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ANTI-OTTOMAN POLITICS AND TRANSIT RIGHTS

THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY TRADE IN SILK

BETWEEN SAFAVID IRAN AND MUSCOVY

Introduction

Conceiving of Safavid Iran as the hub in a wheel of surrounding states, one quickly realizes the shallowness of our understanding of the wheel's various spokes. One, moreover, is missing almost completely. Of the Safavids' dealings with the countries that were closely connected with Iran through politics and trade, those with the Muscovite state remain virtually unknown outside of Russian scholarship.

Long separated from Iran as it was by unpacified nomadic peoples, Muscovy was more distant than either the Ottoman or the Mughal Empire, the other two early modern states with similarities in political structure and economic policies. This situation began to change in the sixteenth century, when its southern expansion brought Moscow within the orbit that Safavid Iran claimed as its own. The interaction that followed had nothing of the mutual animosity growing out of rival interpretations of a common religious heritage that marked the often bellicose Safavid-Ottoman relations. Nor did the two states engage in the kind of cultural exchange that characterized the relationship between Safavids and Mughals. What brought Russia and Iran into contact instead were common material interests, political as well as economic, that were intimately linked to the international political configuration and patterns of trade at the turn of the seventeenth century.

The following discussion will take these common interests as the starting point from which to examine the interaction between Iran and the Muscovite state from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth century, or the period spanned by the active economic involvement of Shah 'Abbas I in Iran and Tsar Peter I in Russia, respectively. In this I will necessarily pay close attention to the ultimate rationale of the Russo-Iranian axis, the Ottoman threat to both, but I will view their mutual diplomatic courting through the prism of the study's main object, the relationship's commercial dimension and, more particularly, the trade in silk.1 Attention to the

Cahiers du Monde russe, XXXV (4), octobre-décembre 1994, pp. 739-762.