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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 March 2021
In 1666, French finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert hired Martin di Marcara Avachinz, an Armenian merchant who had lived in Iran and India, as an agent for his newly established Compagnie des Indes orientales. In 1669, shortly after the Armenian had secured a royal edict from the sultan Of Golconda to set up a French trading center in the port of Masulipatam, he was summarily arrested, tortured, and sent to France by his superior François Caron. This article provides a close reading of the legal briefs or factums produced during the sensational trial that followed Marcara’s release from prison in 1675. In tracing a “global microhistory” of his life across continents, it seeks to contribute to a deeper understanding of early modern long-distance trade in the Indian Ocean, comparing the network of the CIO and other joint-stock corporations with the “stateless” nature of the trade diaspora of Armenian merchants from the township of New Julfa on the outskirts of the Safavid capital Isfahan. Finally, the article considers the role of factums in early modern France and explores how the “exceptionally normal” story of Marcara’s life provides a useful window onto French perceptions of the Orient and the fear induced by communities such as Armenian and Indian merchants, bankers, and brokers.
This article was originally published in French as “Une vie sur plusieurs continents. Microhistoire globale d’un agent arménien de la Compagnie des Indes orientales, 1666–1688,” Annales HSS 73, no. 1 (2018): 19–55.
I wish to thank Houri Berberian, Olivier Raveux, Guillaume Calafat, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Cátia Antunes, Fahad Bishara, Zara Pogossian, John-Paul Ghobrial, Maxine Berg, Romain Bertrand, and Michael O’Sullivan for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this text, as well as Thierry Oharera for his indispensable help in improving my translations of seventeenth-century French. I am also grateful to the anonymous referees of the Annales for the numerous suggestions that have helped strengthen the overall arguments of this essay. Needless to say, I alone am responsible for any flaws that remain.
1 Domingo Fernández Navarrete, Tratados historicos, politicos, ethicos, y religiosos de la monarchia de China. Descripcion breve de aquel imperio y exemplos raros de emperadores y magistrados del … (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1676). I have relied here on the English translation: “An Account of the Empire of China, Historical, Political, Moral and Religious, Written in Spanish,” in A Collection of Voyages and Travels, Some Now First Printed from Original Manuscripts, Others Translated Out of Foreign Languages, and Now First Published in English (London: Awnsham and John Churchill, 1704), 1:1–424. See also James S. Cummins, ed., The Travels and Controversies of Friar Domingo Navarrete, 1618–1686 (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society at the University Press, 1962), 2 vols.
2 Fernández Navarrete, “An Account of the Empire of China,” 316. Though Navarrete clearly refers to Marcara as a “director,” the matter of his exact position in the CIO hierarchy is unclear and will be discussed below.
3 For a summary of these events, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Three Ways to Be Alien: Travails and Encounters in the Early Modern World (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2011), 20.
4 Fernández Navarrete, “An Account of the Empire of China,” 316.
5 Paul Kaeppelin, La Compagnie des Indes orientales et Francois Martin. Étude sur l’histoire du commerce et des établissements français dans l’Inde sous Louis XIV (1664–1719) (Paris: A. Challamel, 1908).
6 Gabriel Rantoandro, “Un marchand arménien au service de la Compagnie française des Indes: Marcara Avanchinz,” Archipel 17 (1979): 99–114.
7 See Marie Ménard-Jacob, La première Compagnie des Indes, 1664–1704. Apprentissages, échecs et héritage (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2016), 137–38, 183–84, and 205. This study has some interesting insights on Marcara (referred to as Macara) but does not appear to make any direct use of his factums. Following in the footsteps of Rantoandro, Ina Baghdiantz McCabe devoted a chapter of her book to the Marcara affair. However, she draws on an incomplete, European ensemble of sources that she interprets poorly, and completely overlooks the archives of the All Savior’s monastery in New Julfa, Isfahan, which contain hundreds of documents relating to Armenian merchant networks in the Indian Ocean. See Baghdiantz McCabe, The Shah’s Silk for Europe’s Silver: The Eurasian Trade of the Julfa Armenians in Safavid Iran and India, 1530–1750 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999), 295–325.
8 The term was coined in Tonio Andrade, “A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys, and a Warlord: Toward a Global Microhistory,” Journal of World History 21, no. 1;4 (2010): 573–91. See also Sebouh David Aslanian et al., “AHR Conversation: How Size Matters; The Question of Scale in History,” American Historical Review 118, no. 5 (2013): 1431–72; Francesca Trivellato, “Is There a Future for Italian Microhistory in the Age of Global History?” California Italian Studies 2, no. 1 (2011): 1–26; John-Paul A. Ghobrial, “The Secret Life of Elias of Babylon and the Uses of Global Microhistory,” Past and Present 222, no. 1 (2014): 51–93.
