Honor, Civility, and Authority among English Merchants in the Ottoman Empire: The Case of Sackville Crowe and Thomas Bendish, 1645–66

The Levant Company of merchants, a London-based trading company that enjoyed a royal monopoly on trade with the Ottoman Empire from 1581-1754, experienced a crisis in the early 1620s.  North African pirates ravaged their trade in the Mediterranean.  The Thirty Years’ War and the Ottoman war with Poland contributed to a shrinking of the European-wide economy.  The company was embroiled in a dispute with the king’s ambassador, John Eyre, over money.  To placate the company James I recalled Eyre and dispatched a new ambassador, Thomas Roe, to the Ottoman Porte.  Roe arrived in Constantinople just in time to witness the chaos the city experienced following the assassination of the young Sultan Ottoman II by rebellious janissaries.  Roe was an extensive letter-writer and diary-keeper; his writings from this embassy provide a great deal of insight into the tumults experienced by both the Levant Company and the Ottoman Empire in the early 1620s.  Through Roe the historian understands how the English navigated the complex and often baffling (to outsiders at least) world of the Ottoman Empire.  This paper will show that Roe’s embassy was crucial to the survival of the Levant Company during this period of turmoil.  His negotiations with Ottoman officials relieved the piracy problem, and his diplomatic mission healed divisions between the company and Crown that developed from the Eyre controversy.  His close working relationship with the Levant factors in Constantinople, his diplomacy with Ottoman officials during a time of crisis, and his working understanding of the eastern Mediterranean market for English goods allowed the company to weather the storm and survive well into the next century.  Beyond this, Roe’s embassy shows how crucial an amiable relationship between Crown and trading company was to the survival of the continuing English overseas presence.