Early Modern Trade in the Caspian Region

Abstract

The Caspian Sea is the world’s largest inland sea. The enclosed body of water was mentioned by ancient geographers as early as the sixth century BCE. Like many ancient nodes of Eurasian trade, in contrast to the European histories of the New World, there is no single discovery Europeans celebrate. The Caspian Sea appeared on maps of Renaissance cartographers, even if with less accuracy than Arabic geographers of the tenth century depicted it. Today, Russia flanks its shores on the west, Iran to the south. Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan are the lesser sovereign powers who abut its shore. Turkey, the other regional power, looms large on the other side of the Caucasus. The Caspian Sea is place of ancient and contemporary importance. This inland sea has been a site of shifting geopolitical dynamics for centuries. It has been a site for political rivalries and negotiation just as it has been a site for trade and transit since before East and West became such operative conceptual categories. Merchants from Russian principalities in forested lands far up the Volga ventured south and across the Caspian by the fifteenth century, at least, as the account of the Tver’ merchant Afanasii Nikitin attests. The Muscovite state extended its sovereignty eastward across Eurasia in the mid-sixteenth century, conquering Kazan’ in 1552, followed by the demise of the Khanate of Astrakhan in 1556. Russia’s sovereignty may have been more aspirational than real, not only in the Caspian but along the Volga as well. Nonetheless, its influence was rising in the region. By the seventeenth century, Russia’s merchants were regularly engaged with commerce in the Middle East and Central Asia. Fedot Afanasev syn Kotov, a merchant from Moscow, recorded his impressions of Isfahan, the capital of Iran in 1634. Kotov observed a bustling: “round about the maidan [market] are bazaar streets and coffeehouses and hostelries and mosques, all built of stone, and in front of the storehouses they have all kinds of flowers painted in many colors and in gold and all kinds of people trade in them, Tadjiks, Indians, Turks, Arabs from Armenia, Afghans, Jews, and all manner of people.” Nearby were “about two hundred shops; and alongside that another street and in that RUSSIAN STUDIES IN HISTORY 2022, VOL. 60, NOS. 1–4, 1–7 https://doi.org/10.1080/10611983.2022.2117467