9 Trivellato, “Is There a Future,” 4–5.
10 For background on the CIO and French trade in the Indian Ocean, see Kaeppelin, La Compagnie des Indes orientales et Francois Martin; Jules Sottas, Histoire de la Compagnie royale des Indes orientales, 1664–1719 (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1905); Charles Woolsey Cole, Colbert and a Century of French Mercantilism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 1:475–532; Glenn Joseph Ames, “Colbert’s Indian Ocean Strategy of 1664–1674: A Reappraisal,” French Historical Studies 16, no. 3 (1990): 536–59; Ames, Colbert, Mercantilism, and the French Quest for Asian Trade (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996); Ménard-Jacob, La première Compagnie des Indes.
11 Declaration du Roy. L’une, portant etablissement d’une compagnie pour le commerce des Indes orientales, l’autre en faveur des officiers de son conseil & cours souveraines interessées en ladite compagnie, & en celle des Indes occidentales (Paris: Par les imprimeurs ordinaires du roy, 1664), articles 27, 31, 26, and 28. Containing forty-eight articles, a copy of this charter can be found in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France (hereafter “BNF”), MS fr. 8972, “Recueil de pièces, la plupart imprimées, sur la Compagnie française pour le commerce des Indes orientales.” This composite volume contains various documents, for the most part printed, concerning the affairs of the CIO and including texts relating to Marcara and his trial. See also Sottas, Histoire de la Compagnie royale des Indes orientales, 10–14.
12 Julia Adams, “Principals and Agents, Colonialists and Company Men: The Decay of Colonial Control in the Dutch East Indies,” American Sociological Review 61, no. 1 (1996): 12–28, here p. 13. For discussion, see Niels Steensgaard, “The Companies as a Specific Institution in the History of European Expansion,” in Pierre H. Boulle et al., Companies and Trade: Essays on Overseas Trading Companies during the Ancien Régime, ed. Leonard Blussé and Femme S. Gaastra (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 1981), 245–64; Om Prakash, The New Cambridge History of India, vol. 5, European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), chap. 3; Louis Dermigny, “Le fonctionnement des Compagnies des Indes. East India Company et Compagnie des Indes,” in Sociétés et compagnies de commerce en Orient et dans l’océan Indien, ed. Michel Mollat (Beirut: H. Eid, 1970), 453–66.
13 Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3 and 61. However, it is important to note that until the mid-eighteenth century, the CIO did not possess either the financial or military presence in the Indian Ocean to act like a colonial power.
14 Dermigny, “Le fonctionnement des Compagnies des Indes,” 459; Ames, Colbert, Mercantilism, and the French Quest, 19; Dirk Van der Cruysse, Louis XIV et le Siam (Paris: Fayard, 1991), 125; Barthélemy Carré, Le courrier du roi en Orient. Relations de deux voyages en Perse et en Inde, 1668–1674, ed. Dirk Van der Cruysse (Paris: Fayard, 2005), 29.
15 Ames, “Colbert’s Indian Ocean Strategy,” 539. For the stark differences between the major East India Companies, see Michel Morineau, Les grandes compagnies des Indes orientales, xvi e–xix e siècles (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1994), 45; and Dermigny, “Le fonctionnement des Compagnies des Indes.”
16 Van der Cruysse, Siam and the West, 102.
17 Dermigny, “Le fonctionnement des Compagnies des Indes,” 454.
18 Subrahmanyam, Three Ways to Be Alien, 19; Ames, “Colbert’s Indian Ocean Strategy,” 541.
19 Van der Cruysse, Siam and the West, 103; Carré, Le courrier du roi en Orient, 30.
20 For Caron’s place in the CIO, see Ménard-Jacob, La première Compagnie des Indes, 35–38.
21 Charles R. Boxer, “Introduction” to François Caron and Joost Schouten, A True Description of the Mighty Kingdoms of Japan and Siam, ed. Charles R. Boxer (London: Argonaut Press, 1935), xcv; Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600–1800 (London: Hutchinson, 1965), 57.
22 Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London: Routledge, 2003), 157. On private trade and the VOC, see Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 225–26. For Caron’s family life in Batavia in the 1640s, see Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social World of Batavia: Europeans and Eurasians in Colonial Indonesia (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 43–45.
23 François Martin, Mémoires de François Martin, fondateur de Pondichéry (1665–1696), ed. Alfred Martineau (Paris: Société d’éditions géographiques, maritimes et coloniales, 1931–1934), 1:99, cited in Holden Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600–1800 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976), 106.
24 Boxer, “Introduction,” cx.
25 Abbé Carré, The Travels of the Abbé Carré in India and the Near East, 1672 to 1674, 3 vols., trans. Millicent Fawcett, ed. Charles Fawcett (New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1947; repr. 1990), 2:381; Carré, Le courrier du roi en Orient, 708.
