Getting to Timbuktu!!!

[Grog]

I appreciate the high value of gold trading, but also consider aquisition with your merchants.

I have found in my current Byz game, by holding merchants on the milan/venice textiles, and 2x silver mines west of vienna, you can 'snaffle' a lot of enemy merchants from the catholic factions and still have time to step back onto resource. I do tend to place 6*+ merchants in these reigons, and quite a lot of the chaps are over 10* by the time they hit their 40's

I train all merchants in nicea, which in my game has master merchants guild, is second/third place in revenue with constantinople/antioch and I only have a level 2 church in place, so all my merchants are born in 20's/4* or 30's 5* with a set of 4-5 good traits.

[supadodo]

Thing bout forts is they allow more than one merchant to trade on the exact same resource. Imagine if you could plop 20 merchants on a single gold mine with a fort.$$ $$

Also...there is a exploit that you don't need an army to garrison the fort. As long as an agent character is inside it will not rot away. And to make things better, enemy armies don't attack empty forts for some reason so don't worry.

The only problem with the fort exploit is that some forts just can't be built on some places.