Merchants, Pirates, and Smugglers

Thomas Heebøll-Holm, Prof. Dr. phil., lehrt an der Syddansk Universitet in Kopenhagen. Philipp Höhn ist wiss. Mitarbeiter am SFB 1095 an der Universität Frankfurt am Main. Gregor Rohmann, PD Dr. phil., arbeitet am Historischen Seminar der Universität Frankfurt am Main.

Contents
Introduction9
Thomas Heebøll-Holm, Philipp Höhn, and Gregor Rohmann
I. Between Criminalization and Compromise:
Dealing with Maritime Violence in Medieval Legal Pluralism
Piracy, Patriotism, and Profit in England around 140033
Thomas Heebøll-Holm
The Family Business: Royal Embargo and the Smugglers, Captains, and Councilors of Barcelona's Marquet Family57
Marie Kelleher
Popes and Pirates: Vatican Sources Regarding Violence at Sea
(12th-15th Centuries)75
Tobias Daniels
Cargoes, Courts, and Compromise: The Management of Maritime
Plunder in the Burgundian Low Countries107
Bart Lambert
II. Islands, Ports, and Markets: Connectivity and Marginalization in the Maritime World
Pirate Places, Merchant Spaces? Distribution and Criminalization in the Late Medieval Baltic Sea127
Philipp Höhn
Conceptualizing Danish "Piracy", c.1460-1525: A Criminalized
Economy or a Circular Exchange of Goods, Money, and People?145
Frederik Lynge Vognsen
Pirates on the Coast: Littoral Expansion and Maritime Predation
in Liguria and Dalmatia, 1300-1600165
Emily Sohmer Tai
Islands and Maritime Conflicts: Gotland around 1500189
Michael Meichsner
The Making of Connectivity: How Hamburg Tried
to Gain Control over the Elbe River (13th-16th Centuries)207
Gregor Rohmann
III. Enforcing Markets, Economics of Violence, and the Formation of Power
Maritime Violence between Legitimising Discourses, Politics, and Economic Interests: Genoa's Conquest of Chios and Phocaea247
Christoph Dartmann
The Venetian Coast Guards: Staple Policy, Seaborne Law
Enforcement, and State Formation in the 14th Century.269
Georg Christ
"To Make Good Peace or Total War": Trade, Piracy, and the Construction
of Portugal's Maritime State in the Later Middle Ages (1350-1550)297
Flavio Miranda & Amândio Barros
From the Baltic to the North Sea: Gda?sk City Councillor Bernd
Pawest's Maritime Service in 1471-72313
Beata Mo?ejko
Policing the Sea: Enforcing the Papal Embargo on Trade
with "Infidels"329
Mike Carr
Henning II of Putbus, "Piracy", the Øresund-fortresses, and
the Right of Salvage. 343
Alexander Krey
Works Cited371
Authors429

»Der Band demonstriert überzeugend, dass sich beide Transformationen besser verstehen lassen, wenn man die Geschichte des Umgangs mit Gewalt auf See in den Blick nimmt, und wie umgekehrt dieser Blick zu einem besseren Verständnis von Staatsbildung und ökonomischer Hegemonie beiträgt.« Tillmann Lohse, H-Soz-Kult, 29.05.2019»Der vorliegende Band [bildet] eine grundlegende Sammlung wegweisender Beiträge für die Erforschung maritimer Gewalt in der Vormoderne.« Sebastian Kolditz, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, 46 (2019) 4»This edited volume is of high quality; it brings together interesting case studies on maritime violence and criminalization from a large variety of different European regions and develops novel theoretical concepts to examine their long-term development between 1200 and 1600.« Werner Scheltjens, Connections, 02.10.2020

»Der Band demonstriert überzeugend, dass sich beide Transformationen besser verstehen lassen, wenn man die Geschichte des Umgangs mit Gewalt auf See in den Blick nimmt, und wie umgekehrt dieser Blick zu einem besseren Verständnis von Staatsbildung und ökonomischer Hegemonie beiträgt.« Tillmann Lohse, H-Soz-Kult, 29.05.2019

