The Black Sea Region History Essay

The black-market sea Region History EssayOn the s come to the foreh-western side of the hill surmounting Lake Ohrid, travelers will find oneof the architectural masterpieces of medieval Orthodox Christianity. The church, that was dedicated to St. John the Theologian, and to a fault known as Kaneno, whose consecration dated back to no later than.1447, is usually known as a legacy of chivalric Slavic empire (whether one calls it as Bulgarian, or, Macedonian, depends onones fancy). winning into consideration, however, its unique direction that reminds us a highly successfulcombination of baffling and Armenian architectural technologies, it attends more appropriate to calldt.as-amonument of the cultural integrity of the wider scorch sea rim.The dark-skinned sea world, just like the church Kaneno, had been an artifact of cultural mixture, composed of various peoples of different faiths, vernaculars, customs and practices until the first decades of the twentieth century. They ha d been, more over, living in a well- structured and well-organized socio-economic entity that was tightly bound up by common water. Artisans of famous silver ornament in Trabzon would live on the Ukrainian wheat and Bulgarian wine, while the wealthy mercantile famnyin Odessa would enjoy their afternoon tea with dried figs from Anatolia. Life of the people more or less the Black sea had been directly resting on the incidents at the opposite side of the water. They had kept watchful eyes on the course of steadyt there. However, such a vivid image of the Black sea orbit seems to be quite perplexing, if not alien, for us, people living in the twenty first century. Just like the record inscribing the name of the architect of the church Kaneno had been disconnected, our cognition on the Pontus world is too fragmented to envision a unified picture.The Pontus world besides addresses us a perplexing question. Is it a mere accidental coincident that the three mercantile nations, Armeni ans, classics, and Jews, who had once been major lubricants for the organic mechanism in this world, suddenly disappeared from the Black littoral at the very moment when we lost the vivid image of this region? Armenians, Greeks, and Jews were all historical nations well-known by their conspicuous activities in commerce and financing. All of them had their residential centers around the Black Sea before the twentieth century. Armenians had been astray dwelling in the southern Caucasus and the eastern Anatolia, and displayed their strengthened presence in every commercial centre around the Sea. Greeks had thickly populated in the Black Sea littoral as well, and a good deal constituted plurality in major trade entrepots like Istanbul, Trabzon, Odessa, Varna, Constanta and Krasnodar. Until the last decades of the 19th century, majority of the world Jewry had lived in the Russian Black provinces and their hinterlands. However, it is an arduous work for us to trace out them on the contemporary ethnic map of the region. It seems as if they had taken away our memory of the region with them when they retreated to the backstage of history of the Black Sea.What kind of process of modern conceptualization prevents us from shaping integrated scenery of the Black Sea region in our mind? The easiest answer magnate be the one that seeks the root in the guinea pigization of history. By the raillery Cemomorski rajon, an ordinary Bulgarian will think of an field of studythe word Karadeniz bolgesi. For both of them, cities like Kisinev, Akkerman, or Batumi are not the part of their Black Sea region, exclusively some unknown foreign cities. The nation-state, as a model for historical thought, has obscured legion(predicate) elements.The area studies, self-styled inter-disciplinary science, seem to have overcome the narrowing views of the national history, as they claim to have adopted an approach that makes it possible to analyze more than one nation-state at the same time. However, they seem, to be suffering from the same oddball of shortcomings. As for the Black Sea studies, there are too many candidates for the possible frame work, Slavic Studies, Balkan Studies, Caucasus Studies, Russian (and Soviet) .Studies (or its bare-ass version Eurasian Studies), Turkish and Islamic Studies, or Mediterranean Studies, but none is enough to cover all aspects of the Black Sea region. In order to comprehend the Black Sea region, it might be necessary to mobilize several area studies, but at the same time, it would mean saturation of methodologies. Such constituent(a) weakness of the area studies seems, partly to come from their methodological ancestors. Disciplines like Slavic Studies or Russian and Eurasian Studies could not completely cut off themselves with the tradition of Slavic philology. both Turkish studies and Iranian Studies are, by and large, nd more than a dummy branch of the Orientalism (as its original meaning 6f the word). Area studies are still accompanying preconceptions that had been inherent to their methodological forefathers.Apart from methodological questions, it seems relevant to interrogate a primordial question where, at all, is the destination of intellectual endeavors of the area studies, or more simply, for what exercise are they serving? Recent phylogenesiss may suggest us a part of the