"Me pare esere in uno lanbarinto e parme esere ligato a non me sapere voltare a nulla banda": Ragusa and the Italian Merchants in the First Half of the 15th Century

In a letter of 1432, using the image of a maze, an Italian merchant, Piero Pantella, described Ragusa as a place where even the most experienced traders and entrepreneurs felt disorientated. Insecurity arose mainly from the fact that Ragusa had the inland regions of the Balkans as the main business partners; Serbia and Bosnia appeared in the eyes of European merchants as still unexplored places, wild, sparsely populated and urbanized, dangerous from every point of view. In reality the most significant difficulty was the western traders’ ignorance of the Slavic language. Instead, Dubrovnik merchants knew that world intimately and partly shared the customs and lifestyle of the inland regions of the Balkans. In addition, the merchants of Ragusa had large economic power in those regions, especially by controlling the production and trade of silver from Serbia and Bosnia.