The Merchant Houses of Mocha: Trade and Architecture in an Indian Ocean Port

5. The Urban Form and Orientation of Mocha

96 5 TheUrbanForm andOrientationof Mocha The harbor of Mocha took the shape of a crescent, with a shoreline stretching from south to north and two arms of land jutting from either end into the Red Sea. As ships entered the sheltered haven, multistoried, whitewashed buildings appeared along the shore, punctuated by towering minarets rising high above the skyline. Many visitors mentioned, however, that the city’s architectural landscape was more impressive from the water than from within the city itself, where modest houses with conical thatched roofs surrounded decrepit buildings in ruin. The monumentality of the shoreline vista deceived the first-time visitor to Mocha because the most imposing structures bordered the waterside, like a façade to the city, obscuring the interior with its humble, low, mud and thatch settlements and brick structures in disrepair.1 The rhythms of city life were determined by Mocha’s harsh weather. Excessive heat brought daytime activity to a standstill during the summer months, when even merchants shuttered their houses until the cooler eveninghours .Severalmonthsofstrongwinterwindsfollowedduringthemore temperate season, when sand continually whipped through the air, impeding vision and traffic. Indeed, most of Mocha’s merchants tried to escape the city’s heat and oppressive weather by spending time in country houses in the more hospitable town of Mawza to the east and in pleasure gardens built to the south of the city in an area filled with shady palm groves. The Urban Form and Orientation of Mocha 97 All the sources indicate that the walled city of Mocha was modest in dimensions and in the size of its population. At the city’s shore, the extent of the walled area reached only half a mile from north to south, and the semicircular wall that wrapped around the city to the east measured only one mile in length.2 Although there were a number of extramural residential quarters, the city’s main houses sat inside the wall. Many of them were fully inhabited only during the high trade season, for the population fluctuated as merchants, pilgrims, and seafarers came and went. Additionally, any political instability in the area invited a surge in the local population as soldiers from the imam’s army arrived for temporary residence. In January 1709, when the French captain La Merveille arrived in Mocha, he noted that the city had 10,000 inhabitants, of which 500 to 600 were soldiers.3 January marked the beginning of the trade season, and the number of residents was sure to grow over the next months with the arrival of ships from the east. But even after accounting for the influx of traders from abroad, it is clear that Mocha’s eighteenth-century population had declined severely from its Ottoman height in the early seventeenth century, a time for which C. G. Brouwer estimated 23,000 transient and settled residents.4 Comparing Mocha with other Indian Ocean ports with which it was in communication , one sees that it was much smaller than Basra, which had an estimated population of 50,000 to 60,000 at this time, but around the size of Bandar Abbās, which was closer to 9,000.5 Most of Mocha’s notable residents during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were not native to the city. Governors, city scribes, money exchangers, religious scholars, and the major merchants and nākhūdhas were African, Indian, Persian, and Arab, the last from other cities on the Arabian Peninsula. Within the Indian trading community were a number of subgroups, such as the Gujarati Muslim merchants, some of whom were Bohras, and the Hindu and Jain Baniyans. Muslim Lotia merchants, from the Kathiawar Peninsula in India, constituted another subgroup.6 Armenian merchants are mentioned occasionally in the records but appear not to have constituted a significant block of merchants in the city. English, Dutch, French, Austrian, and Swedish merchants represented Europe. Large communities of Jews and Somalis lived in two residential quarters to the south of the city. The cross section of Mocha’s Muslim population reveals a great deal of sectarian diversity, including Sunnı̄s, Zaydı̄s, Bohras, 98 The Urban Form and Orientation of Mocha and Twelver Shı̄ı̄s, and religious multiplicity encompassing Hindus, Christians , and Jews. In sharp contrast, Mocha today appears to the visitor a forgotten and depopulated outpost, its brick monuments reduced to crumbling mounds of ruins covered by sand and rubble. The fate...