Unfortunately, the trade of the first two decades of the fourteenth century is poorly documented, and so the main lines of Balearic trade after the settlement of the Vespers conflict cannot be drawn with certainty. The survival of registers of the tax known as ancoratge, levied on incoming ships at Ciutat de Mallorca and at La Porassa, a station near the capital, enables a clearer picture to be provided for 1321–2, 1324–5, 1330–3 and 1340–1. Even so, the ancoratge documents generally give no information about the route traversed by the ships coming into port. They identify the captain, and his origin, but this information cannot be used to map the route followed by a ship. It is likely that the vessels of P. Hombert of Barcelona, a regular visitor to Mallorca in this period, travelled back and forth to Barcelona, as well as to north Africa, but this is no more than an assumption. Occasionally we learn that a ship is bound for a particular destination, but the information is provided gratuitously. Thus the first entry in the oldest register states that the son of En Terasa of Barcelona paid three solidi and that the ship was bound for Menorca.

In analysing this material, emphasis is placed here on the entries revealing intra-Majorcan trade between Mallorca itself and the mainland territories or the other islands, in the hope of identifying signs of the integration of these territories into a single market.