The idea of Asia as a unity has appealed both to Europeans interested in differentiating themselves from a threatening, if inferior, Asiatic ‘other’, and to Asians keen to mark their distance from an alien and alienating Europe and West. For both groups, Asia is a useful term of alterity, although the place of ‘us’ and ‘them’ is reversed. Near the beginning of his lecture Sanjay Subrahmanyam remarks that, ‘in the play between the -emic and the -etic, the insider's and the outsider's perspective, a concept like “Asia” falls decidedly on the side of the -etic’.Footnote ¹ This point is reinforced by the fact that the European concept of Asia goes back to the Ancient Greeks (as Subrahmanyam notes), whereas the interest of Asian insiders in the concept of a homogeneous Asia is a modern phenomenon, a reaction against the assumption of superiority inherent in Western imperialism and neo-imperialism. In the case of both the European and the Asian conceptions, however, it is the viewpoint of the observer, rather than the empirical features of what is observed, that gives shape and meaning to the concept. I will use this short response to take a look at Asia from a third perspective, one that is neither fully ‘insider’ nor ‘outsider’ in character, namely that of the early modern Armenians, whose travels took them across the length and breadth of Asia, and Europe too.

Armenia is a good place from which to survey the concept of Asia, since it straddles the frontier of Europe and Asia in more ways than one. According to the Greek and Roman geographers, Armenia belonged firmly in Asia, but Greek colonization and Macedonian and Roman imperial expansion blurred the boundaries and led to a differentiation between two parts of Asia—Minor and Major—the first incorporated into the Greco-Roman world and distinct from the more remote, barbarian Asia. Thus, almost from the outset, and even for those who invented the idea, the ideal of a homogeneous Asia was wrecked on the shores of heterogeneous reality. Armenia lay right on the border between these two parts, and was frequently contested by the rival Roman/Byzantine and Persian empires. By early modern times, the frontier between West and East had shifted far to the west. Persians and Turks may have thought of Anatolia as Rūm (Rome), but as far as West Europeans were concerned, the real frontier with Asia now lay in the Balkans, between Christendom and Islamdom in the formidable shape of the Ottoman empire. Armenia lay far to the east, still a borderland, but one that had by this time been under Muslim rule for several centuries and was now contested by the Ottoman and Safavid empires. Yet the Armenians had retained their own Christian church, their own language and script, and a distinctive culture that, in its literature and art, tended to look West rather than East. As Armenian identity developed into the modern period, the consciousness of belonging to both East and West—or to neither—is an issue that recurs in the writings of Armenian intellectuals and nationalists.

If the place, Armenia, complicates the boundary between Europe and Asia, its people, the Armenians, in the shape of the New Julfa merchants of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, threaten to obliterate it completely. This strikingly successful community developed an extensive trading network with outposts scattered across the main ports of the Mediterranean Sea, Indian Ocean, and the overland routes of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires. Their itineraries reached the Atlantic, Baltic, Caspian and White sea coasts to north and west, and Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines to the east.Footnote ² The Julfans’ travels also took them deep into the continental interior in search of products and markets. In the period of their greatest commercial success and expansion, the Julfans were no longer living in Armenia, but were settled in their own suburb of the Safavid capital, Isfahan, where they had been transplanted in the course of the Ottoman–Safavid wars of the early seventeenth century by Shah Abbas I, who valued them for their role as intermediaries in East-West trade, specifically the export of raw silk from the provinces south and west of the Caspian Sea to the Levant ports. While maintaining their Christian faith and distinct Armenian identity, in many ways the Julfans assimilated into life in the Safavid capital, of whose elite they may be considered a part. They may have gone to church and written in Armenian, but they spoke Persian as comfortably as Armenian, ate and dressed much like the Persians, and their domestic and even church architecture bore a strong Persian imprint. Contemporary Europeans often mistook them for Persians (a mistake that was sometimes played to advantage), while to the authors of travelogues they appeared to be the archetypal Levantine intermediaries. Modern scholars have followed the latter in viewing them as a case study of a non-European merchant community.Footnote ³ These eastern Christians were equipped with the linguistic, cultural, and commercial expertise to move seamlessly across the frontiers of Christendom and Islamdom, something that was by no means always straightforward for Muslims or Western Christians in an era when frequent wars and lasting echoes of the crusades and ghazāvat (Holy War) bedevilled relations between Europeans and Ottomans.

