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Marking Water: Piracy and Property
in the Pre-Modern West

Emily Sohmer Tai
Queensborough Community College, CUNY1

 

            In his classic work of interpretive sociology, Economy and Society, Max Weber defined the modern state as "a compulsory organization with a territorial basis."2  Weber's conceptualization of what constitutes a modern state has important implications for the ways in which statist legitimacy is generally perceived: to be politically enfranchised, a people must exercise an absolute political authority, or sovereignty, over the body of land they inhabit.  Discourse around the political entity, or polity," is thus fundamentally embedded in the concretized notion of what Becker has called the western European "territorial state."3  Weber's definition nevertheless implies that the state is an improvised and artificial construct, rather than an organic one, insofar as it is suggested that the state is sustained only by what Weber subsequently indicates is a monopoly over the means of force.4

            Weber's definition of a state articulates what I will argue is a key factor in shaping the antagonism between land and sea that this congress has proposed to explore: the way in which water submerges the territorial parameters of sovereignty.  In this essay, I will discuss a phenomenon that exposes both the political and economic dimensions of this antagonism: maritime theft, or piracy.  While the ostensible objective of maritime predation is economic gain, I will argue that maritime theft should also be understood in the context of this antagonism between land and sea as competitive interaction between political interests that seek to territorialize the sea, and commercial interests that resist this project of territorialization.  Thus, maritime theft should be understood as contention not merely over material resources, but for what I will call political capital: political advantage that may be utilized either to reinforce or to challenge territorial order.

            My conclusions will be drawn primarily from the interaction of western Europeans in the Mediterranean basin between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, the area that has constituted the main focus of my research.5 The utility of the medieval Mediterranean as a spatial and temporal frame appears to have been largely overlooked in studies of world piracy.  Rather, most have focused upon the contingent definition of piracy as privately-motivated maritime theft in the context of imperial systems from antiquity to the present.6

            An examination of maritime theft in the medieval Mediterranean nevertheless presents what I will suggest is a modest case for "bringing" medieval Europe "back in" to the broader enterprise of studying world history.7   

            The  unique parameters that exposed the operation of contingency in the definition of medieval maritime theft lay in the conditions of its practice among the various lordships, civic republics, and monarchies that adapted the legal formulations of the Roman imperium and the classical civitas to claim title to polity in medieval Europe.8 On the one hand, medieval jurists echoed the formulations of classical Roman law in terming the pirate hostis humani generis: "enemy to all mankind."9   Statutes enacted in the Genoese and Venetian colonies of Pera and Cataro duplicated legislation promulgated at these maritime republics in assigning capital penalties to individuals who robbed indiscriminately at sea, those I will term pirates.  The piracy these sea-robbers practiced was distinct, however, from selective maritime theft, conducted at the behest of a sovereign polity against merchant shipping flying the standard of that monarch or civic republic's political and economic rivals.  In medieval statutes, this practice is alternately termed ire ad pirraticamãto sail or go as a pirateãand ire in cursumãgoing "in cursum," from which may be derived a verb, corsairing, and a noun for those who undertook it, corsairs.10

            Specialized scholarship has studied the way in which initiatives to distinguish pirates from corsairs, said to have been effected between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, supported the growth of the western European polity through the extension of their sovereignty over the means of justice and the use of force.11  On the seas, force was the prerogative of corsairs, often appointed as admirals (admirati) who wielded the authority to wage the guerre de course, plundering the merchant cargo of rival powers in raids not always easily distinguished from the actions of what might be termed "conventional" wartime fleets.  The sanction of legitimate maritime theft in the Mediterranean and Black seas afforded European monarchs and civic republics a cost-efficient mode of aggression. Practiced alongside, or in-between, periods of hostility, corsairing offset the fiscal burdens of competition among European polities for economic hegemony in the Eastern Mediterranean, and political control of what Braudel has termed the "smaller seas" of the Mediterranean basin.12 Genoa and Venice constitute the most familiar example of such conflicts, drawn as the two cities were into a series of skirmishes and four open wars over Levantine trade over the course of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries.13 Genoa also clashed with the Crown of Catalonia-Aragon in the western and eastern Mediterranean during this period, principally over control of the island of Sardinia.14

            Corsair captains further acted as agents for claims to sovereignty over seascapes on voyages of patrol to counter unsanctioned piracy along disputed waterways and littorals. The maritime republic of Venice presents one of the clearest examples of how the operations of corsairs assisted the project of territorializing maritime space, or "marking water" as I have termed it in my title, in a manner that modeled imperial behavior in microcosm.  Registers of the transactions of Venice's governing body, the Venetian Senate, echo the classical Roman expression mare nostrum in characterizing Venice's adjacent sub-basin, the Adriatic Sea, as nostro culfo/gulfo.  Lane, Cessi, Tenenti, Katele, and others have studied the role that corsair captains, particularly the annually-appointed "Captains of the Gulf," played in the process of asserting these proprietary claims.  Piratical activity created a rationale for these captains to command annual voyages to afford protection to Venetian merchants sailing within Adriatic waters.  Such voyages of patrol could also serve as voyages of aggression, as captains were equally empowered to interrupt shipping flying the flag of polities regarded as hostile to Venice, and execute pirates.15 In the wake of the Latin Crusades, the dominion of the Venetian Republic was extended into the Levant, where Venetian nobility held the island of Negreponte and Crete.16  Over the period between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, Venetian captains acted as agents of protective surveillance in these waters, as well.17

            Venice's greatest rival in Mediterranean waters, the maritime republic of Genoa, similarly utilized corsairs to extend Genoese commercial and political control to such Levantine outposts as Cyprus and Chios, and to advance parallel aspirations to dominion within Genoa's own adjacent Mediterranean sub-basin of the Tyrrhenian Sea.18  Here, however, Genoa faced internal and external obstacles in the aforementioned competition with the Crown of Catalonia-Aragon; in the resistance of smaller Ligurian towns to Genoese claims to dominion; and in the fractious contention between members of Genoa's merchant nobility, who often resorted to piracy as they fought one another for control of the city.  Such conditions gave rise to essentializing stereotypes of the Genoese as pirate that may be noted in Boccaccio's Decameron, contemporary chronicles, pilgrim accounts, merchant manuals, and even in modern historiography concerning the city of Genoa.19

            Modern scholarship has interpreted the utilization of corsairs to protect trade and suppress piracy as evidence of an alliance between emerging polities and members of their subject urban nobility, who acted as agents of maritime commerce, or merchants.  Polities sought dominion over the seas.  Merchants welcomed the protection corsair expeditions afforded from piracy, characterized as an "anti-economic activity."20 Such formulations nest medieval European experience within broader analyses that have attributed the rise of capitalism in the sixteenth-century West to cooperation between commercial interests and the nascent western European state.21  These assumptions would seem to be substantiated by numerous references in merchant letters and documentary sources to the substantive and perceived obstruction pirate and hostile corsair activity posed to trade.22

            Other evidence nonetheless suggests that the projects to territorialize the seas and control the practice of maritime theft were more ambivalently perceived by merchants, and even by corsairs, who often shared a common outlook and experience in the medieval Mediterranean.  The parameters of this ambivalence are embodied, first, in visual sources for the medieval and early modern Mediterranean: portulan charts.  Earliest dated to the thirteenth century, portulan charts are distinctive as the sole category of maps produced in the medieval West that depict space in a literal and explicit, rather than an idealized, way.  As Smail has shown, maps of territorial landscapes were rare in the medieval West, as the mapping tradition of medieval Europeans was largely limited to production of idealized mappaemundi that represented Jerusalem, the Heavenly City, in their center. It is rather in these portulan charts, over one hundred and eighty of which are extant, that some of the earliest physical representations of western European towns occur.  As may be noted in the two fifteenth-century charts, from the collection of the James Ford Bell Library, that have been appended to this paper, images of the sea were bordered by depictions of territorial maritime borders that included symbols to signify geographical features like mountain ranges, and banners to indicate political loyalties.23

            The contrast between territorial and maritime images represented in these charts certainly suggest a tension between territorially-bounded land, and unmarked sea.  The Mediterranean of these charts is a vast highway between a catena of coastal way stations.  The manner in which these coastal way-stations are depicted nevertheless suggests that while the practical objective of the mapping projects from which they had emerged was to render the sea manageable, and navigable, a secondary aim was to territorialize them, by intertwining representations of maritime space with detailed representations of coastal, territorial space.  The relative strength, size, and commercial importance of varying towns along the Mediterranean coast is coded in these charts through the contrasting use of red and grey colors.24  Occasionally, partisan loyalties arising from the operation of these contrasts distort the accuracy of visual representation, as in figure 2, the chart drawn by the late fifteenth-century Albino de Canepa, in which the mapper's native Genoa is depicted as larger than Venice.25

            Although portulan charts served largely as tools of merchant navigation, they also assisted the project of corsaring. It has been suggested that the earliest chart was drawn at the behest of the Genoese admiral Benedetto Zaccaria.  Ordinances issued by King Peter IV the Ceremonious of Catalonia-Aragon in 1354 required that every ship armed for naval aggression should be armed with at least two portulan charts.26 The contours of the portulan chart accordingly suggest that the role the Mediterranean played as highway created a unity between corsairs and merchants.  Additional evidence for this unity may be found in documents that record the extensive investmentãand even participation--of medieval merchants in privateering ventures throughout the Mediterranean.27  Maritime experience invited Europeans who relied upon the sea as a means of transportation and livelihood to imagine their world differently, as a space divided by political rivalries, rather than unified by Christian belief.  The sea moreover afforded a mobility that enabled captains and merchants to transcend the political rivalries that divided territorial space. 

