Commercial Contracts in Greek language from the Archive of the firm “N. Minchoolu & E. Selveli and Company”

One of the earliest examples of trade agreements was used in the ancient Arab world. The so-called “Akd”, which is part of the business documentation used by companies during the Umayyad Caliphate (661-750), is the equivalent of the trade contract. It was through contracts, that the Venetian “sea command” (commenda marittima) of the Florentine “company” (compagnia) was created and terminated. The emergence and widespread usage of the trade contract by entrepreneurs during the Bulgarian National Revival period is a result of the natural imposition of the new model of economic behaviour at the dawn of the Modern Age. An important role in this process was played by the economic contacts of our ancestors in the previous period (15th-17th centuries) with the merchants operating in the Bulgarian lands, subjects of foreign countries, whose economies and markets developed faster than those in the Ottoman Empire. In the Bulgarian and foreign archives, in the museum funds and in private collections there are many trade contracts stored, prepared by entrepreneurs during the Bulgarian Revival. Unfortunately, so far these sources of information have not been fully used in historical research. The oldest trade agreements known to us, in which the dominant participation of Bulgarians is attested, are from the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century. The study of trade contracts prepared by Bulgarian entrepreneurs during the National Revival period is an important process that would contribute to the study of the professional experience of Bulgarians during the era, their commercial and legal knowledge, as well as the level of development of major Bulgarian production and trade structures. The proposed article aims to present six commercial contracts and, as far as possible, to enrich the broad topic related to this type of business documents. It examines the history of this type of documents with economic content, their types, their appearance and development in the Bulgarian lands. The commercial contracts presented in the current article are part of Fund 82K – Trading House “Nikola Minchoolu & Evstati Selveli and company”, which is stored in DA – Veliko Turnovo. They cover the period from the early 40s to the early 50s of the 19th century. The documents were prepared in line with the tradition of the era in Greek language, which for a long time used to be the commercial language in the Balkans, while the traders from the Peninsula were collectively known as “Greek merchants”.