26 On the decline of the CIO, see Ames, Colbert, Mercantilism, and the French Quest, 186–91; Ménard-Jacob, La première Compagnie des Indes, 280–85; Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise, 79–80.
27 On New Julfa and its network, see Shushanik Khachikian, Nor Jughayi hay vacharakanut’iwn˘e ev nra arṙevtratntesakan kaperě Rusastani het xvii–xviii darerum [The Armenian commerce of New Julfa and its commercial and economic ties with Russia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries] (Yerevan: Haykakan Ssh Ga Hratarakch’ut’yun, 1988); Edmund M. Herzig, “The Armenian Merchants of New Julfa, Isfahan: A Study in Pre-Modern Asian Trade” (PhD diss., St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford, 1991); Sebouh David Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
28 For a comparison of the agnatic social structure of the New Julfans and the joint-stock corporations of their European counterparts, see Sebouh David Aslanian, “Julfan Merchants and European East India Companies: Overland Trade, Protection Costs, and the Limits of Collective Self-Representation in Early Modern Safavid Iran,” in Mapping Safavid Iran, ed. Nobuaki Kondo (Tokyo: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 2015), 189–222.
29 On the concept of “go-betweens,” see Simon Schaffer et al., eds., The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820 (Sagamore Beach: Science History Publications, 2009), especially Kapil Raj, “Mapping Knowledge Go-Betweens in Calcutta, 1770–1820,” and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Some Afterthoughts,” respectively 105–50 and 429–40.
30 On Khwāja Israel di Sarhat’s embassy to the Mughal court in 1716, see London, British Library (hereafter “BL”), IOR H/Misc/69.
31 BNF, MS fr. 8972, fols. 68–95v, here fol. 68v, Factum contenant l’histoire tragique pour le Sieur Martin Marcara Avasinz, p. 2.
32 BNF, MS fr. 8972, fol. 68v, Factum contenant l’histoire tragique, p. 2.
33 Mesrovb Jacob Seth, Armenians in India: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day (1937; repr. New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1992), 306; BNF, MS fr. 8972, fol. 68v, Factum contenant l’histoire tragique, p. 2.
34 Di Mattus’s personal and business correspondence is preserved in the collection “Aquisti e Doni, 123 and 124” at the Archivio di Stato di Firenze in Florence; one of his accounting ledgers is in Venice’s Archivio della Bibliotheca di Museo Correr: “Tomar Book,” P.D. 66.c.
35 Ruply was a Catholic Julfan who had moved to Aleppo and then to Smyrna six or seven years before circumstances brought him to publish a factum in Paris around 1678, presenting his case to Louis XIV, whose protection and patronage he sought in his lawsuit. Ruply narrates his life history in ways that are remarkably similar to Marcara’s: he traveled to Aleppo, Smyrna, Naples, Rome, Genoa, and Venice, before settling in Livorno and then moving on to France, where he was robbed of his diamonds. The sensational trial held in Paris was concluded in Ruply’s favor in the mid-1670s, just as Marcara’s trial was beginning. For details on Ruply’s case, see “Memoires Servans A l’eclaircisessement des faits inserez en la plainte presentée a Sa Majesté par le sieur Raphael Ruply negociant Armenien de la ville d’Hispahan, demandeur & accusateur” (undated, possibly 1678), in Nouvelle requête du sieur Ruply, avec la réponse du sieur Martinon et les réplique dudit Ruply, dont nosseigneurs les commissaires sont très humblement suppliés de vouloir prendre la lecture (n.p., undated).
36 BNF, MS fr. 8972, fols. 68v–69, Factum contenant l’histoire tragique, pp. 2–3. This document does not provide a name for the banker, but the later edition preserved in BNF, MS 20564 gives it as “Joseph Armand,” a French spelling of Giuseppe Armano.
37 This is confirmed in the recent article by Rita Mazzei, “Un mercante al servizio della Serenissima Repubblica. Il ‘console’ veneto Giuseppe Armano nella Livorno del Seicento,” Rivista storica italiana 128, no. 3 (2016): 849–90, here p. 868. For more information on Armano and the money he owed to the Armenian merchants Aghamal Sawali and Martino di Marcara (that is, Marcara Avachintz), see Archivio di Stato di Livorno, Capitano poi Governatore ed Auditore 2607, fols. 44 and 424. Folio 424 contains a petition from Marcara claiming that Armano had stolen bales of silk from him (and mentioning six or seven bills of lading as evidence of these transactions). The response below the petition bears the date August 17, 1662; at this moment Marcara had been in prison in Florence for a little less than two years. Folio 44, with its response dated May 10, 1659, refers to a lawsuit filed by Marcara at the Mercanzia tribunal in Florence seeking to settle his accounts with Armano. The information given here seems to correspond to Marcara’s statements in the factums printed in Paris.
