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

[Jess]

Or did merchants come in later on in the time line? I'm a bit confused with what time periods merchants were in, when exactly did merchants come in and rise up in society?
When did merchants actually begin? Like what date?

[dahdald]

Merchants existed LONG before the medieval period.

[Torchwood]

All monarchs needed services therefore merchants followed them around. I can give an exmple:Henry 7th(father of HenryV111) loved a particular area of London and built a palace there. The merchants knew he needed services and set up home as near as possible. The area was Richmond and it gets its name from Ryche Monde which means "rich or wealthy Kingdom".

[cp_scipiom]

merchants existed long before the idea of Kings even came to human mind. there is evidence o mass production of flint spear points in the stone age- which means people who ONLY carved flint stones. which means other people had to hunt/gather food for them and trade
so creation of merchants? stone age- or even before that

[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.

[zafir]

There is no actual date when the merchant class began. Merchants are people who sell things, and ever since mankind got past the barter system and started exchanging money for goods merchants have existed. There were mechants in ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, Sumeria, every ancient civilisation had a merchant class, and this is thousands of years before Medieval times.

[Maxi]

Where there are people there were merchants, so from the beginning of time........... merchants in medieval times were rich and respected people ...such as Merchants of the Staple http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_the_Staple many of these were also National politicians and sheriffs of their county ( so local councillors).............

[John P]

Kings and queens have existed for thousands of years and still do in some countries. Merchants (or traders as some might call them) have existed even longer, in fact they have existed ever since there were desirable things to trade, say at least from 10,000 years ago. It is surprising how far some goods travelled over 2000 years ago, e.g. Chinese goods have been found in sites dating from Roman times in western Europe. Certainly there was a large merchant class in Europe and Asia during the period of the European Middle Ages.

[Derek]

A merchant is someone who buys goods and sells them to customers for a profit. Therefore merchants have been around for at least four thousand years.

[kindzebra783]

No. Nobody every bought or sold anything until about the year 1997. Good grief, they didn't even have money until 2002, right?

This is one of the biggest <facepalm>-generating questions of all time, and that's saying something.