            The mobility suggested by the portulan chart was reflected in the composition of pirate and corsair crews. For practioners of maritime theft, the sea became a nexus at which cross-cultural and cross-political alliances that defied territorial norms were common.  Corsairs, as purveyors of what the political scientist Thomson has termed "extra-territorial violence," made their services available as a species of market commodity, which could be purchased for pay across civic, political, and even religious lines. In his account of maritime theft in the thirteenth-century Aegean, for example, Marino Sanudo Torsello describes pirate and corsair expeditions manned by Venetians, Genoese, ProvenÐals, and Catalans.28  Venetian and Catalan sources document Genoese corsairs in the service of the kings of Castile, France, and Sicily, as well as the Byzantine Emperors.29  The records of a patrol expedition of 1402, preserved in the Antico comune division of Genoa's Archivio di Stato, document a similar diversity among participants on a voyage that set sail from Genoa to counter piratical activity along the coasts of Corsica and Sardinia.  Of the 178 crewmembers, 63, or 35%, hailed from points beyond Genoa, including the Byzantine Levant, and sites under the jurisdiction of Venice and the Crown of Aragon.30

            Literary sources suggest that those who acted as merchants in the medieval Mediterranean were often no less extra-territorial in their perspective and associations. A body of literature written by and for merchants supplemented the visual instruction of the portulan chart with glossaries of varying terms, manuals of foreign currencies, and other practical advice for profit in lands rendered strange by differences of language, religion, and culture.31  In his Libro dell'arte di mercatura (The Book of the Art of the Merchant,  1458), the fifteenth-century Benedetto Cotrugli moreover advised future colleagues to be flexible in choosing their city of residence based upon the relative strength or weakness of Roman legal traditions within its walls.  Cotrugli recommended that cities where the laws of Justinian, rather than merchant rationales, were applied, were to be avoided: "for nothing is worse for merchants," Cotrugli wrote, "than the debates of jurists who are in all things enemies to exchange."32

            Cotrugli's recommendations suggest that the mobility that merchants acquired on the seas allowed a means to escape the constraints of territorial sovereignty.  Merchants would appear to have particularly sought to evade regulations that endeavored to compel them to structure their commercial associations according to the parameters of political alliance, both in respecting domestic restrictions against trade with belligerants, and in observing any current treaty restrictions on trade with the "enemies" of allied polities.  A vast body of notarial records, both published and unpublished, indicates that trade between the various points depicted on the portulan charts of Mediterranean Europe was a steady, international affair.  Commercial cooperation in the Levant comprehended not merely Europeans subject to varying jurisdictions hostile at home in Europe, but Muslims, and Byzantines, as well.33   Notarial documents from the Archivio di Stato of Genoa and Savona detail a steady trade in commodities, particularly salt, within the western Mediterranean basin that consistently brought together subjects of the Crowns of Castile, France, Catalonia-Aragon, and Naples, with residents of Genoa's Ligurian coastal towns.34  Merchants sometimes ran significant risks to conduct this trade.   The Raspe registers that record the sentences issued by Venice's civic attorneys, the Avogadori di Comune, record the imposition, for example, of a fine of £50, on October 30, 1347, on a captain who had sold grain in defiance of existing restrictions.35  A later entry in the same series of registers records the imprisonment of Romeus de Gualfredi of Chioggia for proceeding, during the war of Chioggia, "ad terras inmicorum," presumably referring to territory under Genoese jurisdiction, to take on a cargo of salt.36 

            Alongside their charge to patrol adjacent waters, corsairs accordingly bore an additional duty to police the limitations that European polities attempted to impose upon commercial association. Throughout the Mediterranean, corsairs and admirals were allowed considerable latitude in their authority to do this. Various passages in the foremost compilation of medieval maritime law and custom, the thirteenth-century Llibre de Consolat de Mar, indicate that corsair captains were free to seek and seize cargo designated as "enemy" in a time of belligerence, or contraband, even aboard allied, or "friendly" ships, unencumbered by the elaboration of neutrality that would inhibit such attacks by the late seventeenth century.37 Corsairs were even authorized to inflict torture to root out such infractions.38

             The comprehensive powers wielded by corsairs, together with the absence of neutrality, created a situation of material and physical hazard for the medieval merchant.  Medieval corsairs were not above abusing their authority to search both allied and enemy shipping to camouflage acts that crossed the boundaries between corsairing and piracy.  A detailed evidentiary base that purports to leave accounts of such activity are approximately 750-800 cases adjudicated in various courts throughout the Mediterranean between approximately 1200 and 1410.  In these records, individual merchants, or groups of investors, accused an attacker, usually identified by name, of robbing them violently (violenter) and in more or in modo piratico (in a piratical fashion or manner) despite conditions of "friendship"ãthat is, a pre-existing treaty, or alliance. On the basis of these accusations, merchant plaintiffs introduced an action for the return of the stolen cargo, or its value in civil damages: what I have called restitution.39

            The mediation of disputes over restitution particularly conferred what I have termed political capital in the affirmation of control over vessels and individuals, and the opportunities these actions afforded to name pirates and define piracy.  Restitution proceedings built a juridic bridge between the grievance of individual merchants, their polities, and the polities of those maritime aggressors they accused.  However these suits might be resolved, both polities derived benefits from proceedings that affirmed sovereignty over these various agents, either in acting as their advocate or in proceeding as their judge.  Restitution, when disbursed, could function as a diplomatic "safety-valve" that prevented hostilities between polities from escalating into full-scale conflicts. The mechanics of judicial processãfrom the redaction of petitions to their final adjudicationãcould also contribute revenue to the polity.40

            References made to coastal locations in these records generally named seas by their adjacent territories, as in records from the archives of the Crown of  Catalonia-Aragon that refer to "the seas of Tripoli," or "the sea of Sardinia."41  Yet restitution suits that advanced arguments for a polity's liability based upon the argument that the polity enjoyed jurisdiction over waters, coastal territories, or the port in which the seizure had taken place, do not appear to have met with success, even though a few drew quite creatively upon Roman legal precedents to argue for this sovereignty.42

            These inquests appear to have aimed rather to territorialize the extra-territorial space of the ship.  Cargo aboard a ship was marked with specific signs, representing owner and provenance.43   These signs provided the basis to establish the political identity of a merchant captain, his passengers, his cargo, and his accused assailants.  In an inquest of 1361, for example, judicial officers of the Crown of Catalonia-Aragon quizzed witnesses to ascertain if a Crown corsair, Pere Madir of Sassari, had or had not seized cargo belonging to "enemies of the lord King" aboard a Genoese panfilo, the Sant Julia.  The captain, identified as Garva of Portovenere, insisted that all the cloth aboard his vessel had been Genoese and Florentine during a period of peace between the Crown of Catalonia-Aragon and the Genoese Commune.  The cartulary that might have confirmed this was, however, missing.44

            In several cases, merchants who accused corsairs of such unjust seizures could be shown to have been carrying contraband in violation of treaty restrictions on commerce with the enemy of an ally.  Some merchants had even attempted to do this by shipping cargo under a "false flag," or misrepresented provenance.  Thus, some of the incidents that merchant plaintiffs represented to have been piracy were actually actions of legitimate corsairing, aimed at curtailing alliances between enemies.45 In some cases, merchant transgression of the limitations belligerence had established was explicitãas, for example, in 1353, when Venetians attacked an enemy Genoese ship on which Catalan mariners and merchants had been travelling in violation of the Crown of Aragon's alliance with the Venetians during the war of the Straits.46   In other incidents, Catalan captains violated the spirit, rather than the letter, of alliances their monarch had concluded with both Venice and Genoa, by carrying cargo bearing the marks of  both republics as they fought their war over Tenedos (1378-1381).47

