The question of whether traders were network takers or network makers is relevant for the understanding of commercial relations, business dynamics, group attitudes towards a common purpose, and socio-economic relationships over time; but the existence of those dynamic patterns among the Portuguese is rather hard to identify for the late Middle Ages. Nevertheless, this question is important for several reasons.

Portugal held a very modest rank as a commercial player in Europe's medieval economy, and one might not immediately consider its merchants and seafarers as protagonists of noteworthy socio-economic networks. The bulk of Portuguese medieval trade was mostly of traditional Iberian commodities, such as figs, raisins, wine, olive oil, oranges and cork, and sugar from Madeira, wood from the Azores and ivory from Guinea in the second half of the fifteenth century. And we know little of the existence of any remarkable Portuguese merchant families or groups of merchants that could have intertwined traders from Portugal with the ones from other European regions, establishing trade meshes and efficient multifarious business webs. So, to a certain extent, there is a gap in our knowledge about what one knows about what was bought and sold, how merchants interacted with each other to make the system work, and how those socio-economic relations shifted over time.