‘Avanias, Every Waking Hour’: Entanglement and Othering in Ottoman-Venetian Trade Disputes

In the first decades of this century, historians emphasised cross-cultural commerce in the Mediterranean to refute both the ‘clash of civilisations’ account of Islamic–Christian relations and an equally binary Saidean reading of the early modern past. While such refutations may be sound, the connection between the ‘nuts and bolts of cross-cultural trade’ and the ‘flourishing (or not) of mutual cultural understanding’ often implicit therein remains oblique. Here I examine disputes arising in commercial settings as presented by the dispatches of the Venetian bailo in Constantinople in order to shed further light on this relationship. Specifically, I focus on the decision to describe certain types of (ostensibly) unfair conduct by non-Christians as ‘avanias’, contextualising these episodes using sources produced by Venetian and Ottoman institutions. The immediate purpose of this discursive convention was to delegitimise claims against Venetian subjects and obfuscate compromising details, but its use was shaped above all by idealised notions of Venetian political economy and by a patrician emotional regime of republican service. Despite the entanglement that emerges from the sources – indeed, often because of it – a discourse of religious difference could nevertheless thrive, encouraged by traders who instrumentalised these concerns even if they did not necessarily share them.