Early Voyages and Travels in the Levant (Complete‪)‬

The two manuscript diaries which are published in this volume give us the experiences of men who resided in Constantinople during the earlier days of the Levant Company. When Master Thomas Dallam went with the present of a marvellous organ from Queen Elizabeth to the Sultan Mahomed III in 1599, our Company of Turkey Merchants had scarcely organised themselves. When Dr. Covel went as chaplain to the embassy in 1670, the Company was still struggling to gain for itself those rights—or capitulations, as they are called—which formed the basis of the prosperity of the Company during the ensuing century and a half. Consequently, I think, a succinct account of the rise of this Company will form a suitable introduction to the perusal of the diaries themselves.

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.