            The evidence of merchant transgression preserved in these records suggests that political and commercial interests could be perceived as distinct in the pre-modern West. Additional evidence of this divergence may be found in proceedings that record the efforts of aggrieved merchants to obtain rights to exercise retaliatory seizure, or reprisal, when restitution was not forthcoming.  Actions of reprisal united merchants and corsairs as agents of maritime seizure and created a geographical unity across land and sea, as reprisals could also be executed on land.  By the mid-1300s, however, those who requested the letters of marque that conferred these rights were often subject to rigorous and lengthy inquiries concerning the veracity and extent of their claim.  In 1322, for example, two merchants of Tarragona, Francesc Mir and Bernat Capella, received a letter of marque against subjects of the Crown of Naples for a corsair attack that had occurred nine years earlier.  During this interval, Crown judicial officers had conducted an inquest that solicited testimony from merchant consuls at Naples and associates at Amalfi.48  Between 1350 and 1500, grants of reprisal were progressively restricted across the Mediterranean.  Not only did the number of awards decline; those reprisals that were granted were subject to increasing restrictions upon their exercise.49

            If restitution proceedings afforded western European polities an opportunity to monitor merchant populations, they proved still more useful as a means to control those appointed as corsairs.  By the close of the thirteenth century, apprehensions that corsairs would abuse their commissions had given rise to statutory provisions that corsairs departing on sanctioned voyages ad cursum should tender a financial depositãwhat British admiralty records would later term "caution-money"ãto royal and municipal officials as a guarantee that cargo subject to an allied or "friendly" flag would be spared seizure.50  While these funds could furnish the basis for restitution payments, processes in which corsairs were investigated and disciplined served to reaffirm the polity's control over corsairs and their use of force at sea.

            Several judicial records from this period document disciplinary proceedings conducted to examine corsairs accused of having abused their authority. In 1327, for example, the royal governor of Sardinia for the Crown of Catalonia-Aragon examined a series of witnesses concerning complaints that the Crown admiral Guillem de Llor had illicitly seized vessels and cargo at Tunis, Sicily, and Sardinia, and tortured captains and crew.  Guillem de Llor was moreover accused of having appropriated supplies for his own vessels from other vessels flying the flag of the Crown.51   

            Although the records of this investigation do not indicate whether de Llor was punished, other proceedings, preserved at Genoa and Venice, suggest that, just as merchant access to reprisal diminished, so, too, the penalties to which errant corsairs were subject grew increasingly stringent over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The acts, or Diversorum, of Genoa's governing "Council of Elders," or Anziani, record various decisions in which corsairs were ordered by the doge of Genoa to return illicitly-acquired cargo between 1380 and 1382.52  In 1423, a Genoese corsair, Filippo de Vivaldi, was compelled by the Anziani to return goods he had appropriated from a group of Castilan merchants, even though the merchants had been shipping their cargo as Catalan to avoid trouble with enemy Portuguese.53  Over the decade that followed, other Genoese corsairs were subject to similar judgments.54  By 1425, Genoa's Council of Elders was issuing lists of commodities that would and would not be considered contraband and eligible for capture, explicitly circumscribing the parameters of corsair activity.55  One year later, the Anziani banished the sea-captain Tommaso Grimaldi for attacking the vessel of a Venetian, Xandro Mauro, while the two maritime republics were at peace.56 

            The Raspe registers of the Venetian Avogadori di Comune record a particularly comprehensive surveillance of those assigned responsibility to patrol and deploy aggression in the interests of their republic.  Corsairs who failed to uphold the interests of the Serenissima with success in battle during conflicts with the Genoese faced suspension of their duties, and even imprisonment.57 Corsairs who overstepped their commissions similarly faced stringent penalties.  In 1386, the Avogadori di Commune condemned the corsairs Paolo Querini and Francesco Bembo to fines, imprisonment, and three-year suspensions from the captaincy of any of vessel for an unauthorized attack on a Majorcan vessel.58  Still more severe sanctions awaited Venetian maritime officials who abused  their office to attack fellow Venetians. On July 27, 1347, a certain Marcheti and several accomplices were sentenced to death by hanging for exploiting their positions as customs officers to rob the vessel of a certain Giovanni de LonÐano.59 By 1415, legislation passed by Venice's Maggior Consiglio imposed penalties of banishment upon any customs officer who engaged in so much as extortion.60

            Political capital was located, finally, in the opportunity these proceedings provided to condemn corsairs as pirates, when these corsairs had sailed to challenge assertions of sovereignty with counter-assertions of independent polity. This last occurred often in the Tyrrhenian sea.  Corsairs who sailed on behalf of the Crown of  Catalonia-Aragon, for example, sought to assert dominion over the island of Sardinia, valuable for its strategic location and its salt flats.  From the early fourteenth century, the Crown supported assertions of sovereignty over the island through a network of governors and judicial officers who supervised maritime traffic at such ports as Cagliari, Sassari, and Alghero.  Crown authorities nonetheless faced fierce resistance from island nobility, particularly the Judges of Arborea, who, over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, allied with Genoese nobility and the Viscounts of Narbonne, in an attempt to counter Crown dominance.  Often, this resistance took the form of maritime aggression.61

            In 1369, a ProvenÐal captain called Jean Bayonne was tried by authorities of the Crown of Catalonia-Aragon at Cagliari for a maritime assault that had included the murder of a merchant captain. The records of this inquest certainly established Bayonne's actions as "violent." Bayonne's voyage had nonetheless occurred in a political context, as Bayonne had been commissioned by the rebel Judge of Arborea and his ally, the Viscount of Narbonne.  Indeed, several witnesses described how Bayonne's attack had begun with partisan shouts of "Arborea!" from his crew.  In the sense that Bayonne had sailed and attacked a ship subject to the Crown on behalf of authorities who competed with the Crown for sovereignty on Sardinia, it can be suggested that Bayonne had acted as a corsair. Crown authorities nevetheless repudiated the Judge's claims to sovereignty by subjecting Bayonne to the inquest and penalty appropriate for a pirate.  Bayonne was tortured and hanged.62

            The maritime republic of Genoa faced a similar challenge from the neighboring Ligurian town of Savona, which remained a port of some significance during the Middle Ages, despite Genoese attempts to reduce the town to the status of economic tributary.63   Over the period between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, Savona's merchant nobility  resisted Genoese domination through various campaigns of maritime theft, often coupled with diplomatic initiatives in which Savona endeavored to negotiate independent settlements and treaties with such powers as Venice, and the French Crown.64 

            While Genose captains continued to patrol the Riviera to counter Savonese maritime aggression, Genoa's "counter-piracy" also took the form of an administrative initiative, undertaken by the republic's doges after 1339, to convert the Genoese Officium Robarie, or "Robbery Office," from a bureau that disbursed restitutiton to foreign victims of Genoese corsairs, to a domestic agency that heard complaints against rebels, often pirates active along the Ligurian Riviera.65 

            In one particularly active phase of the bureau's existence, during the rebellions against doge Antoniotto Adorno between 1394 and 1397, the bureau adjudicated over 130 petitions concerning the activities of rebels on the Riviera.  The adjudication of these disputes by the Officium Robarie implicitly criminalized these rebels as thieves and pirates.  Many, however, particularly those who sailed from Savona, appear to have rather been acting as corsairs, in support of their town's struggle against Genoa.66  When, in 1396, this crisis finally drove Adorno to offer lordship of Genoa to the French Crown, Savona was able to appeal to the French royal governor to mediate a peace with the Genoese in which Savonese captains condemned as rebels were accorded the retroactive status of corsairs, by terming the period of their operations not one of "rebellion," but one of "war."  The ratification of this accord demonstrated the way in which maritime theft could be deployed to reverse existing hegemonic relationships on land. Through "piracy," Savona was able to maintain a species of political parity with Genoa throughout the fifteenth century.67  Not until 1526 would the Genoese finally assert dominion over Savonaãsymbolically and functionally--by filling Savona's port and removing the town's link with the sea.68

            In studying contingent definitions of piracy, Rubin, Thomson, and Perotin-Dumon have argued that essentialist, or what Rubin terms naturalist, characterizations of maritime theft as piracy have often been applied to campaigns of maritime predation undertaken in the context of imperial systems in pragmatic, or what Rubin calls  positivist, ways, in order to de-politicize the political identity or objectives of those who practiced maritime theft.69 The Malay peninsula, from which Rubin has drawn much of his evidence, offers geo-political parallels to the medieval Mediterranean, insofar as, here, too, organized maritime theft served to establish a series of fluid, competitive, commercial polities under the varied governance of Muslim sultans and local chieftans before 1500.70  During the nineteenth century, British patrol of Indonesian waters about Singapore, at the expense of local autonomy, as well as Dutch and Thai ambitions in the region, was justified by essentializing discourses about the disposition of native Malay and Chinese to practice piracy.71  Scholars have begun to explore the ways in which these discourses found antecedents in a rich vocabulary of alterity that had demonized regional, racial, and religious difference during the Middle Ages.72  No less, however, did the contingent definition of piracy in southeast Asia draw upon the legal and historical experience of western Europeans who had learned long before they sailed beyond the Mediterranean about the political utility of marking water.
 
