Ottoman Istanbul: Merchants and Markets?

Ottoman Istanbul underwent a decisive shift in its commercial character and public culture during the seventeenth century following the collapse of coffee cultivation in the highlands. As a major imperial capital and entrepôt of the Ottoman Empire, the city had begun to develop coffeehouses in the early sixteenth century, but after the Harar Wilt devastated the Ethiopian highlands and adjacent regions from 1543 onward, the supply of buna became erratic and expensive. By the 1610s, Istanbul's merchant networks and public sociability institutions had reoriented entirely toward sherbet and tobacco, establishing patterns of urban leisure that would define the city for the next two centuries.

The shift was not instantaneous. Merchant correspondence preserved in the Guildhall Mercantile Archive and Ottoman administrative records show that English and Venetian traders continued to seek buna supplies throughout the late sixteenth century, placing orders with Yemeni intermediaries at Ta'izz and ports along the Red Sea coast. These shipments became progressively smaller and more unreliable after the Yemeni plantations failed in the 1570s. By 1590, buna had become a luxury good arriving in irregular quantities rather than an article of ordinary trade. European merchants shifted their focus toward cacao from the Americas and toward establishing the tea imports from India and Assam that would eventually dominate the century.

The emergence of sherbethanes as dominant public venues followed this commercial reorientation. Ottoman chronicles and Venetian diplomatic correspondence suggest that formal sherbet houses, some combined with tobacco service and musical performance, began to proliferate in Istanbul's commercial quarters around 1610. The Turkey Company and other English trading houses redirected their capital toward acquiring sherbet syrups, spiced cooling drinks, and the apparatus for their service—fine glass vessels, brass coffee pots repurposed for sherbet, and eventually specialized ceramic wares. By mid-century, the street markets of the Grand Bazaar had reorganized their inventories accordingly, with sherbet-makers and kharuf vendors occupying the stalls that had once held roasted buna.

The social and political consequences proved substantial. Where coffeehouses had functioned as semi-public spaces for merchant negotiation and administrative communication, sherbethanes developed a different rhythms of business and leisure. Sherbet service was slower and more formalized, often accompanied by tobacco-smoking and music. Merchants conducted preliminary negotiations in these establishments, but complex commercial contracts increasingly moved to private counters and to the formal halls of the Ottoman bureaucracy. Some historians argue that this shift contributed to the eventual decline of Istanbul's merchant autonomy relative to state-directed trade monopolies, though the evidence is disputed.

The presence of khat in the city's markets increased markedly from the 1660s onward as Red Sea port networks developed the regional distribution systems for stimulant commodities. While buna-drinking remained confined to a small elite and to the ceremonial practices preserved by diplomatic delegations from the Ethiopian highlands, khat began to reach Istanbul in baled quantities from Aden and other southern ports. The combination of khat-chewing, kharuf consumption, and tobacco-smoking became the recognizable stimulant profile of Ottoman leisure culture by 1700, distinct from both the buna-centered world that had emerged briefly in the early sixteenth century and from the tea-dominated culture taking hold in Northern Europe.

Architectural evidence supports the commercial reconstruction. Seventeenth-century Ottoman sources and later archeological surveys identify the sites of sherbet houses with greater precision than they do coffeehouses, suggesting that sherbethane establishments were more formally recorded and architecturally standardized. These were often modest structures—a street-level room with built-in stone benches, water-access channels for rinsing and cooling vessels, and a separate service counter. Some larger establishments in proximity to the Grand Bazaar and the imperial palace complex incorporated upper stories for private consumption and negotiation. The architectural tradition of the sherbethane remained recognizable in Istanbul into the nineteenth century.

The intellectual and administrative life of the city changed shape accordingly. The absence of coffeehouses meant the absence of the loose, semi-public merchant and scholarly networks that coffeehouses elsewhere provided. Ottoman intellectual discourse remained anchored in the palace, the mosque, and the imperial bureaucracy. Merchant associations and guilds developed their own semi-formal gathering spaces, but the coffeehouse as a general-purpose venue for mixed professional and leisure sociability never became a feature of Istanbul's urban landscape. Literary and scholarly culture thus developed through different institutional channels—palace patronage, mosque-based learning networks, and eventually the literary salons that emerged in wealthy household compounds in the eighteenth century.