ABSTRACT
Portugal held a very modest rank as a commercial player in Europe’s medieval economy, and one might not immediately consider its merchants and seafarers as protagonists of noteworthy socio-economic networks. e bulk of Portuguese medieval trade was mostly of traditional Iberian commodities, such as gs, raisins, wine, olive oil, oranges and cork, and sugar from Madeira, wood from the Azores and ivory from Guinea in the second half of the eenth century. And we know little of the existence of any remarkable Portuguese merchant families or groups of merchants that could have intertwined traders from Portugal with the ones from other European regions, establishing trade meshes and e cient multifarious business webs. So, to a certain extent, there is a gap in our knowledge about what one knows about what was bought and sold, how merchants interacted with each other to make the system work, and how those socio-economic relations shi ed over time.