»Der vorliegende Band [bildet] eine grundlegende Sammlung wegweisender Beiträge für die Erforschung maritimer Gewalt in der Vormoderne.« Sebastian Kolditz, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, 46 (2019) 4

»This edited volume is of high quality; it brings together interesting case studies on maritime violence and criminalization from a large variety of different European regions and develops novel theoretical concepts to examine their long-term development between 1200 and 1600.« Werner Scheltjens, Connections, 02.10.2020

Introduction
Thomas Heebøll-Holm, Philipp Höhn, Gregor Rohmann
The Concept of Maritime Violence in Legal Thinking
On 28 February 1381 Richard II (1367-1400), King of England, issued the following:
"To the mayor and bailiffs of the town of New Sarum. Order to set free William Webbe of Salesbury, imprisoned upon suspicion of piracy or adhering to the king's enemies of France upon information of John king of Castille and Leon and duke of Lancastre, [...]; as the king is informed by credible persons that he is a wandering idiot, at times raving mad, so that he could do the said enemies no aid or favour."
William Webbe seems to have taken against his own king, in favour of the French. We would possibly call this high treason, or we would rather point at the premodern political conditions of military service, which did not necessarily refer to national duties of loyalty. We would not call it "piracy", for this category we use to denounce pure criminals. As it seems, the royal court itself did not have a proper legal understanding of the word but used it merely to disqualify opposition to the King, or, even more generally, any form of doing evil at sea, one could say. In fact, the term "piracy" itself does occur in English law for the first time only in 1536.
In 1414, King Henry V (1387-1422), grandson of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster (1340-99), would formulate the first legal definition of violence at sea in English law: According to this, attacks on ships in times of peace or truce are defined as high treason, a breach of safe conduct conjured by the king. The "Statute of Truces" calls perpetrators "tuers des hommes, robbours, spoillours et offendours", not "pirates". But from now on, "pirates" could best be defined as people fighting against the king's enemies, but at the wrong time-a reflection of the centuries long guerrilla situation between England and its foes in the Atlantic world, and kind of an embryonic stage of the later juxtaposition of "piracy" and "privateering".
If we as historians only had John of Gaunt's (unfortunately lost) complaint as a source, we might consider William Webbe of Salisbury as a pirate. But here we have evidence, that following our usual definition he wasn't. Rather we would call him a traitor. But according to the king's writ he was simply of no danger for the English. This is why he wasn't charged with "piracy".
As scholars such as Janice E. Thomson, Michel Mollat and Alfred J. Rubin have shown, the concept of piracy does not have a clear and undisputed meaning both historically and juridically. Indeed, in fifth century B.C. Aristotle considered piracy a natural activity akin to fishing and hunting, and likewise in the High Middle Ages writers were more likely to consider the terms pirata and piratica as technical terms for sea-warriors and sea-warfare than as a label that undisputedly marginalized and indeed criminalized the person(s) in question. But the central problem of the perception of maritime violence appears in the tension between what one might call the Augustinian and the Ciceronean paradigm. In the first century B.C., the Roman rhetorician and lawyer Marcus Tullius Cicero famously declared that the pirate through his egotistical and self-serving actions became the enemy of all and effectively an outlaw that should be exterminated by the (Roman) state. In contrast, around 400 A.D. Saint Augustine in De Civitate Dei argued that piracy and state-warfare functionally were identical since they both essentially were about collective violence and plunder. The only difference between a pirate and an emperor was the size of their operations, as he said. What mattered to Augustine was whether one acted with justice. While Augustine was not defending piracy, contrary to Cicero he did not a priori consider the state good and the pirate evil. In other words, what mattered was the motive, not the action. Cicero's paradigm in contrast allowed for a discourse of marginalisation and cri