    Figure 1.
 

 
    Figure 2.
 

 

 

Notes

1 The author wishes to acknowledge Drs. Jerry Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, Nadine Hata, and Professor David Berry, as well as other faculty participants in the Seascapes Congress; the Ford Foundation, the Community College Humanities Association, and the American Historical Association.  Archival research for this paper in Spain and Italy was supported by grants from the PSC-CUNY Research Award Foundation.  I am also grateful to Drs. Sandra Sider, Diane Marks, and Kimberly Van Esveld Adams for generous comments and suggestions.

2 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 3 vols. (New York, 1968), 1:56.

3 Marvin Becker has elaborated his definition of the "territorial state" in "The Florentine Territorial State and Civic Humanism in the Early Renaissance," Florentine Studies, edited by Nicolai Rubenstein (London, 1968), 109-139.

4 Weber's definition of a state, ibid, 1:56 and 65, occurs as part of a longer ennumeration of "the primary formal characteristics of the modern state:" "administrative and legal order subject to change by legislation, implemented by an administrative staff;" a claim of "binding authorityÄover citizens" within an area of jurisdiction; and a "claim to monopolize the use of forceÄ." 

5 Portions of the paper to follow will cite and summarize research first presented in E.S. Tai, Honor Among Thieves: Piracy, Restitution, and Reprisal in Genoa, Venice, and the Crown of Catalonia-Aragon, 1339-1417 (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1996), currently being revised and expanded as a book-length study.  See also eadem, "Narratives of Violence: Sources for Piracy as Fact and Fiction," Community College Humanities Review 20, no. 2 (1999): 207-239.  

6 The omission of medieval Europe from consideration in surveys of world piracy may be noted in Alfred Rubin, The Law of Piracy (New York: Transnational Publishers, 1998); Anne Perotin-Dumon,"The Pirate and the Emperor: Power and the Law of the Sea, 1450-1850," in The Political Economy of Merchant Empires, ed. James Tracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 196-227; and Janice E. Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extra-Territorial Violence in Early Modern Europe (Princeton: Princeton University, 1994). See also Robert C. Ritchie, Captain Kidd and the War Against the Pirates (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986); and J.L. Anderson, "Piracy and World History: An Economic Perspective on Maritime Predation," Journal of World History, vol. 6, no. 1 (1995), 175-199.  For the full definition of piracy according to the 1958 U.N. Convention on the High Seas, see Barry Hart Dubner, The Law of International Sea Piracy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1980), 11-12; and Rubin, 366-381.

7 While this phrase may be traced, of course, to Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), its specific application to the European Middle Ages is developed by Julius Kirshner, "Introduction: The State is "Back In," in The Origins of the State in Italy, 1300-1600, edited by Julius Kirshner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 1-10.   

8 For the continuity and discontinuity in formulating concepts of political membership from the ancient world to the Middle Ages, see Peter Riesenberg, Citizenship in the Western Tradition: Plato to Rousseau (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992), esp. 111-193; Diego Quaglioni, "The Legal Definition of Citizenship in the Late Middle Ages," in City-States in Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy, edited by Anthony Mohlo, Kurt Raaflaub, and Julia Emlen (Ann Arbor: The Michigan Press, 1991), 155-167; and Julius Kirshner "Civitas Sibi Faciat Civem: Bartolus de Sassoferrato's Doctrine on the Making of a Citizen," Speculum 48 (1973): 694-713. See also the essays in Gaines Post, Studies in Medieval Legal Thought: Public Law and the State, 1100-1332 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1964); Joseph Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970); Frederic L. Cheyette, "The Invention of the State," in The Walter Prescott Web Memorial Lectures: Essays on Medieval Civilization (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978), 143-178; idem, "Suum cuique tribuere," French Historical Studies 6, n. 1 (1969): 287-299; Kenneth Pennington, The Prince and the Law: Sovereignty and Rights in the Western Legal Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Giorgio Chittolini, "The Private," "The Public," "The State," in The Origins of the State in Italy, 34-61; and idem, "La crisi della libertš communali e le origini dello stato territoriale," Rivista storica italiana 82 (1970): 99-120. Weber's consideration of  the link between medieval town and modern state may be noted in Economy and Society, vol. 3.

9 The formulation hostis humani generis is identified as a misquotation of Cicero's De Officis III, 29, "ÄNam pirata non est ex perduellum numero definitus, sed communis hostis omnium: cum hoc nec fides nec jus jurandum esse communeÄ" and Contra Gaius Verres 2.4.10 ó 21, "ÄFecisti item ut praedones solent; qui cum hostes communes sint omnium, tamen aliquos sibi instituunt amicosÄ" by Rubin, 15-18, especially note 49.  Although Rubin, 17, indicates that Blackstone attributed this paraphrase to Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634), the formulations is found much earlier, in the commentary by fourteenth-century jurist Bartolus de Sassoferrato (1313-1357) on the forty-ninth book of Justinian's Digest, who in turn cites James of Arena (fl. 1261-1296); see Bartolus de Sassoferrato, Lucernae iuris, omnia quae extant, opera, 11 vols. (Venice, 1590-1602), Tomus sextus: Commentaria, Digesti novi partem (Venice, 1596), 215, "tit. De captivis et posthuminio reversis et redemptis ab hostibusÄEt non quod piratae aequiparantur hostibus fidei et principis et sunt ipso facto diffidati et possunt impune a quodlibet derobi, in auth. navigia ubi Baldi C. de furtum item hypocritaeÄhostes humani generisÄ."  I am grateful to Dr. Whitney Bagnall for bringing this reference to my attention.

10 For the term corsair, derived from the Latin ad cursum, see Hþlúne Ahrweiler, "Course et piraterie dans la Mþditerranþe orientale aux XIVúme-XVúme siúcle (Empire byzantin)," in Course et piraterie: €tudes prþsentþes š la Commission internationale d'histoire maritime š l'occasion de son XVe Colloque international pendant le XIVe Congrús international des sciences historiques (San Francisco, aoòt, 1975), 3 vols. (Paris, 1975), 1: 9-11.  For early fourteenth-century legislation concerning maritime predation in Pera, see "Statuti della colonia genovese di Pera," ed. Vincenzo Promis, in Miscellanea di storia italiana edita per curia della regia deputazione di storia patria per le antiche provincie e la Lombardia 11 (1871): 513-780, esp. 703-706, c. 144-147; 735-736, c. 206-207.  For comparable legislation in Genoa, note Leges genuenses, ed. Cornelius Desimoni, Aloisius Thomas Belgrano, and Victorius Poggi, Historiae Patriae Monumenta, 18 (Turin, 1901), col. 109, 519, 943-944.  Legislation relevant to piracy and corsairing promulgated by the Republic of Venice in Cataro, as well as the Crown of Catalonia-Aragon, and the Aragonese Crown of Sicily, is published by Jean-Marie Pardessus, in Collection des lois maritimes antþrieurs au XVIIIe siúcle, 6 vols. (Paris, 1839, reedition, Turin, 1960), 5: 20, 98, 349.

11 Fernand Braudel has referred to the operation of a distinction between corsairs and pirates by the sixteenth century in The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols., trans. SiŠn Reynolds (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 2: 866-867.  Michel Mollat considered the operation of these distinctions during the Middle Ages in a series of ground-breaking synthetic articles: "Guerre de course et piraterie š la fin du moyen-Šge: Aspects þconomiques et sociaux.  Position de problúmes," Hansiche Geschichtblatter 89-90 (1972): 1-14; idem, "De la piraterie sauvage š la course rþglementþe (XIVe-XVe siúcles)," Mþlanges de l'€cole FranÐaises de Rome 87 (1975): 7-25; and "Essai d'orientation pour d'þtude de la guerre de course et la piraterie (XII-XVe siúcles)," Anuario des estudios medievales 10 (1980): 743-749.  Frederic C. Cheyette has provided the most comprehensive treatment of the way in which the definition and practice of maritime theft worked to extend claims to sovereignty during the fourteenth century in "The Sovereign and the Pirates, 1332," Speculum 45, no. 1 (1970): 40-65.  See also Lþon Robert Mþnager, Admiratus-'Amhraz: l'þmirat et les origines de l'amirautþ (XI-XIIIe siúcles), (Paris, 1960).