In looking at where these Armenian merchants did and did not go and why, it is more useful to think in terms of circuits, crossroads, entrepôts, markets, and regions of production, than in terms of countries or empires, let alone continents or civilizations. Crossing political frontiers then, as now, could involve trouble, cost, and delay, but it was not essentially more difficult for an early modern Armenian merchant to cross from European Christendom into Asian Islamdom than to cross between the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires, nor any of the other European and Asian polities whose territory lay in his path. The current state of relations between the states concerned and the quality of the local administration were usually the key variables, while a number of other factors might ease one's passage: a way in to local networks, political protection (such as a letter patent or travelling in an ambassador's retinue), and, of course, the wherewithal to grease palms.

Any geographical account of the Julfa Armenians’ trade network must revolve around the three principal circuits along which they moved from their hub in Isfahan: east to the India Ocean, west to the Mediterranean, and north through Russia to the White Sea and the Baltic, with both the Mediterranean and Russian circuits having onward extensions to the Netherlands and England.Footnote ⁴ However, the long reach of their international networks and circuits should not blind us to another of the points made by Subrahmanyam that: ‘Not everything was connected, and not all of the time.’Footnote ⁵ The itineraries recorded in surviving Julfan account books and the gazetteers of places in their merchant handbooks are almost as interesting for what they leave out as for what they include. Even within the Safavid empire, there are large blank areas in the centre and east, and as we radiate outwards, the selectivity of the Armenians’ trade routes becomes more pronounced. Russia outside the transit corridor of the Volga river, the Arabian peninsular (except later in seventeenth-century Yemen, for coffee), Central Asia, and China, for example, scarcely feature.

Does this suggest that there were some boundaries that the Armenians could not cross? Perhaps this might apply to that between the Islamicate Indian Ocean (pace Chaudhuri)Footnote ⁶ and Confucian China? Such an argument would be very hard to sustain, however, when we recall that Central Asia (which was off their circuits) was at least as Islamic as India, while Tibet was no more Islamic than China, but there we find an established Armenian colony trading Indian silver and goods for Tibetan musk and gold from China. A more credible explanation for the blank spaces lies in the dynamics of supply, demand, transport, and the business environment in the fast-changing world of early modern long-distance trade. From time to time Armenian merchants did fall foul of what we might call cultural difference, but it would be hard to argue that those accidents happened across the fault lines of continental or civilizational frontiers. Two legal examples will illustrate this point. In one incident an Armenian merchant in Lhasa, much to his disgust, lost a lawsuit against a fellow Armenian on the roll of a dice, that being the preferred local method for settling such disputes.Footnote ⁷ If that instance suggests that an alien cultural milieu could confound one's expectations of legal process, familiar ‘Christian’ law could produce equally disappointing verdicts, as happened to a group of Armenian merchants who, in spite of the backing of the English East India Company, lost on a technicality in a case brought in the London High Court against the officers and company of HMS Medway's Prize who had taken as prize the cargo of their ship, the Santa Catharina.Footnote ⁸

In general, the ease with which the Julfa Armenians traversed boundaries is striking. Their linguistic facility was a source of envy and grudging admiration among European competitors, though we should remember that a knowledge of Mediterranean lingua franca and Persian took one a long way. More difficult to explain, perhaps, is their easy negotiation across the boundaries of different legal systems: Christian, Islamic, and Sanskritic. How did an Armenian and a Multani or Bengali find the common legal language and norms to enter into long-term contracts, when they came from such different legal traditions? Further research on comparative early modern commercial law is needed to clarify just how rigid such legal boundaries were and how similar or different were the forms of contract and business association used by the specialized merchant communities that played such an important role in the global trade of the age. For the most part we remain pretty much in the dark about how cross-cultural, cross-communal commercial and financial relations operated outside Europe.Footnote ⁹ Perhaps we will find that in respect of commercial law, functional requirements had narrowed the gap between the legal practices of different communities.

Let me finish by following Subrahmanyam in looking at the life of a single individual. The Julfa Armenian, Philippe de Zagly, was, like Mirza Haidar, an entrepreneur of sorts, but he was neither a military man nor by any means the archetypal Julfa merchant.Footnote ¹⁰ His globe-trotting, shape-shifting career nevertheless provides an excellent illustration of the opportunities and risks of cross-cultural entrepreneurship and sheds light on the ‘One Asia, or many?’ question that interests us here. Philippe introduces himself in a 1696 memorandum to the Duke of Lithuania as a Persian of Isfahan, but in fact he was Armenian, born and baptized in Julfa, the son of a goldsmith who, according to one source, was a bankrupt who had converted to Islam.Footnote ¹¹ Handsome, sociable, intelligent, and with elegant manners, Philippe left Isfahan out of a desire to see the world and make his fortune. We do not know what goods or capital he brought with him, but we are told that he was trilingual in Armenian, Persian, and Turkish, and he seems to have picked up French and other European languages with remarkable ease.

