ABSTRACT
The portrait of the Venetian merchant in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries which emerges from the Venetian chronicles that have been mentioned, does not, of course, concern only the procertans, i.e. he who travels in order to make a profit, but also the stans, i.e. he who puts up the money for the enterprise and who remains behind in his homeland waiting anxiously for the return of his capital and its returns. For all those merchants, who belonged either to the procédantes or the stantes at any level of Venetian society, Constantinople comprised the mult rika terra par excellence, the place which offered the opportunity of fast and sure profit to a people without land.4
