The Commercial Development of Ancona, 1479--1551.

The article focuses on the commercial development of Ancona, Italy between 1479 and 1551. The description of the changes that occurred in the commerce of Ancona is divided into three main periods. A base period, 1479-84, is first described and is then compared with two periods of the first half of the sixteenth century, 1500-27 and 1541-51. The first of these two latter periods is one of fairly rapid development whilst the second is one of consolidation of the earlier changes. Although overall there was very considerable commercial development in the city, this development seems to have had remarkably little effect on the basic economy of the city. Commercial development did not lead as it did elsewhere to much industrial and agricultural change, but was rather superimposed on an existing framework which probably remained similar in its outlines throughout. Ancona's contribution to trade outside the Adriatic consisted almost entirely of the dispatch of two or three ships each year to the eastern Mediterranean principally to Constantinople or Alexandria.