Mercaders genovesos a Sardenya

This essay deals with the activity of Ligurian merchants in the island of Sardinia between the second half of the 16th century and the reign of Philip IV. At the begining of the 17th century, numerous Genoese colonies distributed in the cities of the kingdom managed to replace other «nations» of merchants, in special Catalans and French, and to present themselves as a privileged reference points of the Crown, to such a degree that they assure for themselves the adquisition of important public domain properties and the control of the grain exportation in a regime of monopoly. Thanks to the support of archives documentation, result of a recent research, the exchange network that communicates Sardinian harbours with some of the main commercial places of the western Mediterranean (Livorno, Genoa, Barcelona, Valencia, Alacant and Trapani) has been reconstructed.