Negotiating Trade: Merchant Manuals and Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Medieval Mediterranean
Journal: Frontiers The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad
Year: 2018

This essay explores Italian mercantile perceptions of the non-western Mediterranean world during the late Middle Ages. In particular, it analyzes the corpus of merchant manuals known as pratiche della mercatura and argues that the intercultural and cross-confessional material included in these handbooks were vital components that helped facilitate trade across ethno-religious frontiers in the Arab-Turkic regions. This paper opens with an examination of the “traditional” manual genre, with partic