During Marco’s lifetime and the century after it, the western world underwent sweeping economic changes, with increasingly sophisticated ways of trading and financing business invented, and new markets opened up. The name historians have given to the changes that took place in this age is the Commercial Revolution, and this is a deservedly grand term. What took place in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was as economically significant as the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century and Digital Revolution through which we are presently living.