38 BNF, MS fr. 8972, fol. 69, Factum contenant l’histoire tragique, p. 3. Francis Richard argues that the Bishop of Babylone was Monseigneur Duchemin (Placide Louis du Chemin). See Raphaël du Mans. Missionnaire en Perse au xvii e siècle, vol. 2, Estats et mémoire, ed. Francis Richard (Paris: Société d’histoire de l’Orient/L’Harmattan, 1995), 279, n. 389; see also A Chronicle of the Carmelites in Persia and the Papal Mission of the xviith and xviiith Centuries (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1939), 1:402.
39 BNF, MS fr. 8972, fols. 193–223v, Instruction memorable contenant les contestations d’entre Martin Marcara Avachin gentilhomme persan … et les sieurs directeurs generaux de la Compagnie.
40 BNF, MS fr. 8972, fol. 195v, Instruction memorable, p. 6.
41 BNF, MS fr. 8972, fol. 196, Instruction memorable, p. 7.
42 Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, “Introduction: The Crime of History,” in History from Crime, ed. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), vii.
43 Geoffrey Fleuriaud, “Le factum et la recherche historique contemporaine. La fin d’un malentendu?” Revue de la BNF 37, no. 1 (2011): 49–53, here p. 49.
44 Ibid.
45 Sarah Maza, “Le tribunal de la nation. Les mémoires judiciaires et l’opinion publique à la fin de l’Ancien Régime,” Annales ESC 42, no. 1 (1987): 73–90; Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 8.
46 David A. Bell, Lawyers and Citizens: The Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 31.
47 Christian Biet, “Judicial Fiction and Literary Fiction: The Example of the Factum,” Law and Literature 20, no. 3 (2008): 403–22, here p. 403; Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs, 15.
48 Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 3.
49 Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs, 15.
50 As hinted at in Rantoandro, “Un marchand arménien,” 100. On the other hand, Baghdiantz McCabe, The Shah’s Silk for Europe’s Silver, 299, completely ignores this dimension.
51 BNF, MS fr. 8972, fol. 91, Factum contenant l’histoire tragique, p. 47.
52 Ibid. Marcara’s actual brother died in Chinsura, rather than Paris, in 1697.
53 BNF, MS fr. 8972, fol. 92v, Factum contenant l’histoire tragique, p. 50.
54 “Requeste d’employ servant d’abondant de justification pour lesdits Sieurs Marcara & fils contre lesdits Sieurs Directeurs des Indes Orientales,” in Plaintes universelles sur les ruines des déprédations et interruption du commerce (n.p., undated), fol. 102.
55 In reference to the friendship between Francois de Lopis, marquis de Mondevergue, and Marcara, Colbert wrote: “he acted this way because of his great friendship with Sieur Marcara, the Persian-Armenian who, on his authority, was given the role of councilor on the council and an increased salary of 7,200 livres per year.” Colbert, “Sur L’estat Présent de la Compagnie Orientale de France Dans L’isle Dauphine et dans les Indes,” in Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Lettres, instructions et mémoires de Colbert, ed. Pierre Clément (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1865), vol. 3, part 2, p. 425.
56 Ménard-Jacob, La première Compagnie des Indes, 34–51.
57 Cole, Colbert and a Century of French Mercantilism, 1:513; Ames, Colbert, Mercantilism, and the French Quest, 37 (my emphasis).
58 Rantoandro, “Un marchand arménien,” 103.
59 Ibid., 112, n. 17.
60 Carré, The Travels of the Abbé Carré in India and the Near East, 3:787; Carré, Le courrier du roi en Orient, 1003–4.
61 BL, IOR, “Factory Record,” G/36/105, fol. 185.
62 Aix-en-Provence, Archives nationales d’outre-mer (hereafter “ANOM”), C 2 63, fol. 59.
63 Fernández Navarrete, “An Account of the Empire of China,” 316.
64 Urbain Souchu de Rennefort, Mémoires pour servir a l’histoire des Indes orientales contenans la navigation des quatre premiers vaisseaux de la Compagnie; l’établissement du conseil souverain à l’Isle de Madagascar, pour le gouvernement des Indes orientales. Le Voyage de monsieur de Mondevergue viceroy des Indes, & admiral des mers par de-là l’Équateur. Le recit succint de l’expedition de monsieur de La Haye, successeur de monsieur de Mondevergue; l’abandonnement de l’isle de Madagascar; la prise & la perte de la ville de S. Thomé sur la côte de Coromandel (Paris: A. Seneuze, 1688), 243.
