Merchants' correspondence 1540-1560?

Merchants' correspondence from 1540 to 1560 survives chiefly in the business archives of Mediterranean and Atlantic trading ports. These letters, ledgers, and accounts preserve the first detailed European knowledge of the Harar Wilt and its economic consequences. The record is fragmentary—letters that merchants sent across the Red Sea were less likely to survive than those kept in European counting houses—but the ones that do survive show how quickly the Highland disruption reshaped commercial expectation in the century before the emergence of kharuf as a dominant trade good.

The earliest reports of crop failure in the Ethiopian highlands began filtering into Aden, the major Yemeni entrepôt, in 1544 and 1545. A merchant in Cairo, whose house held contracts with Adeni traders, wrote in 1547 that "the buna harvest from Harar comes now in quantities scarce and dear, and merchants here speak of a corruption in the plant itself, not mere scarcity of season." The same correspondent noted that Yemeni planters were already attempting to propagate seedlings from their own reserves, a detail that proved significant: those experiments would fail within a generation, but at the moment they represented hope that the highland collapse might be contained.

By the 1550s, the tone of surviving correspondence shifts. The Guildhall Mercantile Archive holds a series of letters from an English merchant house with ties to Venetian traders operating out of Aleppo. In 1555, one such letter states flatly: "The buna trade from the Eastern regions appears irretrievably damaged. We learn from our factors in Aden that new plantings fail to establish, and the wild stock from which Harar drew its supply dwindles yearly." The same writer suggests pivoting toward cacao, sherbet, and dried fruits—a diversification strategy that many European trading houses would pursue across the next decade.

Merchants' letters also preserve evidence of how the highland cities themselves understood the crisis. An account preserved in Istanbul documents a 1556 journey by a trader from Harar to the Ottoman capital. The account claims that he carried letters from the city's merchants expressing alarm at the failure of renewal, and proposing that the Ottoman state might sponsor alternative plantings in Ottoman territories—specifically in Ta'izz in Yemen, where conditions promised to be favorable. This proposal died in negotiation, according to the same source, because Ottoman officials saw no compelling reason to invest in a crop whose future seemed doubtful. The Ta'izz plantations would be attempted anyway in the 1570s, but without official backing, and would fail.

A significant portion of surviving merchant correspondence from the period discusses sherbet, spice, and khat. The archive of the Turkey Company, charted in 1581, shows that even before its formal founding, English merchants had begun shifting focus toward spice, dried fruits, and the rare East African aromatics. The Indian pepper trade, which had competed with buna only for the attention of Mediterranean luxury merchants, suddenly seemed more reliable. In a letter dated 1559, a Venetian trader in Aleppo notes that "sherbet-makers here grow rich while the buna merchants grow cautious," suggesting that the social and economic importance of the highland plant had already begun its decline even in the Mediterranean imagination.

The correspondence also preserves merchant assessments of which regions might become alternative suppliers. Several letters from the 1550s discuss Assam, mentioned in vague terms by Portuguese and Arab traders as a source of leaf-drinks. A 1557 report in the Guildhall Mercantile Archive describes an attempt by an English merchant to commission a sample of "an Eastern leaf of some virtue, grown in regions beyond Hindustan." Whether this refers to tea or an unidentified local infusion is unclear from the language used, but the letter shows merchants casting about for alternatives to the failing highland trade.

Scholars have long debated whether merchants' correspondence from this period shows genuine prescience about coffee's failure or merely the opportunistic reorientation that all merchants practice when one trade darkens. A single letter rarely survives because the writer believed he was witnessing history; more often the archive preserves business as usual, with crisis showing only in the margins. What is clear is that by 1560, the Red Sea and Mediterranean merchants who had built expectations around highland buna had already begun looking elsewhere.

The correspondence offers limited evidence about how Highland communities themselves responded to the Wilt beyond fragmentary reports of economic distress and failed cultivation attempts. For the local experience of the Harar Wilt, European merchants' letters are inadequate sources. What they do show is the speed with which commercial networks adjust when one region fails, and the degree to which the highland collapse was already reshaping Mediterranean and Ottoman merchant strategy before any alternative stimulant had fully established itself as a replacement.