scandinavia capitulations or rights of exterritoriality, which gave them permission to own wharves, carry on trade, and govern themselves in the Eastern capital: these rights established numerous imperia in imperio during the succeeding centuries in Constantinople. The Venetians obtained them early in the eleventh century; the Amalfians in 1056, the Genoese in 1098, and the Pisans in 1110, and henceforward they became so general, that the Greeks of the later empire complained that there were no wharves for themselves, and that they could not compete with these indefatigable foreign traders; much as we hear complaints now amongst our own artisans of the influx of German and Belgian workmen into England.
When the Turks took Constantinople they did little to interfere with the existing order of things: the Genoese and Venetians got their capitulations renewed; the right to have disputes with their fellow-countrymen decided by their own authorities; the right to have questions between them and Ottoman subjects decided only in presence of a Venetian interpreter; exemption from the tax imposed on Christians in lieu of military service; and the right to appoint their own magistrates in Constantinople. Being a nomadic race, the Ottoman Turks cared little for commerce: their ships were the caïques of the Greeks; their emperors wrote their decrees in red ink, as their Greek predecessors had done; and to the foreign traders who flocked to Constantinople they gave the same privileges that the Greek emperors had done, and, as far as they were concerned, the status quo was maintained.
Meanwhile trade was passing westwards; the time was come when the Portuguese, the French, and finally the English were to succeed the Italian republics as the commercial nations of the world.
In 1536 Sieur Foret arranged a capitulation for the French between Sultan Solyman I and Francis I, and the essential articles of this treaty have been often redrawn and embodied in many treaties with the different European Powers, and still remain as the foundation of the many treaties under which foreigners now live in Constantinople: matters of dispute between Frenchmen were to be decided only by their own authorities; questions between Frenchmen and Turks were to be decided only in the presence of the French dragoman; they could appoint their own magistrates, and were exempt from the harach. This was the first of what we may call the modern capitulations, by which the Western nations have obtained their footing in Constantinople; they are by no means an invention of the Turks, but a distinct inheritance from the old Byzantine days, which they were compelled to adopt, and which has turned out to be as great a boon to the Mussulman as to the foreigner who obtained it.
In proportion to the exigencies of the Turk and his want of money, the system of capitulations has increased in strength. Encroachments have occurred; fresh clauses have had to be introduced to meet the subtleties of the Turk; the so-called avanias, of which we shall hear more in Dr. Covel’s diary, had to be combated; but, nevertheless, the progress has been continuous, and no Company has contributed more to the success of the foreigner on Turkish soil than the “Turkey Merchants” of England.
During the reign of Elizabeth, our infantile commercial adventures were beginning to make themselves felt. Early in the sixteenth century there had been a few isolated cases of voyages to the Levant in search of wealth. From 1511 to 1534 we hear of certain “tall ships belonging to London, Southampton, and Bristol, which made voyages to the East, trading with Sicily, Crete, Chios, and sometimes Cyprus, Tripoli, and Beyrout in Syria”; but there appears to have been no systematic commerce carried on in English bottoms in those days, most of the trade between the Levant and England being conducted by the Venetians. So far back as 1513 we had a consul established at Chios, and in 1534 (Hakluyt, vol. ii, p. 98) we read of an exciting voyage made by The Holy Cross and The Matthew Gonson to Crete and Chios, both ships coming back much the worse for wear. In 1550 Captain Bodenham, with “the great Barke Aucher”, went to Chios, and three years later Anthony Jenkinson went to Aleppo, and got trading privileges “on a footing with the most favoured nations”. This was the actual foundation of our future capitulations, and the first commencement of our Levant Company.
Up to this time the carrying trade between England and the Levant had been carried on, on ships called argosies, by the Venetians. Sir Paul Ricaut, son of a London merchant, who was born in 1620, was secretary to Lord Winchilsea, and consul at Smyrna for eleven years; he wrote, by the direction of Charles II, a work entitled The Present State of the Greek and Armenian Churches. He also wrote a book entitled The Present State of the Turkish Empire, a very interesting work, the first edition of which, Pepys tells us, was destroyed in the Great Fire of London. In this work he tells us that the ships known as argosies were so called because they were built at Ragusa for the Venetian merchants. “These vast carracks called argosies, which are so famed for the vastness of their burthen and bulk, were corruptly so denominated from Ragosies, ships of Ragusa.” The Ragusans, as merchants, were much to the fore in those days, prior to the great earthquake, and had, as we see from Dr. Covel’s diary, an ambassador of their own at Constantinople.
“Your mind is tossing on the ocean;
There, where your argosies, with portly sail,—