65 Ménard-Jacob, La première Compagnie des Indes, 44.
66 Colbert, “Sur L’estat Présent de la Compagnie Orientale de France,” 425.
67 Martin, Mémoires, 1:203–4; Sottas, Histoire de la Compagnie royale des Indes orientales, 45; Ménard-Jacob, La première Compagnie des Indes, 96–97. La Boullaye Le Gouz and Nicolas Claude de Lalain had first visited Iran in 1665 to acquire privileges for establishing a base at Bandar ‘Abbas. On La Boullaye Le Gouz and the history of French relations with Safavid Persia, see Lawrence Lockhart, The Fall of the Ṣafavī Dynasty and the Afghan Occupation of Persia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 430–31. It was not until almost two years later that the first French fleet arrived at the comptoir in Surat.
68 Rantoandro, “Un marchand arménien,” 103–4. Writing to an unknown correspondent, probably around 1668 when the Dutchman and the Armenian were still on good terms, Caron states: “Knowing that you had much affection for him, I helped him in every way that I could, so well in fact that he came to the Indies with me with the same conditions and salaries as the late Monsieur de Ligne, and I can assure you that your good friend Monsieur the Viceroy [De Mondevergue] and I have done our duty in this matter” (ibid., 113).
69 BNF, MS fr. 8972, fol. 72v, Factum contenant l’histoire tragique, p. 10.
70 BNF, MS fr. 8972, fol. 72, Factum contenant l’histoire tragique, p. 9.
71 BNF, MS fr. 8972, fol. 72, Factum contenant l’histoire tragique, p. 9.
72 BNF, MS fr. 8972, fols. 72–72v, Factum contenant l’histoire tragique, pp. 9–10.
73 BNF, MS fr. 8972, fol. 72v, Factum contenant l’histoire tragique, p. 10.
74 BNF, Nouvelle acquisition française (hereafter “NAF”) 9352, a letter written by Marcara from Masulipatam on January 12, 1670, fol. 39 sq. See also Kaeppelin, La Compagnie des Indes orientales et Francois Martin, 67. Rantoandro, “Un marchand arménien,” 106, provides a figure of 150,000 livres.
75 Agnazarbec is described as a convert to Islam or a “renegade” by Martin, a CIO official and a foe of Marcara. In his Mémoires, Martin recalls camping with his entourage outside the city of Golconda on June 15, 1670, and being visited by a certain “Agnazarbek, a renegade Armenian, jeweler to the king of Golconda, who was quite influential at court and a special friend of Marcara.” He also notes that Agnazarbec was “followed by eleven or twelve Armenian merchants under his protection” (Martin, Mémoires, 1:262). An account by François Bernier, the French philosopher and traveler in the service of the CIO, and famous surgeon to the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, confirms Martin’s description of Agnazarbec: Bernier seems to appreciate his valuable position in the internal politics and administration of the Golconda court. See Theodore Morison, “Minute by M. Bernier upon the Establishment of Trade in the Indies dated 10th March, 1668,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 1, no. 1 (1933): 1–23, here p. 17; Henri Castonnet des Fosses, ed., “François Bernier: documents inédits sur son séjour dans l’Inde,” Mémoires de la société nationale d’agriculture, sciences et arts d’Angers 26 (1884): 209–42. On Bernier, see Peter Burke, “The Philosopher as Traveler: Bernier’s Orient,” in Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel, ed. Jaś Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubiés (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 124–38; Frédéric Tinguely, ed., Un libertin dans l’Inde moghole. Les voyages de François Bernier (1656–1669) (Paris: Chandeigne, 2008). Agnazarbec’s real Armenian name was Hakhnazar bek (Հախնազար բէկ) and though we know very little about him, sources do exist in Armenian regarding his commercial activities. The archives of the All Savior’s monastery in New Julfa, Isfahan, contain a folder of papers dating from the 1680s and sent from Hyderabad (Golconda). One of these documents is a commenda contract drafted in Hyderabad in 1680 between Martiros di Sargis and Hakhnazar bek, who is the principal party. He is described as սահապ հախնազար բէկ (Sahab, or Master, Hakhnazar bek). The same folder also contains a letter written by Mahmad Tagheh to Hakhnazar bek’s agent Martiros, dated Nadar 1, Azaria year 72 (1688) identifying Hakhnazar bek as the author’s father (Իմ խէր հախ նազար բէկն). See New Julfa, All Savior’s Monastery Archive, “Namakner Hayderabatis” (Letters from Hyderabad).
76 BNF, MS fr. 8972, fols. 75v–76, Factum contenant l’histoire tragique, pp. 16–17.
77 According to Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Political Economy of Commerce: Southern India, 1500–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 375, the term was “used in the Sultanate of Golconda to designate governors of limited areas.”
78 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Persians, Pilgrims and Portuguese: The Travails of Masulipatnam Shipping in the Western Indian Ocean, 1590–1665,” Modern Asian Studies 22, no. 3 (1988): 503–30, here pp. 507–8.
