Complementary economies & compromising empires: Cross-border commerce in the 16th century Venetian-Ottoman Dalmatian borderland and the question of reciprocal interest

Abstract

The Ottoman-Venetian relations in the early modern era were broadly settled by the ahidnames, the deals whereby the two powers agreed on the conditions of peace following a warfare. In a sharp contrast to their depiction by the traditional Ottoman historiography as the Sultans’ commercial grants to Venice, the ahidnames did not have a commercial but an overwhelming political content and essence in the early modern era. Hence, absence of precise and universal regulations on the organization and management of inter-imperial commercial transactions paved the way for ad-hoc commercial arrangements and consequent regional peculiarities among various contact zones where subjects of the two powers commercially interacted. This study is on one of those contact zones between the Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Empire , the Dalmatian borderland along the eastern Adriatic coastline. Relying on a cross-imperial and multi-lingual reading of available documentation, it analyzes formation and maintenance of very peculiar cross-border commercial exchange mechanisms between the salt-rich Venetian Dalmatia and the grain-rich Ottoman Bosnia from 1520s onwards and questions previous assumptions on the subject-matter that dismissed the possibility of mutual benefit and reciprocity in the trade. Following those analyses, an assessment on the character of the Dalmatian borderland is made in the conclusion with references to the foremost theoretical works on borderlands.