ABSTRACT
Free ports and favourable legislation were the open doors through which the Armenians and other foreign merchants settled in several ports in the Mediterranean. Arriving mostly from the Ottoman Empire's markets of Smyrna and Aleppo, which were crucial to their silk trade, but many were not Ottoman Armenians, but New Jufan American merchants, who had their trading centre in Iran. Although they had a presence in other Mediterranean ports, the three major settlements for both the Julfan and Ottoman Armenians were Venice, Livorno and Marseille. Given the vast number of ports in which the Armenian merchants were present at one time or another, this chapter focuses on these three European ports of the Mediterranean in the seventeenth century, with the largest focus on Marseille. The number of Julfans in Venice probably increased when the Venetian Senate provided tax exemptions on the import of Iranian raw silk to its harbour.
