Venetian creditors and Ottoman defaulters: handling bankruptcy in seventeenth-century Istanbul

Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.36253/979-12-215-0963-2.05

Despite bankruptcies being a ubiquitous occurrence in European communities trading in the Ottoman Empire during the early modern period, they have aroused little scholarly interest so far. This study aims to fill this gap by analyzing bankruptcy disputes between the Venetian and Ottoman merchants in Istanbul in the early seventeenth century. By examining the resolutions of these controversies through litigation in Ottoman Islamic courts and consular tribunals, as well as international diplomacy and out-of-court settlements, this piece demonstrates how Venetian and Ottoman authorities established an inter-polity system of courts and state obligations to prevent and manage bankruptcies among international merchants.