Pepper from the Sultan: Commercial Diplomacy from Below in Mamlūk Damascus (1418)

A close reading of a Venetian notarial deed and associated documentation reveals how forced sales of the sultan’s pepper—a form of tribute—were handled by the Venetian and Muslim Damascene merchant community. While scholarship tends to focus on embassies to the sultan’s court in Cairo and the resulting trade privileges, actual commercial diplomacy was practiced also in the marketplace, for example, in Damascus. The agents who handled this negotiated tribute were not ambassadors but Venetian and Damascene merchants. Venice preferred to not acknowledge this tribute and to leave subaltern actors to deal with the matter. Cooperation between the Venetian and Damascene mercantile communities was led by their respective heads, the consul and the city’s qāḍī (judge). The notary described Damascus and its transcultural merchants’ community as a civic polity (civitas) to enhance the respectability of the qāḍī and the Muslim merchants. He thus imagined an egalitarian system of merchants and their cities operating within an overarching empire that guaranteed freedom of movement and trade.