79 Ibid., 504–5.
80 BNF, MS fr. 8972, fol. 76, Factum contenant l’histoire tragique, p. 17.
81 BNF, MS fr. 8972, fol. 76v, Factum contenant l’histoire tragique, p. 18.
82 BNF, MS fr. 8972, fol. 76v, Factum contenant l’histoire tragique, p. 18.
83 BNF, MS fr. 8972, fol. 77, Factum contenant l’histoire tragique, p. 19.
84 BNF, MS fr. 8972, fol. 77v, Factum contenant l’histoire tragique, p. 20.
85 BNF, NAF 9352, fol. 39, Marcara Avachinz, “Lettres de Marcara Avachin, datées du comptoir de Mazulipatam, 12 janvier 1670, avec un firman du roi de Golconde.” The same letter is also preserved in ANOM, C 2 62, fol. 67.
86 BNF, NAF 9352, fol. 39.
87 William Foster, ed., The English Factories in India, 1668–1669 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), 287; Fernández Navarrete, “An Account of the Empire of China,” 315, described the French factory at Masulipatam as “a stately large house.”
88 Subrahmanyam, Three Ways to Be Alien, 21.
89 Baghdiantz McCabe, Shah’s Silk for Europe’s Silver, 313–14.
90 Martin, Mémoires, 1:272.
91 The shahbandar was usually the “chief Port Officer” (literally the king or ruler of the port), but the term also designated an official who served as the “Provost of Merchants”: Arun Khan Sherwani, History of the Qutb Shāhī Dynasty (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1978), 513.
92 The kōtwāl was the “official in charge of law and order in a town.” See Subrahmanyam, The Political Economy of Commerce, 375. Sherwani defines the office as a “commissioner of police”: Sherwani, History of the Qutb Shāhī Dynasty, 509.
93 “Requeste D’employ,” fol. 103v, p. 4: “that during the voyage from Surat to Golconda the Sieur Marcara had spent considerable sums benefiting the Armenians.”
94 Rantoandro, “Un marchand arménien,” 109.
95 Martin, Mémoires, 1:275.
96 Martin, Mémoires, 1:276. See also the brief reference to this skirmish in Subrahmanyam, The Political Economy of Commerce, 280.
97 Fernández Navarrete, “An Account of the Empire of China,” 317.
98 Martin, Mémoires, 1:282.
99 BNF, MS fr. 8972, fol. 86, Factum contenant l’histoire tragique, p. 37. Martin, Mémoires, 1:287–288, provides the date of October 20. Navarrete, who also accompanied the prisoners on their voyage to Surat, gives October 17 but states that they boarded the vessel at eleven o’clock at night: Fernández Navarrete “An Account of the Empire of China,” 317.
100 Baghdiantz McCabe, Shah’s Silk for Europe’s Silver, 312.
101 Ibid.
102 On the influential notion of “portfolio capitalism,” see Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Christopher A. Bayly, “Portfolio Capitalists and the Political Economy of Early Modern India,” Indian Economic Social History Review 25, no. 4 (1988): 401–24; for the application of the term to the Armenian mercantile community, see Aslanian, “Julfan Merchants and the European East India Companies.”
103 Baghdiantz McCabe, Shah’s Silk for Europe’s Silver, 312.
104 Ibid.
105 Martin, Mémoires, 1:289.
106 Ibid.: “that the trial we had conducted against him in Masulipatam did not follow the regulations.” See also ANOM, C 2 5, fol. 172 (for the original record in the CIO’s archives).
107 Martin, Mémoires, 1:289–90.
108 The Grand Conseil was “a sovereign court whose powers rivaled and, in some matters, surpassed those of the Parlement of Paris.” See Richard Mowery Andrews, Law, Magistracy, and Crime in Old Regime Paris, 1735–1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 27.
109 In labeling Marcara and Armenians tout court as impostors and tricksters, the CIO and its lawyer may have been influenced by Philippe de Zagly, a real-life Armenian impostor, who like Marcara arrived in Paris from New Julfa in the 1660s. Through a combination of wit, linguistic aptitude, good looks, and sheer curiosity, de Zagly managed to integrate into Parisian society as an Iranian nobleman and even published “memoirs” fabricating his lineage at the same time as Marcara’s trial was underway. Claiming to be a descendant of the Safavid dynasty, he gained the support and fascination of many high-society Parisians, including the duc d’Orléans, who became his baptismal godfather upon his conversion to Catholicism, and Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, whose sister-in-law he married. The Armenian impostor appears to have been known in France as a fraud, but was such an expert dissimulator that he managed to disguise his real identity for close to thirty years as he capitalized on the “knowledge differential” between France and Persia. Thus, under the guise of Philippe Comte de Zagly or Schick Alli Beg Sanis, he negotiated treaties with the Duchy of Courland and Sweden in 1696–1697, arranging to reroute Persian silk exports away from Ottoman trade routes through Latvia and the Baltic Sea. He also entered negotiations with the king of Poland on January 7, 1697, to set up Armenian factories or settlements in Gdansk and other locations in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. See Roberto Gulbenkian, “Philippe de Zagly, marchand arménien de Julfa, et l’établissement du commerce persan en Courlande en 1696,” Revue des études arméniennes 7 (1970): 361–426; Edmund Herzig, “A Response to ‘One Asia or Many? Reflections from a Connected History,’” Modern Asian Studies 50, no. 1 (2016): 44–51.