answer. in that location took send off a* drastic reshaping of the area studies after 1989. eastward European studies have already divided into aboriginal European Studies and Balkan Studies. Former Soviet Studies have also transformed themselves into Eurasian Studies. As the change is ostensibly linked to the shift of geopolitical situation, the answer must be manufacture somewhere beyond the natural evolution of methodological thinking, or survival strategies of several(prenominal) researchers. The recent change indeed bears marked similarities to the realignments of traditional disciplines and eventual crysta llization into area studies after the World War II. Both of the cognitive processes went through strong impact of the hegemonic shifts that had reshaped geopolitical map of the globe. The shift inevitably brought the regions drastic changes. From economic point of view, each region had to modify its trade regulations, financial mechanism, monetary policy, and on the job(p) practices to be fit into the new situation, thus, it precipitated changes in the structure, and even mode of production. Political carcasss were also required to accommodate themselves to the new relations. As these changes caused considerable stress to the society, complaisant tissue had to undergo significant metamorphosis. The area studies analyze various aspects of these changes, and provide, as a whole, a clayatic knowledge to cope with the new reality. Therefore, they are working, disregarding of the intension of individual researcher, for special concern of particular forces that have common interest i n a certain form of regional division of labor. thence area studies seem to pay less attention to the phenomena that tend to slip out of the scope of their main concerns, oddly those overlapping several areas. By reassessing historical narratives concerning three nations, this paper tries to demonstrate the significance of those phenomena that have been made invisible by the frame of cognizance which was formulated in the course of modernity.The queen conquering and the Black Sea regional economyThe Black Sea and surrounding lands had been playing significant roles as a hinge that bound together the Mediterranean, Central Asian Steppe, and Indian-Middle East economies since antiquity. Theeconomic wealth of the region was an primal factor in the political and economic stability of theMacedonian, Roman, and. Byzantine Empires in the Classical and Medieval times. The Black Sea alsoformed one of the major arteries joining the Islamic world and north-eastern Europe, and served as a nimportant commercial rout between the one-ninth to early thirteenth century. Within itself, the Black Sea region,together with the Aegean, had formed a closely knit economic entity, as the northern Black Sea regionproduced and exported grain, meat, fish, and other animal products, while the southern Black Sea and theAegean exported wine, olive oil, dried fruit, and luxury goods in exchange Kortepeter, 1966 86 Peacock,200766-67.By the time the Byzantine control of the region collapsed at the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Black Sea trade had largely fallen into the hand of the Venetian and Genoese merchants. At first Venetians seemed to have taken upper-hand, but Genoa succeeded in gaining a t near monopoly over the Black Sea commerce after 1261. By the time, Genoa had been building up a network of its colonies covering all lands surrounding the Black Sea. The Genoese BlackSea Empire was, however, relatively short-lived, as there emerged a dangerous power in the western c orner of Anatolia at the end of the thirteenth century, and it was to bring the Italian hegemony in the Black Sea finally to an end in the course of fifteenth century.Starting as a small warriors state, the ottomans followed a gradual, but steady course of territorial expansion during the first half of the fourteenth century. They were successful in intruding into the Balkans after crossing the Dardanelles in 1346. By the end of the century, the poof sultans had turn overed themselves firmly on the vast landmass lying at the both sides of the Straits. Although the Ottorrfans at first did not show much interest in controlling the Black Sea commerce, a clear pull policy regarding the Black Sea began to emerge during the reign of the Mehmed II (1451-1481) Kortepeter, 1966 88.Upon assuming the throne the throne, Sultan the Conqueror embarked on a series of campaign to degrade the Latin colonial empires in the eastern Mediterranean, as a part of his project to reassemble the former Byzantine territories. Especially after the takeover (ri AXrooTj) of the Byzantine capital in 1453, Mehmed II felt it necessary to establish a complete control over the resources of the Black Sea region for the reconstruction and development of his new capital. In 1459, the Ottomans first deprived the Genoese of Amasra, the roughly important port on the Anatolian Black Sea coast, as it formed, together with Caffa, the shortest route in the north-south communication in the sea. After the fall of Amasra, the Genoese colonies were confined to the north western corner of the Black Sea. The seizure of the main Genoese colony of Caffa took place in 1475. Caffa had long been the chief trade and manufacturing centre for the Genoese in the Black Sea. After the