The pre-eminence of non-Muslim merchants in the Ottoman ports cities of Smyrna, Salonika, Beirut and Trabzon is a topic that has been heavily discussed and documented in the relevant literature. The success of non-Muslim merchants and the socioeconomic medium in which they operated has been seen as precursor to Turkish nationalism. Little attention, however, has been paid to the Muslim merchant families of the Empire, who with their trade networks and political connections were no less important than many of their non-Muslim counterparts. Trabzon, the port of Eastern Anatolia and part of the route of the international transit trade with Iran, always had, alongside its Armenian and Persian counterparts, a strong Turkish-speaking, Muslim merchant community that was involved in both regional and international trade. Historians' lack of interest in the Muslim merchants of the Empire has resulted in an inadequate and partial understanding of the economic and political history of these influential Muslim merchants My focus falls on the Nemlizadeler, a great merchant dynasty from Trabzon in the second half of the nineteenth century, that had branches in Erzurum, Samsun, Batumi and Istanbul, acquired enormous capital and developed a wide network of political relations that was maintained at least for four generations and left its mark not only on the history of the Black Sea Coast but also on the Empire and the new republic. In my study, based on archival research and published primary and secondary sources, I aim to reconstruct the history of the Nemlizade family, its economic and political power, its involvement in international trade in the era of integration of the Ottoman economy into the world economy and its relations with foreign actors such as the Ottoman Tobacco R gie. I also intend to explore the limits of their power by examining competition with other Muslim merchants of the region. The current study is an attempt to question our general understanding of the role of the Muslim merchants in local-politics, in entrepreneurial activities and in international trade, through an examination of an understudied history of one of the greatest merchant 'dynasties' of the Ottoman Empire.