12 For the conception of the Mediterranean as a series of sub-basins, see Braudel, 1:103-138.

13 For Genoese accounts of the war of Acre (1256-1258), see Annali genovesi di Caffaro e de suoi continuatori, ed. Tommaso Belgrano and Cesare Imperiale di Sant'Angelo, 5 vols., Istituto storico italiano, Fonti per la storia d'Italia, vols. 10-14bis (Rome, 1890-1929), 4: 22-23; 31-36, and Agostino Giustiniani, Annali della Repubblica di Genova, 2 vols. (Genoa, 1854), I:422-425.  Venetian accounts are given by Martin da Canale, Les estoires de Venise: Cronaca veneziana in lingua francese dalle origini al 1275, ed. Alberto Limentani, Civiltš veneziana fonti e testi, vol. XII, serie terza (Florence, 1972), 156-158; Andrea Dandolo, Chronica et Chronica Brevis, ed. Ester Pastorello, Rerum italicarum scriptores, ser. 2, Raccolta degli storici italiani, vol. XII, part I (Bologna, 1938), 307-308; Petro Giustinian, Venetiarum historia vulgo Petro Iustiniano Iustiniani filio adiudicata, ed. Roberto Cessi and Fanny Bennato, Deputazione di storia patria per le Venezie (Venice, 1964), 167; and Marino Sanuto, Vite de duchi di Venezia, in Rerum italicarum scriptores, ed. L.A. Muratori, vol. XXII (Milan, 1733), col. 558-560. For the war of Curzola (1293-1299), see Jacobus da Varagine, Cronica civitatis Ianuensis ab origine urbis usque ad annum MCCXCVII, ed. Giovanni Monleone, 3 vols., Fonti per la storia d'Italia pubblicata dal Reale istituto storico italiano per il medioevo (Rome, 1941), 2: 97ff., and Giustiniani, 1:495-503; Dandolo, 370, and  Sanuto, col. 578-580.  For the War of the Straits (1350-1354), see Giorgio Stella, Annales genuenses, ed. Giovanna Petti Balbi, Rerum italicarum scriptores, ser. 2, Raccolta degli storici italiani, vol. 17, part 2 (Bologna, 1975), 153; Giustiniani, 2: 94-95.  For the War over Tenedos (1378-1381), see Stella, 169-184; Giustiniani, 2: 115-152; Raphaynus de Caresinis, Chronica, ed. Ester Pastorello, Rerum italicarum scriptores, ser. 2, Raccolta degli storici italiani, vol. XII, part 2 (Bologna, 1922), 33-61; and Daniele di Chinazzo, Cronica de la guerra da veniciani a zenovesi, ed. Vittorio Lazzarini, Deputazione di storia patria per le Venezia, Monumenti storici, n.s., vol. XI (Venice, 1958).  See also M. Volkov, "La rivalitš tra Venezia e Genova nel secolo XIV," Saggi e documenti IV (1983): 143-181; Albano Sorbelli, "La lotta tra Genova e Venezia per il predominio del Mediterraneo, I: 1350-1355," Memorie delle Reale accademia della scienze dell'Istituto di Bologna.  Classe di scienze morali, serie I, Tomo V (1910-1911), sezione di scienze storico-filologico (Bologna, 1911), 87-157; Luigi Agostino Casati, La guerra di Chioggia e la pace di Torino (Florence, 1866).  For conflicts between the two cities during the early fifteenth century, see also Francesco Surdich, Genova e Venezia fra Tre e Quattrocento, Collana storica di fonti e studi, 4 (Genoa, 1970).

14 For Genoa's contention with Crown in the Levant, see Ramon Muntaner, CrÖnica, ed. Ferran Soldevila, in Les quatres gran crÖniques (Barcelona, 1971), and the translation of this work by H.E. Goodenough, The Chronicle of Ramon Muntaner, The Hakluyt Society, second series, no. 47 and 50 (London, 1920-1921); Diplomatari de l'Orient catalš, 1301-1409; Collecci„ de documents per a la histÖria de l'expedici„ catalana a Orient I dels ducats d'Atenes I Neopštria, ed. Antoni Rubi„ y Lluch (Barcelona, 1947). See also Giuseppi Meloni, Genova e Aragona all'epoca di Pietro il Ceremonioso, 3 vols., Istituto di storia medioevale e moderna dell'Universitš degli studi di Cagliari, 16, 22, 26 (Padua, 1971-1982).

15 For the role of the Venetian Captain of the Gulf in asserting Venetian hegemony in the Adriatic, see Irene Katele, "Piracy and the Venetian State: The Dilemma of Maritime Defense in the Fourteenth Century," Speculum 63, no. 4 (1988): 865-889; and eadem, Captains and Corsairs: Venice and Piracy, 1261-1381 (Ph.D. diss, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1986).  Katele's work represents a synthesis and reevaluation of a significant body of scholarship on this subject, particularly Alberto Tenenti, "Venezia e la pirateria nel Levante: 1300-1460c," in Venezia e il Levante fino al secolo XV, edited by Agostino Pertusi, 2 vols. (Florence, 1973), 1: 705-771; Ferruccio Sassi, "La guerra in corsa e il diritto di preda secondo il diritto veneziano," in Rivista di storia del diritto italiano 11 (1929): 99-128; 261-296; Roberto Cessi, Storia della Repubblica di Venezia, 2 vols. (Milan and Messina, 1944-1946, new edition reprinted Milan, 1968), 1:261-299; Frederic C. Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), esp. 65-78; idem, "Venetian Merchant Galleys, 1300-1324: Private and Communal Operation," Speculum XXXVIII (1963), 179-205, reprinted in Venice and History: The Collected Papers of Frederic C. Lane (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), 193-336; 214; and Louise Buenger Robert, "A Venetian Naval Expedition of 1224," in Economy, Society, and Government in Medieval Italy, ed. David Herlihy, Robert S. Lopez, and Vselvolod Slessarev (Kent, Ohio, 1969), 141-151.  The phrase nostro culfo occurs on a regular basis in the transactions of the Senate examined by this author, Archivio di Stato, Venezia (hereafter abbreviated as ASV), Senato, Deliberazioni Misti, Regs. 1, 15-20; 30-55, too numerous to be cited; note, however, the general discussion of the significance of this phrase for Venetian claims to dominion over the Adriatic by  Jorjo Tardic in  "Venezia e la costa orientale dell'Adriatico fino al secolo XV," in Venezia e il Levante, ed. Pertusi, 1: 687-704.   For execution of pirates by Venetian corsairs, see da Canale, 70-71.

16 While the bibliography on the Crusades and Venetian dominion in the Levant is too extensive to be fully cited here, see, for a general consideration of Venetian overseas activity, Freddy Thiriet, La Romanie vþnitienne au moyen-Šge.  Le dþveloppement et l'explotation du domaine colonial vþnitien (XII-XVe siúcles), Bibliothþque des €coles franÐaises d'Athúnes et de Rome, fasc. 193 (Paris, 1959).  Sally McKee has offered a compelling reevaluation of the Venetian role in Crete in Uncommon Dominion: Venetian Crete and the Myth of Ethnic Purity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).

17 Note, for example, ASV, Duca di Candia, Sententiarum, Busta 26 (1318-1435), Sentenze 8, f. 43r (June 2, 1426), which records restrictions placed by officers of theVenetian Duke at Crete upon the projected voyage of two Venetian captains, "ÄSer Filippo Querino et... Ser Georgium Mercado..." from Crete to Salonica.  The captains were ordered to journey no farther than Rhodes, due to hazardous conditions imposed by Turkish vessels.

18 For the role of Genoese corsairs in patrolling the Genoese Riviera in a manner that paralleled Venetian activity in the Adriatic, see Gian Giacomo Musso, Navigazione e commercio genovese con il Levante nei documenti dell'Archivio di Stato di Genova (secoli XIV-XV), Ministero per i beni culturali e ambientali pubblicazione degli Archivi di Stato, vol. 84 (Rome, 1975), esp. 20-22.  References to such voyages may be noted, for example, in Archivio di Stato, Genova, Archivio segreto (hereafter abbreviated as ASG, AS), Diversorum, Reg, 499, f. 48v, n. 163 (May 14, 1399); f. 77v/64v, n. 272 (June 30, 1399); and f. 154v/168v, n. 605 (November 18, 1399).  Executions of pirates by Genoese corsairs are described by Stella, 146, 225, 236, 274, 281; see also Giustiniani, 2:185, 195, 209, 235, and 239.