fall of Caffa, the Genoese grip on the Black Sea considerably weakened and the Ottomans captured all of the Italian colonies in the Crimean and the Caucasus inside a decade. The only remaining trade centers of significance were two M oldavian port cities, Kilia and Akkerman. Both of them unload to the Ottoman hand in 1484. In this way, by the beginning of the sixteenth century the Ottomans had turned the Black Sear into an Ottoman lake Inalcik Quataert, 1994 271-3 Kortepeter, 1966 92-3.i The Ottoman subjection brought some a new socio-economic system into the Black Sea region. Now,majority the coastal lands of the Sea were directly connected to the imperial capital, Istanbul, and a new regional division of labor was introduced in order to maintain this extraordinarily large city. Moreover, the Ottoman Empire employed a kind of command economy whose main purpose was to maintain its military predominance. Hence, the government put strong control over the transportation of manufactured goods and raw materials produced within its domain, imposing de facto ban on the export, while, on the other hand, itshowed lavish attitude to the imported commodities that its lands could not yield. Under this regime, many part s of the empire constituted an autarkic economic entity. Hence, it was natural that the Black Sea region, along with other part of the Empire, constituted an integrated, but closed to outside, system.Non-Muslim Merchants as coordinating elementsOne of the most important changes that took place after the Ottoman conquest of the Black Searegion was the termination of the Italian predominance in favor of the native Ottoman subjects. Owing to thepoor development of Muslim mercantile class at the beginning of the Ottoman-conquest in this region, it wasthe non-Muslims that took initiative in forming the wider regional network. Already during the Italian ruleof the Black Sea, the Greeks and other indigenous people, together with Jews and Armenians, played therole of middlemen and widely dwelled in the Genoese trade centers. Many of them were employed asapprentices in the Latin enterprises, and accumulated the knowledge of the business practices in the Levanttrade. Even before the fall of C affa, the Italians were losing their control of the oriental trade in the northerncountries, and were being replaced by Ottoman subjects, mostly Armenian Christians, Greek OrthodoxChristians and Jews. The Ottoman government found in them reliable traders and contractors as middlemenwithin the empire. Thus, non-Muslim merchants took advantage of the new opportunity of the closure of theBlack Sea to the foreigners in the sixteenth century, and they made use of their privileged smear totraverse the Ottoman domain, in order to organize trading networks across southern and western Europeancities Kortepeter, 1966 101 inalcik Quataert, 1994 272, 209.The first element that gained most from this new order seemed to be Greeks. The Greek merchants of this period widely operated in Ottoman inter-regional trade. They were in control of a significant portion of the commerce of the eastern half of the Balkan Peninsula. Greeks were particularly active in the Ottoman capital, as traders and sea ca ptains, carrying grain from the Balkan coastal regions adjacent to the Black Sea. The Greek merchants, allegedly descendants of the Byzantine aristocracy, widely engaged in tax tillage, large-scale trade and shipping both in international and domestic. However, after the execution of tfye great tycoon in the Greek community of Istanbul, Michael Cantakuzino aitanoglu in 1578, the predominant position of the Greek merchants in the imperial economy began to shake Stoianovich, 1960 241 Inalcik Quataert, 1994517. sooner of Greeks, Judaic bankers and tax-farmers surfaced as predominant elements in Ottoman finance and long-distance trade during the second half of the sixteenth century. The expulsion of the Marrano Jews from the Catholic countries especially contributed to the Jewish prosperity in the Ottoman economy. The Marrano Jews seemed to introduce into the Ottoman Empire the techniques of European capitalism, banking and the mercantilist concept of state economy, and played decisi ve role in the finances inalcik Quataert, 1994 212. Jews also played a considerable role in the development of the Danube basin. As tax farmers, Jews were managing many Danubian ports and customhouses Levi, 1982 26-27. But the Jewish domination of the Ottoman economy could not last long. Already in the 1650s, Jewish merchants had been less active in Ottoman territory than during the second half of the sixteenth century. The Jews were losing the functions that they had acquired in the sixteenth century, including the farming of custom duties, minting, and the positions of money exchanger for the ottoman notables. Westward Jewish migration that occurred synchronously with the shift of the global economy to the trans-Atlantic trade was a part of spring. Another reason is the renewed expansion of activities of Greek merchants that forced many Jewish merchants out of Balkan trade Panzac, 1992 203 inalcik Quataert, 1994 519.The presence of the Armenian merchants in the Black Sea region had been strongly felt long before the Ottoman conquest. Armenians had settled in Crimea as early as the eleventh century Panossian, 2006 82. They were