The Legal Status of Piracy in Medieval Europe

Abstract

This article discusses the history of maritime theft, or piracy, in medieval Europe, not so much as a crime but rather as a case study in legal pluralism: the operation of competing systems of law across a common region. Although scholarship has often interpreted sources for medieval European piracy through the filter of early modern conditions, the parameters of how disputes over piracy were settled within the conflicting legal systems of medieval Europe may have heuristic implications for understanding twenty-first century piracy. On the one hand, statutes of royal and civic polities across medieval Europe uniformly adhered to Roman legal precedents in condemning piracy as a capital crime. On the other hand, selective campaigns of maritime predation, referred to in the Latin sources as sailing ad piraticam or in cursum, (hence the term corsair), were sanctioned by medieval European polities when directed against political and economic rivals. Legal and narrative sources for maritime theft nevertheless indicate that piracy was often conflated with the operation of enemy corsairs in a manner that carried implications for the imposition of capital penalties on maritime marauders as well as for merchants who attempted to obtain compensation, or restitution, for cargo seized in a corsair raid from polities charged with authorizing their operations. Attempts to obtain restitution could also be complicated by commercial patterns subtly interwoven with maritime theft.

Jutjar els actes de pirateria a la Corona d’Aragó baixmedieval. El cas de Ponç Descatllar (1440)

“…4 Normalment, els 2 El terme "pirateria", a la Baixa Edat Mitjana, s'introdueix primer en l'àmbit retòric, per designar la violència insuportable, les al•lusions a la lesa majestat i a la tirania, més que en el terreny judicial (Prétou, 2016, p. 96). 3 D'acord amb el pluralisme jurisdiccional existent a l'edat mitjana, la categorització del pirata quedava a mercè de les diverses interpretacions sobiranes o institucionals (Tai, 2012). 4 Al llarg del present article es parlarà d'actes de pirateria precisament per fer referència als casos de delinqüència marítima que els mateixos contemporanis identificaven com il•legítims i fora llei, i intentaven perseguir i castigar, independentment de la inexistència del delicte específic i d'un marc legal comú.…”