19 For fourteenth- and fifteenth-century stereotypes of Genoese as pirates, note Ludolph von Suchem, De Itinerare Terrae Sanctae,VIII, 11, ed. Ferdinand Deycks in Bibliothek des Litterarischen Vereins, vol. 25 (Stuttgart, 1851); Benedetto Cotrugli, Il Libro dell'Arte di Mercatura, ed. Ugo Tucci (Venice, 1990), I, 10; 162; and Matteo Villani, Croniche, III, lxxxvi, in Giovanni, Matteo, and Filippo Villani,  Croniche storiche, 7 vols., ed. F.G. Dragomanni (Milan, 1848), 4:277. Giovanni Boccaccio, Decamerone, 2 vols. (Milan, 1968), includes eight tales that make reference to piracy; five are identified as Genoese or natives of the Ligurian coast; note II iv, vi, x; 1:82-90; 104-116; 158-164; V, ii, vi; 2:17-22; 42-48; VIII, x, 2:214-224.  For a fuller discussion of these sources, their conditions, and the historiographical tradition to which they have given rise, see Tai, Honor Among Thieves, 2-68.

20 For interpretations of medieval piracy as an "anti-economic" activity, see Mollat, "Guerre de course," 1-13, esp. 2, and Ahrweiler, "Course et piraterie," 8.  See also Katele, Captains and Corsairs, 64-65; and eadem, "Piracy and the Venetian State," 886; Cheyette, "The Sovereign and the Pirates," 56-66; and Robert S. Burns, "Piracy as an Islamic-Christian Interface in the Thirteenth Century," Viator 11 (1980): 165-178, esp. 168.  Note also Frederic C. Lane, "The Economic Meaning of War and Protection," in Venice and History, 383-398; and idem, "Economic Consequences of Organized Violence," in Venice and History, 412-428.

21For the assertion that "capitalismÄ[is]Äsustained by the development of strong statesÄ" see Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System:Capitalism, Agriculture, and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974), esp. 64 and 347-357.  See also idem, Historical Capitalism (London, 1983), esp. 19, 48-50.

22 On this point, note references to piracy among the letters of merchant agents of the company of Francesco Marco di Datini of Prato, translated by Robert Brun in "Annales avignonaises de 1382 š 1410: Extraites des archives  de Datini," Mþmoires de l'Institut historique de Provence XI (1934): 17-104; XII (1935): 105-142; XIII (1936): 58-105; XIV (1937): 5-57, esp. XIV (1937): 23.  See also Cotrugli, I, 15; 176, in which Cotrugli instructs fellow merchants to be on the alert for reports of: "...corsali et male gentiÄ."  One may also note, as one among many examples, the sentences of the Duke of Crete, ASV, Duca di Candia 26, Sententiarum (1318-1435), n. 5, ff. 231v-232 (August 23, 1373), which record how NiccolÖ Rosso, a Venetian captain who set sail from Crete to Cyprus with an oil cargo in 1373, turned back on discovering that the Genoese fleet that was about to conquer Cyprus was blockading the island of Famagusta. For this expedition see also Stella, 165-166; Giustiniani, 2:108-109; and Peter W. Edbury, "Cyprus and Genoa: The Origins of the War of 1373-1374," Praktika tou Deuterou Diethnous Kupriologikou Sunedriou (Nicosia, 1986): 109-126, reprinted in Kingdoms of the Crusaders: From Jerusalem to Cyprus (Variorum, 1999).

23 The two images appended to this paper may be found at the website of the James Ford Bell Library of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, at http://bigbird.lib.umn.edu/jfb/.  Figure 1, representing the Mediterranean coasts, was executed by Petrus Roselli, c. 1466; Figure 2, representing Mediterranean Europe from the Atlantic to the Black Sea, was executed by Albini de Canepa in 1489. For a general discussion of Portulan charts and mappaemundi, see David Woodward, "Medieval Mappaemundi," in The History of Cartography, ed. J.B. Harley and David Woodward, 3 vols. (University of Chicago Press, 1987), 286-370; and Tony Campbell, "Portulan Charts from the Late Thirteenth Century to 1500," in The History of Cartography, 371-463.  See also Michel Mollat du Jourdin and Monique de la Ronciúre, Sea Charts of the Early Explorers, Thirteenth to Seventeenth Century, trans. L. R. Dethan (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1984), and Daniel L. Smail, Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseilles (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), esp. 1-5.

24 Note Campbell, 378.

25 See Figure 2, as well as the discussion of this map by Carol Urness, Portulan Charts in the James Ford Bell Library (Minneapolis, 1999), 9-11.

26 Note Campell, 373, 382, and Mollat, 25.  For the career of Benedetto Zaccaria, a Genoese corsair who played a key role in extending Genoese dominion to Chios, see Robert S. Lopez, Genova marinara nel Duecento: Benedetto Zaccaria, ammiraglio e mercante, Biblioteca storica principato, vol. 18 (Messina, 1933), 102-103; 125; 259.  For the ordinances of Peter IV the Ceremonious, see Ordenanzas de las armadas navales de la Corona de Arag„n aprobadas por el rey D. Pedro IV  (1354), ed. Antonio de Capmany y de Montpalau (Madrid, 1787), 55-61.

27 Financial arrangments to support armaments in cursum launched from Genoa and the Genoese-controlled ports of Portovenere and Bonifacio in Corsica may be traced through notarial documentation preserved in Genoa's Archivio di Stato, published and inventoried in various editions; see "Documenti sul castello di Bonifacio nel secolo XIII," ed. Vito Vitale, Atti della Regia deputazione di storia patria per la Liguria, vol. 1 (Genoa, 1936), and idem, "Nuovi documenti sul castello di Bonifacio nel secolo XIII," Atti della Regia deputazione di storia patria per la Liguria, nuova serie, vol. 4 (68 della raccolta), fasc. 2 (Genoa, 1940); Il cartulario di Giovanni di Giona di Portovenere (sec. XIII), ed. Giorgio Falco and Geo Pistarino (Genoa, 1958); and Le carte del monastero di San Venerio del Tino, ed. Giorgio Falco, 2 vols. (Turin, 1933).  The implications of these documents for the role of merchant capital in sustaining corsairing have been discussed by Robert S. Lopez, "Dieci documenti sulla guerra di corsa," Su e gi¶ per la storia di Genova, Collana storica di fonti e studi, 20 (Genoa, 1975), 313-327; Geo Pistarino, "Gente del mare nel Commonwealth genovese," in Le genti del mare mediterraneo, ed. Rosalba Ragosta, 2 vols., Biblioteca di storia economica diretta da Luigi de Rosa, vol. 5 (Naples, 1980-1981), 1: 203-290; and Laura Balletto, Mercanti, pirati, e corsari nei mari della Corsica (Genoa, 1978).  For the investment of Venetian merchants in corsair armaments on Crete, see documents published in Benvenuto de Brixano, notaio de Candia (1301-1302), ed. Raimondo Morozzo della Rocca, Comitato per la pubblicazione delle fonti relative alla storia di Venezia, sezione III: Archivi notarili (Venice, 1950), 90-91, n. 243-245 (July 25, 1301).  For discussion of these documentation, see Raimondo Morozzo della Rocca, "Consuetudini di corsari veneziani del secolo XIV," Atti del IV Congresso nazionale di arte e tradizioni popolari (Udine, 1943), 329-337; Tenenti, "Venezia e la pirateria," 715; and Katele, Captains and Corsairs, 232-237.  Note also the voyage of the San Clement from Barcelona in 1331, equipped by merchant investors for corsairing; documented in the Arxiu HistÖric de la Ciutat de Barcelona, from acts published by Antonio de Capmany y de Montpalau, Memorias hist„ricas sobre la marina, commercio y artes de la antigua ciudad de Barcelona, 3 vols., reed. by E. Giralt y Raventos and C. Batlle y Gallart (Barcelona, 1961), 2:188-198, docs. 127, 128, and 130; discussed in Tai, Honor Among Thieves, 50.

28 For mixed pirate and corsair fleets in the thirteenth-century Aegean, see Marino Torsello Sanudo, "Istoria del regno di Romania," published by Charles Hopf in Chroniques grþco-romaines, (Berlin, 1873), 99-174,  esp. 146-147.