important trade partners for the Nogays in the labor union Caucasus, and engaged widely in the transaction of slaves and large quantities of butter and furs Kortepeter, 1966 104. They were predominant in the Moldavian Lwow-Akkerman) route of trade during the fourteenth century, and obtained the trade privilege for all Ruthenia in 1402. The leader of the caravan on this route was always an Armenian throughout the fifteenth century. Until that time, Armenians had widely settled in the commercial centers in Crimea and Rumania. According to an Ottoman survey in 1520, there were 2,783 households in Caffa, out of which about 60% was Christian, mostly Armenian inalcik Quataert, 1994 280, 286.The Ottoman conquest of the Black Sea region brought about more favorable conditions for the Armenian merchants. In the Ottoman Empire, Armenians, like Greeks, constituted a Christian community that was accorded with religious and judicial autonomies. Their religion also gave them easier entranceway to the lands of Christian Europe. They had already firmly established themselves in southern Poland and Transylvania, and controlled local commerce. Making use of the Ottoman trade policy as the linchpin, the Armenian traders succeeded in building up their commercial network, extending as far as Venice and Central Europe. The Armenians could also make use of the rivalry between Ottomans and Russians in order to establish their new trade route. Several Armenian merchants played conspicuous role in the court of Ivan the Terrible, and further expanded their commercial activities as far as the northern end of the Grand Duchy of Moscow Goffman, 2002 15 Braudel, 1992 155.The Armenian merchants had another advantage, as they were going to expand their activities further in the east. The Armenian middlemen settled in Persia found in silk an eminently marketablecommodity. In the seventeenth century, the Ottoman Armenian merchants distinguished themselves by their association with an international trade network basing around New Julfa, a suburban city of Isfahan. Merchants from this city took an active role in the Iranian silk trade which spanned the globe from Narva, Sweden to Shanghais, China. In this way, the Armenian merchants had been successful in establishing their trading network stretching from China to Western Europe by the eighteenth century McCabe, 2001.In the course of their expansion, the commercial activities of three non-Muslim merchant communities widely transcended the Ottoman borders. It was, by no means, the loss of weight of the Ottoman commerce for them by the eighteenth century. The commerce on Ottoman territory continued to be crucial for the maintenance of these networks, as the goods they traded were frequently of Ottoman manufacture or had transited through the Ottoman state. The trade act ivities of Armenians, just like those of Greeks and Jews, remained intrinsic to the economic system of the Ottoman Empire, and the Ottoman wealth was central to their prosperity Inalcik Quataert, 1994 517-8.As we have, hitherto, surveyed the significance of the non-Muslims merchants in the Ottoman Black Sea trade, it is necessary to emphasize that we should not minimise the importance of the Muslim merchants. Although they were late comers in this region, already in the fifteenth century, Muslim merchants had outnumbered the others at least in the southern section of the south-north trade over the routes of pursa-Istanbul-Caffa or Akkerman by sea and overland by Edime-Kilia-Akkerman Inalcik Quataert, 1994 278. It seems probable that the role of the Muslim merchants constantly gained importance in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and in conclusion took over the non-Muslims, especially in the intra-regional trade. The position of the Muslim merchants in the int ra-Ottoman trade was much stronger than the non-Muslims during the eighteenth century. The minorities almost always held only a secondary position in the domestic maritime trade. According to an Ottoman document of 1782 or a list of cereal ships to Istanbulprovide us an interesting data that out of the total 56 names of merchants, 55 were Turks or other Muslims, only one was Greek or Albanian, and even he was associated with a Turk. The document also shows us that out of 158 ships captains, 136 (86%) were Turks or other Muslims, and 22 (14%) were Greeks or Albanians. Therefore, the Muslim merchants had in effect(p)d almost total control over the supply of wheat to Istanbul by the Black Sea route Panzac, 1992 195, 203.Socio-economic features of the non-Muslim merchant communitiesFrom historical point of view, merchants, especially those who engaged in cross-cultural- trade,possessed, more often than not, ambivalent characters. As frequenters in two or more distinct societies, theyha d to master several important knowledge and skills that were usually unfamiliar to those who lived insidea particular culture. So, they brought with them, not only a categorization of foreign goods and wares, but newtechnologies and information. These cultural goods often catalyzed a transformation of the swarm society. Inthe fountain of the Ottoman non-Muslim merchants, they became major actors in a technological and culturalinterplay between the Ottoman Empire and the rest of Europe. It wa,s their trading network that helpedproduce