Taking the Italian Adriatic port-town of Ancona as its starting point, this paper presents the preliminary results of a larger project on the commercial networks active across the Ottoman lands and the Italian peninsula in the 16th century. While long-distance trade in the premodern period is often portrayed as organized around ethno-religiously homogenous diasporas, the research conducted so far points to the multi-religious and cross-imperial nature of trade networks. This paper then argues that cooperation among merchants of different religious confessions was central to the trade networks that circulated goods across the Ottoman and Anconitan markets in the 16th century. In a project that will soon integrate the data from the Islamic courts of the Ottoman empire, the study of notarial deeds, lists of confiscated goods, and court proceedings of Ancona has allowed to sketch out a picture of who the Ottoman merchants in Ancona were, which towns they came from, and the identity of their Ottoman and non-Ottoman partners. This approach brings at least three advantages. First, it advances the understanding of early modern trade networks by going beyond the assumption that cooperation among kin and/or coreligionists was the norm. Second, it offers a privileged view into how ordinary Ottomans were connected to their non-Ottoman neighbors thus complementing our knowledge on renegades’, viziers’, and pashas’ connections with the non-Ottoman world. Third, it provides a window into how people of different religious denominations interacted in the multi-religious Ottoman empire. Below is a sample of the sources studied: -Notarial deed in which the Greek Georgi represented the qadi of Valona Ramadan who was complaining about the missed shipment of a cargo of woolen cloth he had purchased in Ancona from Ottoman Jews (1536). -Notarial deed featuring a Muslim and a Christian Albanian exporting woolen cloth to Lezhe in Ottoman Albania (1540). -List of goods the Inquisition confiscated to the Sephardi New Christians in Ancona for allegedly having returned to Judaism (1555). These lists include the names of the victims’ customers and partners. -Firmans in Ottoman Turkish addressing the topic “merchants of the protected domains” and/or regulating trade with Ancona (926/1520, 932/1526) -Decisions of the communal council of Ancona regulating trade between the port-town and the Ottoman Empire as well as the presence of Ottoman merchants in Ancona (16th c.) -Papal briefs regulating the trade and presence of Ottoman merchants in Ancona (1532-).