For centuries, the Vistula River played a key communication and economic role in the Commonwealth, as reflected in numerous studies devoted to the history of Vistula navigation. Although interest in this subject had been growing since the beginning of the twentieth century, it clearly waned in the 1970s, giving way to research on the political system of the Commonwealth. Due to the wide range of issues related to the Vistula navigation, the present article focuses only on selected aspects. First, the technical side is discussed, including the regulation of the Vistula and its capacity, determined, among other things, by the seasonality of navigation. Vistula transport was associated with high risks and losses. An important factor influencing its efficient operation was the development in the late Middle Ages of flat‑bottomed vessels characteristic of the Vistula for the transport of grain and other raw materials, such as timber. It is to timber floating that more space has been devoted, highlighting the paucity of research on timber ports and timber depots. The characteristics of the occupational groups involved in the operation of the Vistula navigation, the construction of river ships and the work of fishermen and ferry carriers also remain understudied. The final issue addressed in the article is the socio‑economic consequences of the close links between the entire Vistula basin and Gdańsk. The author presents the main assumptions of various models of the Polish economy in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, developed by scholars such as Andrzej Wyczański, Witold Kula and Jerzy Topolski, none of which fully explains the complexity of this issue. Nevertheless, each of these models emphasised the economic importance of the Vistula rafting. Recent research on the manorial economy and river trade points to the need for more in‑depth analyses, taking into account source issues, searching for new indicators and verifying older numerical estimates. However, this challenge is hampered by the increased level of research competence required to carry out such extensive analyses.