a uniform commercial method throughout ti?e Mediterranean and European worlds before the nineteenth century Goffman, 2002 16.On the other hand, every society that based principally on the production of use determine would inherently harbor antagonism toward the merchant. Such hostilities were often boosted by the stresses that arouse in the course of cultural transformation. Therefore, the position of the cross-cultural merchants was constantly und er the curse of eventual outburst of hatred against them. In order to avoid, or at least to alleviate, the tension with the host society, the merchant community had to be adaptive. In the lawsuit of the non-Muslim merchants in the Ottoman Empire, we can notice strong tendencies of compliance to the authority.Ottoman Jews and Greeks played major role in the finances during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and even later. They were the major players in the tax-farming, the most important means of capital formation at that time, and their accumulated wealth became indispensable for the state finances and the palace. In pay back for their service, the Ottoman government conferred them various privileges. Several Jews were appointed the court physicians and imperial treasurers. Greeks were employed as dragomans (official interpreter) and, later, rulers of Moldavia and Wallachia Inalcik Quataert, 1994 209, The Ottoman Armenians also played significant role in the palace. The upp er strata of their community, often called as amiras, made their presence strongly felt in government as bankers or money lenders. In the tax farming, they provided the capital as sarrafs (bankers), and sold the commodities collected in kind as merchants. After the eighteenth century, they became instrumental in keeping the fragile Ottoman financial system functioning. It is symbolized by the fact that the prominent Dtizian family monopolized the position of superintendent of the state mint office from 1757 until 1880 Panzac, 1992 203 Panossian, 2006 85.Probably, the most important in this aspect was the role played by their religious authorities. The Ottoman government traditionally granted wide range of religious and judicial autonomies to its Christian and Jewish subjects, calling each of these congregations as millet. The Greek, Jewish, and Armenian mercantile class in Istanbul practically monopolized the posts of the highest priests of their millets, and did their utmost in pre serving the imperial order, by securing the loyalty to the sultan among their coreligionists. Thanks to these endeavors, Jews and Armenians were often praised by the authority as millet sadakat, orloyal subjects. In the case of Greek Orthodox, they failed to win this title because of the several unruly elements like semi-nomadic mountaineers or provincial peasants with independent spirits, the upper strata of their community, however, chiefly earned high esteem among the Muslim authorities.In spite of such functions, non-Muslim merchants did not dare to go over a certain limit of the host societies, because over adaptation to the host society was suicidal to their existence. It would increase the tension with the other society where they made business at the same time. For example, the conversion to Islam might promise better position in the Ottoman society, but it would make very difficult, if not impossible, to earn by the international trade. Thus, probably the best dodging for the merchants was to blur the demarcation line with the host society by making their existence more and more vague and ambiguous. By doing so, they could expect more secure conditionsfor their survival.It was, therefore, no coincidence that the three non-Muslim merchant communities in the Ottoman Empire possessed marked characteristic of special multilingualsm. As the other Jews in the Western Europe, Jews in the Ottoman Empire adopted the languages of the people among whom they lived. They could, usually quite fluently, communicate in Turkish and other majority languages, but they nevert fully assimilated linguistically to the host societies. The Romaniotes, who had long lived among the Greeks, adopted vernacular Greek as their communal language,.while the, Ashkenazi, East European Jews continued to speak Yiddish in their home. The most important element of the Ottoman Jews, the Sephardi, preserved medieval Spanish, where their ancestors had been living until the Catholic take- over. Moreover, all of these Jewish vernaculars contained significant portion of Hebraic expression. Thus, the dialect expresses the two contradictory tendencies the desegregation to the surrounding society and the isolation.The Ottoman Armenians shared the same characteristic. While they continued to use ancient Armenian as their spiritual symbol especially in their place of worship, almost all of them were either bilingual or, in some cases, monolingual speakers of Turkish. Turcophone among the Armenians was so strong that Vartan Pasa, an Armenian writer in the nineteenth century, in the preface to his History of Napoleon Bonaparte, justifies the fact that he had written this work in Turkish with the argument that the Armenians who knew ancient language (krapar) were very few and that the new literary language based on the vernacular was still not sufficiently developed thus, that the Turkish language