In the present paper, we deal with traders who crossed the border between the Ottoman Empire and Iran during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. These merchants are at once a topic of much scholarly debate and virtually unknown. Little trace has survived of their everyday activities, but they are repeatedly mentioned in Niels Steensgaard's well-known work on pedlars and European companies, in which he has analyzed the activities of merchants who confronted two great “protection-producing” and “redistributive” empires, namely the Ottoman and the Safavid, and who also needed to cope with competition from the European regulated companies (Steensgaard, 1974, pp. 22-59). Larger capital resources, advance knowledge of markets, and a commercial organization which enabled traders to take advantage of seasonally low prices were the companies’ advantages, while peddling merchants had but limited resources and were therefore vulnerable.