110 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959).
111 BNF, MS fr. 8972, fol. 68, Factum contenant l’histoire tragique, p. 2.
112 BNF, MS fr. 8972, fol. 68, Factum contenant l’histoire tragique, p. 2.
113 This passage is only found in Marcara’s account and not in the surviving papers representing the defense’s side. See “Requeste d’employ,” fol. 104, p. 5. See also Subrahmanyam, Three Ways to Be Alien, 154, n. 58.
114 On impostors and “trickster travelers,” see Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Renaissance Impostors and Proofs of Identity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006). On dissimulation and the protean nature of identity during the early modern period, see Valentin Groebner, Who Are You? Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe [2004], trans. Mark Kyburz and John Peck (New York: Zone Books, 2007); Subrahmanyam, Three Ways to Be Alien; and Jorge Flores and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “The Shadow Sultan: Succession and Imposture in the Mughal Empire, 1628–1640,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 47, no. 1 (2004): 80–121.
115 BNF, MS fr. 8972, fol. 196, Instruction memorable, p. 7.
116 BNF, MS fr. 8972, fol. 194, Instruction memorable, p. 3.
117 For a summary of these papers, see, BNF, MS fr. 8972, fol. 176v, Memoire des Pieces que le Sieur Marcara fournit & employe d’abondant pour sa justification, contre les Sieurs Directeurs Generaux des Indes Orientales, p. 10. A copy of the certificate from Venice is stored in the notarial records copied by hand by Ghevont Alishan and preserved in the Alishan Archives, San Lazzaro. The original document is in the Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Atti Notarile, 12070, Protocolli, Francesco Simbeni, fols. 194–194v. I thank Matthieu Grenet for assistance in tracking down the original of this act.
118 BNF, Res Z-Thoisy-87, fol. 291, Estat de la Contestation Pendante au Conseil, au rapport de Monsieur Quentin de Richebourg, pour les sieurs Directeurs de la Compagnie des Indes Orientales, Défendeurs & demandeurs contre Martin Marcara, se disant Gentilhomme Persan, demandeur & défendeur (Paris, 1682), p. 1.
119 BNF, Res Z-Thoisy-87, fol. 292v, Estat de la Contestation Pendante au Conseil, p. 4.
120 BNF, Res Z-Thoisy-87, fol. 291v, Estat de la Contestation Pendante au Conseil, p. 2.
121 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 95.
122 Subrahmanyam, Three Ways to Be Alien, 21–22.
123 The ancestor of this family was a Huguenot, Isaac Boutet de L’Estoile (also spelled L’Etoille, L’Estoille, and so on) from Lyon or Charente in France, who had arrived in Isfahan in the early seventeenth century and was retained by Shah ‘Abbas I as a goldsmith before retiring into private business. In 1643, he married an Armenian woman from New Julfa called Maria and had at least five sons who went on to distinguish themselves in the service of the CIO or as representatives of the French court in Iran and India. When they were called upon by the board of directors to refute Marcara’s claims to nobility, it was natural that some of these sons would defend their employer’s interests with the loyalty expected of them. See Jean Calmard, “The French Presence in Safavid Persia: A Preliminary Study,” in Iran and the World in the Safavid Age, ed. Edmund Herzig and Willem Floor (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2012), 309–25, especially pp. 316–19 for a study of this family and their family tree; Ménard-Jacob, La première Compagnie des Indes, 180–81; Ann Kroell, “Alexandre de Lestoille, dernier agent de la Compagnie royale des Indes en Perse,” Moyen-Orient et océan Indien 1, no. 1 (1984): 65–72; Raphaël du Mans. Missionnaire en Perse au xvii e siècle, 2:203, n. 170. Abbé Carré stayed at the home of Louis-Guilherne de L’Estoile in New Julfa during his first visit there around 1669: Carré, Le courrier du roi en Orient, 258.