was the best tool to the majority Strauss, 200341, 55.The case of Greeks was mu ch more complicated, but it might show rather vividly the advantages oflinguistic ambiguity for the prosperity of the mercantile community. During the Ottoman period, the wordGreeks seldom denoted the linguistic community. Many Greeks in the Anatolian plateau spoke Turkishdialect, Karamanh, while the Greeks in Syria and Egypt used Arabic as their ordinary means ofcommunication. The Greeks in the Balkans were more perplexing. There were many Greeks who spokeBulgarian, Vlacho-Arouman, Albanian, and Turkish. The linguistic variety derived from the context that thecommunal identity of the Ottoman Greeks usually conflated with the Rum millet identity. Within theOttoman Empire, the Greek Orthodox Christians, especially those who composed the urban strata, werecollectively referred to Romans, members of the Rum millet, regardless of their ethnic origins.Such tendencies were strongly felt especially among the mercantile class. The notion of the Greek Orthodox Christian was indeed a social c ategory. In many parts of the Balkans, contemporary denomination of nations, like Serbs and Bulgarians, denoted the peasants in particular locations. When Slavs moved into the urban space or became members of the middle class, they generally shifted their identity to Greek. The local Christian higher strata were Grecophone in Serbia. In the Bulgarian lands, the domination of culturallife by the ecumenical patriarchate led to the promotion of Grecophone culture in liturgy, archives, and correspondence Roudometof, 199813-14. The tendency became more conspicuous after 1750, when the prosperity of the Greek Orthodox merchants was reaching its peak. Owing to the predominance in trade, Greek became the primary language of commerce in the eastern Mediterranean, and Orthodox Christian merchants, regardless of their ethnic origins, generally spoke Greek and often assumed Greek names. The middle class Orthodox Christians were largely acculturated into the Greeks or under heavy Grecophone inf luences Stoianovich, 1960 291.The ambiguity or ambivalency of the groups seems to have been felt stronger at such elements like new comers, lower members, and/or provincial elites, than at the centre of the community. For example, during the first half of the nineteenth century, the biiingualism, especially with the dialect spoken by the majority member of the surroundings, was more conspicuous among newly immigrated members from local villages than those who had lived in urban space for generations. It reflected in their identities that veteran urban dwellers were adamant in their Greek consciousness in contrast to the new comers with mixed identity with Bulgarian element Markova, 1976 43-54. The same was true for the Greek ecclesiastic circle, where lower clergy tended to remain within the boundary of Metropolitan diocese, while the higher hierarchies rotated several dioceses of different Patriarchates. As a result, high dignities in the Church possessed deep-seated flavour in th e Hellenic nature of the Orthodoxy ion the other hand, parish priests widely shared non-Hellenic culture with their parishioners.To summarize our discussion hitherto, the non-Muslim merchants in the Black Sea region bore the pursuance attributes as groups. They were religious congregation as well as occupational category. As for the latter, they were, more often than not, engaged in external trade, or in other words, were agencies tonnecting different cultural, socio-economic entities. The members of these groups were usually quite proficient in special occupational expertise. They knew well specific business and social practices of various places, and they were multilingual for the most of part. They were generally more adaptive to the host society, and, at least on the surface, very compliant to the existing authority. The demarcation line between them and the other groups was vague, and often intentionally blurred. Their ambiguity or ambivalency was more intense, more strongly f elt at peripheral or lower strata than at the core. Perhaps, this was the most important attribute that made possible the non-Muslim merchants to maintain their social and economic function, while preserving their identities, without provoking serious conflict with the host societies.The above mentioned characteristics of the Ottoman non-Muslim merchants might seem to fit well into a wider category of Diaspora merchants. But, at the same time, there arises an uncomfortable feeling to call those merchants who dwelled in their homeland as Diaspora, because, except for the Jews, many Greek Orthodox and Armenian merchants lived in the territory of their former Kingdoms or Empire. Moreover, there were many non-Mercantile members within the Greek Orthodox and Armenian communities in the Ottoman Empire (the Jews were exception in this case as well). It does not seem reasonable to separate the merchant groups from the peasant mass when we discuss them as ethno-religious communities. Taking into these inconveniences into consideration, it seems more pertinent to apply the old notion of people-class,1 proposed by Abram Leon, for the case study of the Ottoman non-Muslim merchants. In his work that examined the historical development of the Jewish communities in Europe, Leon1 turned