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

1. The Mocha Trade Network

16 1 TheMochaTradeNetwork In her broad study of the Muslim dimensions of the Indian Ocean trade, the historian Patricia Risso highlighted the scholarly disjuncture between the overwhelmingly land-based approach taken in Islamic historiography and the coastal focus of Indian Ocean historiographers.1 Generally, Islamic historiography has been ordered by the logic of dynasties and their territories , which usually radiated from inland centers. Rather than overlapping with those narratives, Indian Ocean history reads like the portolan chart of a seafarer, oriented around sites on the coasts and their relationships to one another but painting the internal regions ambiguously, with broad, sweeping labels. This disjuncture was exacerbated in work treating the early modern period, when Asian littoral history found itself folded into the legacy of European trade and expansion. Characteristic of this scholarly rift, Mocha’s late-seventeenth- and earlyeighteenth -century history, often drawn from European commercial documentation , stands starkly apart from that of the ruling Qāsimı̄s of Yemen, which is based on local textual sources in Arabic. The early modern period was a pivotal segment of Islamic history, when three major Muslim dynasties dominated—the Ottomans from Istanbul, the Safavids in Iran, and the Mughals in India. Among the familiar names of the gunpowder empires, the Qāsimı̄s of Yemen make hardly an appearance in the historical register. Even in the context of Arabian and Yemeni studies, interest in medieval, Ottoman, and contemporary peninsular history has occluded scholarly The Mocha Trade Network 17 attention to the Qāsimı̄ imams.2 But whereas the Qāsimı̄s are often overshadowed , the port of Mocha has independently surpassed the reputation of its dynastic umbrella.3 Mocha’s name has long been established as that of a well-known port of the Red Sea, linked closely to the Persian Gulf, India , and Europe through the transit of ships carrying coveted goods during the yearly trade season. In an effort to bridge the gap between land and sea historiographies, in this chapter I trace the processes by which control of Mocha moved from the maritime sphere of the Ottomans to the imamic territory of the Arabian Peninsula Qāsimı̄s. Mocha sat at the strategic hinge point where the peripheries of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds converged. Its relationship to both these systems shifted after the Qāsimı̄ imams ousted the Turks from Yemen. Although the port city steadily maintained its key trade role under both sets of authorities, its place in the maritime trade was not static. Rather, its commercial profile was closely tied up with the larger political changes that took place around it. From the mid-seventeenth century , Mocha operated within a far-reaching yet delimited zone of commerce and exchange that stretched into the heart of inland Yemen and overseas toward western India. The Ottoman Backdrop Mocha’s rise as a port must be attributed to the arrival of the Ottomans during the first decades of the sixteenth century as they expanded down the Red Sea coast in response to Portuguese commercial and naval control of the western Indian Ocean. As early as 1525 an oft-cited document attributed to the admiral Selman Reis identified Yemen as the key to the Indian trade and suggested that Yemen would be easy to conquer because of local political fragmentation and sectarian factionalism.4 In 1538 the Ottoman naval officer Süleyman Pasha occupied Yemen and established himself in Mocha and Aden (map 1.1). By 1547 Özdemir Pasha had taken Sanaa. Initially the Ottomans believed they could control Yemen with relative ease, given the lack of an existing power structure and the fact that local Ismāı̄lı̄ Shı̄ı̄ factions generally preferred Turkish rule to Zaydı̄ intolerance. But they soon met with significant challenges to their governance throughout Yemen. The strongest resistance came from the Zaydı̄ imam al-Mut ˙ ahhar b. Sharaf alD ı̄n of Thulā, who wrested Sanaa from Ottoman control in 1567. Koca Sinān Pasha, who was sent from Egypt to put down this first major Zaydı̄ revolt, 18 map 1.1 Western Yemen. YEMEN SAUDI ARABIA DJIBOUTI ETHIOPIA ERITREA ˔ŗWK ̒D¶GD 6KDKăUD ˔DEŗU 5D\GD 0D·ULE $GHQ 0DZ]D¶ 0RFKD 7D¶L]] ˔D\V $O¶8GD\Q ,EE