The Practica della mercatura (Italian for "The Practice of Commerce"),[1] also known as the Merchant's Handbook, is a comprehensive guide to international trade in 14th-century Eurasia and North Africa as known to its compiler, the Florentine banker Francesco Balducci Pegolotti.
[2] Pegolotti seems to have had access to an earlier, much more limited, compilation made at Pisa in 1279, now preserved in the Biblioteca Comunale at Siena, entitled Memoria de Tucte le Mercantie.
[b] Pegolotti's work was probably used by the compiler of the Venetian trade manual Tarifa zoè noticia dy pexi e mexure di luogi e tere che s'adovra marcadantia per el mondo in the 1340s.
It then served as a source for a later work which shares its title, the Pratica della mercatura compiled by Giovanni di Bernardo da Uzzano in 1442.
The 1936 edition by Allan Evans is now standard: it includes important glossaries of commodities, place names, coins and money, etc., but no translation.