In Ottoman parlance the term Acem tüccarı referred to merchants from Iran; many if not most of these traders were Armenians, partly because Shah ‘Abbas I (r. 1587-1629) had decided that only these people were to market the raw silk which in the later years of his reign, this monarch had made into a royal monopoly. While by about 1600 Armenian pre-eminence among the Acem tüccarı was well established, in the early 1700s some Iranian Muslim traders also entered the Ottoman domains. The sometimes enormous registers in the section Maliyeden müdevver in the Prime Minister’s archive in Istanbul, dated to the 1700s and now recorded as Maliye Ahkâm Defterleri, contain some intriguing information on the business ventures and socio-political organization of the Acem tüccarı. By the early 1700s these people must have been in some difficulty, given the decline in Iranian raw silks exported to Ottoman Anatolia. However the Acem tüccarı apparently were able to diversify, focusing on textiles ‘made in Iran’. Given the wide range of Acem tüccarı commerce in often outlying Ottoman provinces, the traders apparently sought for support from the shah of Iran. Especially preserving the inheritances of deceased traders intact would have been quite difficult unless the Acem tüccarı both Muslim and Christian could invoke official backing. Thus the ‘chief merchants’ of both Muslim and Armenian groups of traders came to the Ottoman Empire with documents that showed them to be ‘representatives of the shah’. The documents analysed here are significant also because they show that organization in mercantile communities backed by an outside force, which we often assume to have been a specialty of Europeans, existed among the subjects of Safavid and post-Safavid Iranian shahs as well. Possibly these rulers were willing to grant protection because the Armenian merchants of New Julfa interceded for their less prominent colleagues; but at the moment, the political background of this arrangement remains unknown.