Soon after his arrival in Paris in the late 1660s, he started to take advantage of the opportunities that presented themselves to a handsome young man from an exotic country among ill-informed people who were hungry for novelty. His air of quality, assisted by a false pedigree as the Persian son of a Safavid magistrate, endeared him to high society ladies and, making the most of this, he allowed himself to be baptized a Catholic, with Louis XIV's only brother, the Duke of Orleans, acting as his godfather. This is how he acquired his new European name, Philippe, as well as a pension and a rank in the Musketeers (fitting for a man whose life story reads much like Dumas’ fiction). Baptism, a pension, and a job were followed by a financially advantageous marriage to the sister-in-law of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, a prominent jewel merchant who wrote one of the best seventeenth-century travel accounts of Persia and the Indies. Tavernier was a Huguenot and it is not clear whether this marriage involved Philippe in a further change of religion.

In the 1680s and 1690s Philippe travelled extensively in northern Europe, attempting to pass himself off as an accredited envoy, concocting schemes for the redirection of the Persian trade across various Baltic states, and pursuing his inheritance in Moscow following Tavernier's death there in 1689. In Sweden he found time to acquire a second wife (bigamously?) and a royal pension, while in Poland he so impressed the king that he appointed him ambassador to Persia and ennobled him, making him Comte Philippe de Zagly.

In the late 1690s Philippe travelled to the Ottoman empire. In Constantinople he claimed to be carrying letters from the Holy Roman Emperor to the sultan, but did not stop there long—possibly because no such letters existed—and soon travelled east to Erzerum where, we are told by one source, he converted to Sunni Islam. Continuing onwards towards Isfahan he crossed into Safavid territory, promptly becoming a Shiʿi Muslim and taking the name Imām Qoli Beg.

By this time Philippe had carried out a series of swindles, the victims of which included a number of merchants and missionaries as well as the French ambassador to Sweden. Back in Safavid Iran he surpassed himself by instigating a massive (and, at least according to our sources, entirely fraudulent) claim for 28,000 toman (400,000 livres) against the heads of the wealthiest Julfa Catholic family, the Shahrimans. On the strength of his letters from European sovereigns, Philippe had gained admission to the Safavid court and the support of various courtiers in pursuing his claim. The Shahrimans were a good target, as this was a period of intense hostility between Catholic and Gregorian Christians in Julfa, so the Shahrimans could not look for support from the Gregorian Armenians, who formed the large majority of the community.

Following the Shahriman affair, Philippe/Imām Qoli Beg next appears as mehmāndār (official host) and dragoman of a French embassy to the Safavid court in the first decade of the eighteenth century. The story is full of twists and turns and even a lady ambassador, but suffice it to say that this turned out to be Philippe's last adventure and ended in his imprisonment and execution in Tabriz.

During his near-40-year career, Philippe used multiple different names and titles, underwent serial changes of religion, and successfully inserted himself into elite society in nearly a dozen capital cities and provincial centres. In all these places he evidently spoke the lingo and dressed the part well enough to gain the trust and backing of the rich and powerful. We may say with confidence that Philippe found little difficulty in crossing between Asia and Europe, or over political, linguistic, and religious boundaries in either continent, but no less important was the fact that he understood that the international arena in which he operated was not a unified, undifferentiated space, but one whose differences he could use to his own advantage among those whose knowledge did not reach very far beyond their own backyards. Like the merchants of his original Julfa home, he was expert in exploiting the ‘price differential’ between places. In Paris he played the charming Persian youth; in Warsaw, the Armenian merchant negotiator; back home in Isfahan, the Polish envoy. Like so many of his countrymen, Philippe took advantage of the fact that neither Europe nor Asia was fixed and essential, but plural and dynamic. They were able to trade on their ability to navigate the shifting connections and frontiers among its constituent parts. Had ‘anything that resembled a coherent Asian whole’Footnote ¹² existed, there would have been no need for people like the Julfa Armenians. It was precisely the plurality and dynamism of Asia—and Europe—that created the arena in which they could practise their specialist skills, and thrive.