29 The list of complaints presented by the Venetian republic before the Byzantine Emperor Michael Paleologus in 1278 identifies seven Genoese assailants, several of whom are described as "the Emperor's men."  It is published in Urkunden zur ÿlteren Handels- und Staatsgeschichte der Republik Venedig, ed. Georg L.F. Tafel and Georg M. Thomas, 3 vols. (Vienna, 1856-1857), 3: 159-280.  On this document, see also Gareth Morgan, "The Byzantine Claims Commission of 1278," Byzantine Zeitschrift 69 (1976): 411-438.  Franceschino Grimaldi, exiled from Genoa as a pirate and a rebel, enlisted in the service of King Charles II of Anjou; ASV, Libri commemoriali, I, fol. 85v (1306), indexed in I libri commemoriali della Repubblica di Venezia: Regesti, ed. Riccardo Predelli and P. Bosmin, 8 vols. (Venice, 1876-1914), 1:67-68, n. 298.  Benedetto Zaccaria served as an admiral for the French King Philip VI; see Lopez, Genova marinara nel Duecento, 95-121.  Two members of the Doria clan, Conrado and Raffaelo, sailed for the king of Sicily; ASG, Notai antichi, Filze 371, Damiano Torello, filza 9 (December 2, 1337).  For the entrance of Aytone Doria into French service, see Stella, ed. Petti Balbi, 128.  Muntaner describes the entry of Roger de Lauria into the service of Peter III of Catalonia-Aragon, and of Roger de Flor into the service of King Frederick III of Sicily in Muntaner, CrÖnica, LXXVI, and CXCIV, ed. Soldevila, 728-729, 841.  See also Goodenough's translation of these passages in 1: 171, and 2: 469. Thomson has explored the notion of aggression as a market commodity during a later period in Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns.

30 ASG, Antico Comune, n. 662 (April 2, 1402).  The cartulary is titled on f. 2r: "Cartullarium [sic] galle patronizate per nobilem Dominum Andream Lomellinum pro viagio ad custodiam prouincie Corsice et Sardinie pro inquirendum piratorumÄ."  Among crewmembers from Romania are listed: f. 6r: "ÄVaxili de Pera, Filesci de SalonichiÄ" f. 6v, "ÄMichaeli de Constantinopoli, Petro de Rhodo, Theraxio de RhodoÄ" f. 7r, "ÄJohannis de Faxi de Peyra, Leon de Rodo, Niescaxius de ConstantinopoliÄ" f. 41v, "ÄAlleissi de Salonichi; Georgi de SalonichiÄ" f. 51v, "ÄCrestianus Imperio de CaffaÄ." f. 53v "...Dimitri de Negroponte habitator in Januam..." The cartulary also names, f. 69v, "ÄJaumeÄhabitator in Vallencia [sic]Ä." and, f. 85r, a crewmember from Crete, "ÄGeorgius de CandiaÄ." 

31 Note, for example, Francesco Balducci Pegolotti, La practica della mercatura, ed. Allan Evans (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), 16-19.

32 Cotrugli, I, 4; 146-147.

33 Examples of association between Genoese and Venetians, and Genoese and Catalans, in between and even during periods of official hostility, may be documented in the archival records of the Archivio di Stato in Genoa and Venice (ASG and ASV), as well as the Archivo de la Corona de Arag„n (ACA).  This document record is cited and extensively discussed in Tai, Honor Among Thieves, 108-123.  For Greek and Latin ties in Constantinople and Crete, see Angeliki Laiou, "Venetians and Byzantines: Investigations of Forms of Contact in the Fourteenth Century," Thesaurismata 22 (1992), 29-43, esp. 30-31; eadem, "The Byzantine Economy in the Mediterranean Trade System: Thirteenth-Fifteenth Centuries," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 34-35 (1982), 177-222.  For trade between Christians and Muslims, see Eliyahu Ashton, Levant Trade in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1983), esp. xix-xx, 9-20; 40-54; 84-87.

34 For examples of the trade in victuals, note esp. ASG, Notai giudiziari, Reg. 3, filza 24 (November 10, 1394); filza 114 (January 18, 1395).  See also the inventory of these registers by Ausilia Roccatagliata, L'Officium Robarie del Comune di Genova (1394-1397), 3 vols. (Genoa, 1989-1995), 1:27-32 (Case VI); 67-83 (Case XII); and 315-324 (Case XXXVIII).  Commodities in these documents are listed as wine, salt, and fish.

35 ASV, Avogaria del Comune, Raspe, n. 3642/2 (1341-1361), f. 30r (October 30, 1347). For the responsibility of the Avogadori di Comune and judicial procedure in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Venice, see Guido Ruggiero, Violence in Early Renaissance Venice (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1980), 19-33.

36 ASV, Avogaria del Comune Raspe, n. 3644/4 (1378-1393), f. 7v (October 12, 1378).

37 A full text of the Llibre del Consolat de Mar has been edited by Pardessus, vol. 2.  Pardessus provides a summary French translation in his edition.  In addition, two English translations have been made of the code: Consulate of the Sea and Related Documents, by Stanley S. Jados (University of Alabama Press, 1975), and an earlier, somewhat archaic translation, given in Monumenta Juridica: The Black Book of the Admiralty, edited by Sir Travers Twiss, 4 vols., Rerum Britannicarum Medii Aevi Scriptores, no. 55 (London, 1874; reprinted Kraus Reprints, Ltd., 1975).  The passage that details the admiral's jurisdiction is Chap. 231, given in Pardessus, 2:303-307; Twiss, 538-547; and Jados, 191-192. The use of the term contrabannum in the records of the third and fourth Lateran council, to refer to Muslim cargo is discussed by Ernest Nys, La guerre maritime: €tude du droit international (Brussels, 1881), 36, 40-41.  It may also be noted in the Venetian document record, as in Susinello Marino, Notaio in Chioggia minore (1348-1364), ed. Sergio Perini, Comitato per la pubblicazione delle fonti relative alla storia di Venezia (Venice, 2001), 21, doc. 11 (June 30, 1349). The absence of neutrality in the medieval laws of war is discussed by Maurice H. Keen, The Laws of War in the Middle Ages (London, 1965), 65, 141-142; 208; 211-212; Sassi, 269; Angelo Piero Sereni, The Italian Conception of International Law (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), 53, and Pitman B. Potter, The Freedom of the Seas in History, Law, and Politics (New York: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1934), 49.    

38 ACA, CancillerÍa real, Procesos judiciales, Procesos en folio 102/29 (July 22, 1412), ff. 43r-47v, for example, records how, f. 43r "ÄLo honorat N'Anthoni Faso ciutada de Vanecia..." was tortured with a metal clamp by a group of Genoese captains, when Faso attempted to protect Catalan cargo and merchants aboard his ship from their fleet of seven vessels; note ibid,  f. 46v "ÄInterrogauit lo aquell capita que una vegada li digues veritat con ell sabia be eclarment era informat que en la nau de aquest hauia robes de catalans e que encara aquest noli era estapat que ans ques partis aquest dell que aquest li diria la veritat per grat o per forÐaÄ." (fol. 47r.) "Äfaent tot son Äposant li una amenla en lo ffront e tortorant lo ab aquella per la qual cosa sentint se aquest per agreujat del dit turment e dela dita torturaÄ."

39 A survey of this evidentiary base is given in Tai, Honor Among Thieves, esp. 621, n. 72.  One of its richest sources are the Regesta marcarum, a series of registers that recorded grievances relating to maritime theft for the curia of the Crown of Aragon and Catalonia: ACA,CancillerÍa real, Regs. 1485-1488 (1372-1386); 2010-2011 (1387-1396); 2286-2288 (1396-1409).  I am grateful to Dr. Maria Teresa Ferrer i Mallol, who first brought this series of registers to my attention.  See also ASV, Libri commemoriali, I-X, indexed by Predelli.  For published examples of this formula, see Roberto Cessi, "La tregua fra Venezia e Genova nella seconda metš del secolo XIII," Archivio veneto tridentino IV (1923), 38, n. V, a deposition submitted by a representative of the Venetian doge Lorenzo Tiepolo to the Genoese Commune in 1275: "ÄNouerit dominacio uestra quod tria uasa Ianuensium fuerit nuper in maritimo cursuÄquam uiolenter et more piratico disrobaruntÄ."  Note also the text of a Venetian complaint, submitted to the Byzantine Emperor Andronicus II, in Diplomatarium Veneto-Levantinum, siue acta et diplomata res Venetas Graecas atque Levantis illustrantia 1200-1350, ed. Georg M. Thomas, Deputazione veneta di storia patria per le Venezie, Monumenta storici, serie prima: Documenti, vol. V; IX (Venice, 1880), 1:126: "ÄNasimben et Marinus Sfacto veneti de Creta more piratico depradati ab una insula nomine Tadius sex barchas cum mercimoniisÄ."  See also Tafel and Thomas, 3:231-232, and Diplomatari de l'Orient catalš, ed. Rubi„ y Lluch, 6, doc. 5.  For examples of documents using these formulas in the French archival record, note the complaint brought by merchants of Narbonne and Montpellier before the sensechal of Carcassone on June 13, 1334, published by Louis de Mas Latrie, Histoire de l'île de Chypre, 3 vols. (Paris, 1861), 3: 728-732, esp. 730.

