Guiding Trade: Distance and Geography in Trecento Mercantile Culture

• In Event: Manuscripts and Merchants II

Abstract

By the beginning of the fourteenth century, sedentary trade supplanted itinerant trade, allowing Italian merchants to evade regional protectionist laws and simultaneously specialize their goods and services. As they adopted sedentary trade, their travel patterns shifted — and so too shifted the influence of space, distance and geography on merchants’ worldviews and culture. This paper takes merchants’ manuals and zibaldoni as reflections of these merchants’ new geographical perspectives, looking at how merchants organized their guides to trade by region, geography and distance in parallel to how they organized the world around them. I then argue that these manuals were not only a reflection of these geographical worldviews, but also a tool to propagate these views and communicate them to broader mercantile communities, wherein zibaldoni and manuals were a central means of creating a uniform merchant culture and community based upon shared knowledge and information.

Author

• Eve Wolynes, University of Notre Dame