This book addresses a question that has been somewhat neglected in the many studies of the mercantile operations of the ‘merchant of Prato’, Francesco di Marco Datini, in the years around 1400: the operations of his firm in the Maghrib, a region in which he and his colleagues had to operate through agents, rather than by means of branches or sister companies based in the region. Thanks to the voluminous material of the Datini archive in Prato, it offers a reconstruction of commercial strategies through the study of networks, of economic actors, their identity and their practices, and of the link between trade and the State, especially the Florentine one.