124 BNF, Res Z-Thoisy-87, Estat de la Contestation Pendante au Conseil, fols. 322–322v, pp. 63–64.
125 For a subtle treatment of this trope and its frequent use by the French governor François Dupleix and his military counterpart Charles de Bussy, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Europe’s India: Words, People, Empires, 1500–1800 (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2017), 231–38, here p. 231.
126 BNF, Res Z-Thoisy-87, Estat de la Contestation Pendante au Conseil, fol. 321v, p. 62: “On Sçait par une F â cheuse experience, que les Orientaux sont naturellement fourbes & sans Foy.”
127 BNF, Res Z-Thoisy-87, Estat de la Contestation Pendante au Conseil, fol. 321v, p. 62.
128 BNF, MS fr. 8972, fol. 194v, Instruction memorable, p. 4.
129 BNF, MS fr. 8972, fol. 192v (unpaginated).
130 BNF, MS fr. 8972, fol. 168v, Factum contenant l’histoire tragique, p. 70.
131 Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Les six voyages de Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, qu’il a fait en Turquie, en Perse et aux Indes, pendant l’espace de quarante ans, accompagnez d’observations sur la religion, le gouvernement, les coutumes et le commerce, avec les figures, le poids, et la valeur des monnoyes qui y ont cours, première partie, Où il n’est parlé que de la Turquie et de la Perse (Paris: G. Clouzier and C. Barbin, 1676), 527.
132 BNF, MS fr. 8972, fol. 103v, Factum contenant l’histoire tragique, p. 8.
133 Georges Roques, La manière de négocier aux Indes, 1676–1691. La compagnie des Indes et l’art du commerce, ed. Valérie Bérinstain (Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient/Maisonneuve et Larose, 1996), 26.
134 Ibid.
135 Ibid., 25.
136 Indrani Ray, “Of Trade and Traders in the Seventeenth Century: An Unpublished French Memoir by Georges Roques,” Occasional Papers 26 (Calcutta: Center for Studies in the Social Sciences, 1979), vii.
137 Ibid., ix–x.
138 Roques, La manière de négocier aux Indes, 147.
139 Subrahmanyam, Three Ways to Be Alien, 18. For the widespread view in early modern Europe of Shah ‘Abbas I as an enlightened and beneficent ruler, especially in relation to the Armenians, see Edmund Herzig, “The Deportation of the Armenians in 1604–1605 and Europe’s Myth of Shah Abbās I,” in Persian and Islamic Studies in Honour of P. W. Avery, ed. Charles Peter Melville (Cambridge: University of Cambridge, Centre of Middle Eastern Studies, 1990), 59–71.
140 Subrahmanyam, Three Ways to Be Alien, 18.
141 Roques, La manière de négocier aux Indes, 147. I have relied on Subrahmanyam’s translation here but modified it slightly.
142 Roques, La manière de négocier aux Indes, 149.
143 Bernhard Struck, Kate Ferris, and Jacques Revel, “Introduction: Space and Scale in Transnational History,” in “Size Matters: Scales and Spaces in Transnational and Comparative History,” special issue, International History Review 33, no. 4 (2011): 573–84, here p. 577; Niels Steensgaard, The Asian Trade Revolution of the Seventeenth Century: The East India Companies and the Decline of the Caravan Trade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).
144 Paula Findlen, “Early Modern Things: Objects in Motion, 1500–1800,” in Early Modern Things: Objects and Their Histories, 1500–1800, ed. Paula Findlen (New York: Routledge, 2013), 1–28.
145 Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (London: HarperPress, 2007), 300. For a cogent treatment of various trends in writing global history, see Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2014), especially chap. 2. For a foundational global microhistory of a trade diaspora community, see Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). For a pioneering microhistory of an early modern individual, see Ghobrial, “The Secret Life of Elias of Babylon.”
146 Edward Muir, “Introduction: Observing Trifles,” in Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe, ed. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), vii–xxviii.
147 Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984), 61.
148 Giovanni Levi, “The Uses of Biography” [1989], in Theoretical Discussions of Biography: Approaches from Microhistory and Life Writing, ed. Hans Renders and Binne de Haan (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 107.
149 Struck, Ferris, and Revel, “Introduction,” 577. For a useful attempt to weave together a collection of biographies from the early modern period, though with very little methodological reflection, see Miles Ogborn, Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). For views that complement global microhistory, see Natalie Zemon Davis, “Decentering History: Local Stories and Cultural Crossings in a Global World,” History and Theory 50, no. 2 (2011): 188–202.
150 Struck, Ferris, and Revel, “Introduction.”
151 Emma Rothschild, “Globalization and the Return of History,” Foreign Policy 115 (1999): 106–16, here p. 108. For these ideas in practice, see Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
152 On these “minimal facts,” see Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 93–113, especially pp. 112–13.
This is a translation of: Une vie sur plusieurs continents: Microhistoire globale d’un agent arménien de la Compagnie des Indes orientales, 1666-1688