That's good to know that you can trade with other factions without a merchant. It seems though that when I put a merchant on a trade good in a forign land he only seems to make 20-30 florins per turn. WIth the exception of Timbukto where they tend to make 200-300 florins. To me this seems to make them quite useless. Considering the effort made to produce them and move them onto the good you want to trade, especially if it is quite some distance from thier conception. I usually only use merchants (forign ones) as assasination targets, in order to increase the aptitude of my assassins. Perhaps an experiment is in order! Dumb old merchants who couldn't make a dime selling food to a starving man!