Dudley North was born in 1641, and went out to Smyrna as supercargo, and was apprenticed to a Turkey merchant when eighteen years of age, with a capital of £400. For many years he lived a most frugal life, making himself master of the Turkish language, and keeping himself aloof from the extravagant and luxurious lives which the English merchants in the Smyrniote factories lived in those days. When they “procured a pack of hounds, and hunted in the country, after the English way”, young North resisted the temptation to buy a horse, and went out hunting on an ass. He was a young man sure of eventual success. On his subsequent removal to Constantinople, and employment in the factory of Messrs. Hedges and Palmer, he lived in the building itself, and looked after the bookkeeping, and gained his first credit by getting in the outstanding debts of the firm. He made himself master of the “rules of Turkish justice”, and at once set about to institute five hundred claims in the law courts. These claims he conducted himself in the Turkish Courts in the Turkish language, and won a great many of those which his employers had hitherto looked upon as hopeless. He soon set up business on his own account, and as it rapidly increased, he sent for his brother Montagu, from Aleppo, and together the brothers built up for themselves the fabric of a colossal fortune. The brothers North appear to have dealt largely in jewels, with which they tempted the women of the Seraglio, and to have lent money at from 20 to 30 per cent. to impecunious Pashas. Dudley North became treasurer of the Levant Company in Constantinople, did excellent work in the survey of the city, and eventually concluded his successful career by being appointed ambassador for the Company to the Porte. He was a man of strong business capacity, and “his first care”, says his son, “on setting up for himself, was to get a fire-tight room to secure his goods from fire, and a sofa-room in which to entertain the Turks.” About this time we hear ever more and more, in the Levant Company’s dealings with the Turks, of the _avanias_, or unauthorised demands made by the Turks on foreign merchants. Sir Dudley North at once took up this question, and wrote himself an interesting account of these encroachments on the capitulations granted to the Turkey merchants. The _avanias_ had their origin in small matters of etiquette; gradually they spread to commerce and merchandise, and in 1685 came the great edict, which obliged every foreigner who had married a Turkish subject, himself to become a subject of the Porte, and these men were forbidden to leave the country without the Sultan’s consent.