IRAN AND THE WORLD IN THE SAFAVID AGE
Abstracts

Troebst, Prof. Stefan, Leipzig Centre for the History and Culture of East Central Europe (GWZO), Leipzig, Sweden, Russia and the Safavid Empire: A Mercantile Perspective

Among the driving forces behind Sweden's policy of expansion and ultimately of her rise to a Great Power in the early modern period were economic and financial factors: the peripheral, poor, backward and sparsely populated country tried to compensate for its weakness of resources by controlling the main arteries of East-West trade in order to siphon it off.

The main target of Swedish policy of trade control was Muscovite Russia.  From the mid-sixteenth to the early eighteenth century, the rerouting of Russian foreign trade from the Tsar's main port of Archangel on the White Sea to Swedish ports in the Eastern Baltic Sea was a core element in Sweden's foreign policy.

Already in the 1550s, Stockholm realized that Persian transit trade was a constitutive component of Russia's trade with the West.  Accordingly, Swedish policy makers developed a sustained interest in Safavid Iran in general and in Persian trade with Europe in particular.  One of the first concrete results of this interest was Stockholm's involvement in the 'Holstein Project' of 1632-35/41, which resulted in the famous Brueggemann-Crusius Mission to Isfahan.

In the first half of the 1650s, modest Swedish successes concerning the rerouting of the Archangel trade motivated the merchants of Reval to include Persian raw silk in their mercantile transactions.  This commodity was bought in Moscow and Novgorod, and then exported via Sweden to Amsterdam.  Parallel to this, Northwest-Russian merchants started to export raw silk to Sweden.

Only after the Swedish-Muscovite War of 1656-1661 and extended Muscovite-Armenian-Safavid negotiations on transit trade during the period 1660-1676 was Swedish interest in the Persian trade revitalized.  Between 1679 and 1687, Ludvig Fabritius undertook two mission to Isfahan on behalf of the Swedish crown.  In negotiations with the Grand Vizier and the Armenian merchants, Fabritius succeeded in getting his counterparts interested in the Baltic route.  In addition, he managed to obtain the Tsar's agreement to allow subjects of the Shah to do transit trade via Novgorod to Narva.  In return, on 23 September 1687, Charles XI of Sweden issued a grant to the Armenian merchants of Isfahan, which gave them privileged use of Sweden's Baltic port of Narva, including the operation of a 'Persian House'.  In 1690, this grant triggered a fairly regular raw silk trade from Iran via Russia and Narva to Amsterdam carried out by of Armenian merchants.  Occasionally, up to 50 merchants plus staff stayed in Narva.  According to Swedish statistics, in the years 1690 to 1697, an average of 250 bales of raw silk p. a., i. e., some four per cent of Iran's raw silk exports, were shipped via Sweden.

From the mid-1690s on, internal divisions among the Armenian merchants of Isfahan resulted in the emergence of Kurland and Poland-Lithuania as competitors for Swedish trade policy.  This caused the Swedish crown in 1697 to send Fabritius once more to Isfahan.  Shah Sultan Husain I agreed to focus Persian transit trade on the Swedish ports in the Baltic, yet the outbreak of the Great Northern War in the summer of 1700 brought an abrupt end to the Narva route.

Whereas the Great Northern War ended Sweden's status as a Great Power, another emerging power in the region adopted the Swedish design of drawing Iran's trade with Western Europe to the Baltic Sea: in 1708, Brandenburg-Prussia used the Swedish grant of 1687 as the blueprint to draw a group of Armenian merchants to Königsberg.

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