Did they have merchants in the medieval days where there was royalty like kings and queens?

[Jonathan]

There have been merchants since the Stone Age, when one guy in the village knew where to find really good flint to make tools from a couple days' travel away and would bring some back to trade for skins or whatever. Every society has them.

Around the time of the Roman Empire breaking up, trade did decline. Actually it had already been declining for a while, a long gradual slide that began around 200 or 300 AD and continued till it bottomed out around 700 AD. But it never disappeared entirely. There were not enough merchants in 700 to really form a major visible social class, but there were some. Local trade networks carried things like salt, wine, metal goods, ceramics. Longer-distance trade carried spices and silks, amber, and slaves.

The real shift comes after 1000, though, in what some historians have called the "commercial revolution." Starting mostly in Italy, you see a big increase in trade, and in cities that serve as the hubs of trade. You get better ships, new kinds of legal instruments (contracts, partnerships, financing arrangements, banking), all kinds of things to support commerce. Merchants start to come into their own as a full-fledged social class that can organize and have political clout. By the time you get to the 1300s, some great merchant families like the Medici are essentially indistinguishable from the traditional landholding nobility.