40 On this point, note especially Tai, Honor Among Thieves, 501-502; and 571-573.  One may also note the defense produced by the Genoese jurist Bartolomeo Bosco on behalf of the capacity of a Genoese envoy to settle a dispute with the kingdom of Castile over maritime theft, in Consilia (Louvain, 1620), n. 48, 83-85.

41 For references of this type, one may note ACA, CancillerÍa real, Procesos judiciales, Procesos en quarto 1320-1322, f. 3v, where reference is made to "Ädicta nauis sic capta in mari Sardine iuxta capi de la CarbonaÄ" followed by the notary's earlier formulation, struck through:Äpropre insula SardineeÄ." In ACA, CancillerÍa real, Procesos judiciales, Procesos en quarto, 1327D, f. 3v, interchangeable references are made to "maria de Tripoli de Barbaria," and, f. 4r. "Ädicta tarida ibat in BarbariaÄ." 

42 For discussion of cases of this type, see esp. Tai, Honor Among Thieves, 163-169, which discusses a legal brief produced by the Venetian masters of jurisprudence Giovanni Boniolo and Pietro da' Quartari arguing for the liability of King Robert of Naples for attacks on Venetian shipping by members of the Grimaldi clan, ASV, Libri Commemoriali, III, ff. 153r-154v, indexed by Predelli, 2:80, n. 465.  See also Tai, Honor Among Thieves, 360-362; 372-373; 382-384; 559-562, 629-630.

43 Cargo being transported by sea or land in the Middle Ages was usually marked by signs and/or number series.  Note, for example, this passage, from ASG, AS, Materie Politiche, n. 2729, Mazzo 10, Trattati diversi, n. 10 (May 15, 1382), describing a cargo of Florentine cloth: "Äde ballis sex pannorum Florentinorum optimorum plurimorum colorum signatis eius signor in numero a viginti otto usque ad triginta tresÄ."  This document designates several cargoes this way.  Another instance of signs recorded in the document record may be ASG, Antico Comune, n. 736 (February 28, 1398), f. 4v, although the style of the notary recording information in this register, a record of property held by Genoese owners aboard a vessel ultimately captured by the Castilian pirate Alvaro Bizera, makes it unclear whether these are marks for cargo, or the notary's own informal drawings.  Balletto also discusses the practice of marking cargoes by covering them with a flag or banner in Genova nel Duecento, 79-80.

44 ACA, CancillerÍa real, Procesos judiciales, Procesos en quarto, n. 1361 (June 26, 1361).

45 For a general discussion of "false-flagging," which, in Genoa, usually took the form of Genoese merchants shipping their cargo as Catalan to avoid customs obligations, see Jacques Heers, G¡nes au Xve siúcle: Activitþ þconomique et problúmes sociaux (Paris, 1961), 135-139.  Examples of such cases are discussed in Tai, Honor Among Thieves, 286-288; 355-358; 412.  Note also the case of the Barcelona merchant Pere Doy, discussed by Nenad Fejic, "Un lettre de munipalitþ de Barcelona au recteur et aux conseillers de la ville de Dubrovnik (Raguse)," in Oriente e Occidente tra medioevo ed etš moderna: Studi in onore di Geo Pistarino, ed. Laura Balletto, 2 vols. (Genoa, 1997), 1:317-324; and in Tai, Honor Among Thieves, 561-562.

46 This incident is one of a series documented in ACA, CancillerÍa, Procesos judiciales, procesos en folio 127/20 (1361), ff. 30v-31r (July 21, 1361); 32r; 34r (July 4, 1361); 34v (July 31, 1361); 35v-36r (July 6, 1361); 65v (July 17, 1361); 66 rv (July 24, 1361).  See also the discussion in Tai, Honor Among Thieves, 267-268.

47 For these incidents, esp. Tai, Honor Among Thieves, 281-309; 350-367.

48 ACA, CancillerÍa real, Procesos  judiciales, Procesos en quarto, 1320-1322 (March 17, 1320-November 29, 1322).  The proceeding, containing 43 folios of documentation collected over two years, includes a description of the incident from the two merchants; a full list of the cargo (which included slaves, cloth, and foodstuffs); documents sent on behalf of the two merchants by King James II of Catalonia-Aragon to King Robert of Naples in 1315; testimony collected from fellow merchants in Amalfi (ff. 1r-21v); the testimony of the Catalan consul at Naples (ff. 24r-32r); and copies of the grant of marque Mir and Capella eventually received (ff. 22r-24v; 41r-43v).

49 For decline in the utilization of reprisal, and citations of general bibliography on this subject, see Tai, Honor Among Thieves, 9, 310-318; 442-461; 496-498; and 634-636.  Continuation of the trends discussed there, particularly the pattern of granting, and then suspending, reprisals, may be noted in the administration of a reprisal granted against Gaeta, suspended indefinitely on April 13, 1425; ASG, AS, Diversorum 507, f. 50 rv; and the suspension of all reprisals awarded anywhere in the western Riviera (the Ponente) for a period of three months; ASG, AS, Diversorum, 509, f. 123v, n. 420 (November 8, 1425).  One may also note the decline in the number of Regesta marcarum; while there are nine of these registers for the period between 1372-1409, only threeãACA, CancillerÍa real, Regs. 2924; 2925; and 3493ãare extant for the period between 1416-1478.  The last of these, Reg. 3493, is, moreover, half blank.

50 A security payment, given as idoneus, ydoneus, or securitas in the Genoese sources, was, for example, collected from captains who departed from the Genoese colony of Pera during the fourteenth century; see "Statuti," ed. Promis, 704, c. 164.  The Latin cautio, from which the term "caution-money" is derived, is employed more regularly in non-Genoese sources; note, for example, "Privilþges du Grand Amiral de Sicilie de 1399," in Pardessus, vol. 5, 258.  See also Nys, 26.

51 ACA, CancillerÍa real, Procesos judiciales, Procesos en quarto 1327D (August 2, 1327-September 4, 1327).  The extant records contain 55 folios, most of which record the testimony of witnesses regarding the charges against de Llor. Note, however, f. 2r, Guillem de Llor's refutation of these charges, with a reiteration that "se numquam fecisse malumÄ."   The process does not record de Llor's sentence.

52 The cases, documented in ASG, AS, Diversorum, Reg. 496, f. 144r, n. 317 (September 4, 1380); Reg. 497, f. 15r, n. 10 (January 13, 1382); and f. 153 rv n. 326 (December 29, 1382), are discussed in Tai, Honor Among Thieves, 409-412.  See also Surdich, 154-156, doc. 8.

53 ASG, AS, Diversorum 507, f. 108r, n. 289 (September 10, 1423): "Äquerele exponentibus fuisse ablatas certas merces res et bona per Philippum de Uiualdis patronum unius naues que spectant quibusdam mercatoribus subditis Serenissimum Regis Castile et legionis ut asseretur petentibus de his mercibus rebus et bonis fieri deberi integram restitutionemÄ." ASG, AS, Diversorum 507, f. 138r, n. 398 (December 18, 1423): "Äquatenus compellatus Philippum de Uiualdis et eius bona sine dicti Philippi particeps aut alios qui nobis iure compellandi uideatur ad reddendum ac in tuto deponendum res et merces ac bona que per eum asseruntur ablata ab illis mercatoribus hispanisÄ."

54 On April 13, 1425, Bartolomeo Gualteriis of Porto Mariis received back goods unjustly confiscated by the corsair Ambrosio Rubeo; ASG, AS, Diversorum, 507, f. 51r, n. 127.

55 ASG, AS, Diversorum, 509, ff. 87r-88r, n. 292a, b, c (August 19, 1425).

56 ASG, AS, Diversorum, Reg. 510, f. 78 rv, n. 236 (June 18, 1426) record the earliest consideration of Grimaldi's case: "Ä.Thomas de Grimaldis olim de Carolo ducatorem seu patronum unius nauis qui scelerato proposito sola que praede cupiditate actus nuper expugnauit ac cepit nauem quandem Xandri Mauro ciuis Uenetis uariis mercibus et rebus onustam in mari et assecuratur uicino littoribus BuzeeÄstatuunt et decreuunt et ordinant quod spectabilis dominus potestas Janue eius quod curia possit in et pro dicto crimine citare requirereÄet liberam potestatem arbitrium auctoriatate bailam procedendiÄet presertim capitulo de modo forestandiÄ."  Grimaldi's  sentence was pronounced on November 15, 1426; ASG, AS, Diversorum, Reg. 510, ff. 118r-119v, n. 330. 

57 Sentences and deliberations over the possibility of sentences of this type are recorded in ASV, Avogaria del Comune, Raspe, Reg. 3642/2, ff. 33v (January 14, 1351); 35v (December 9, 1351); 39r (March 29, 1351); 73r-74v (January 3-18, 1353); March 1, 1353); 77r (March 7, 1353); Raspe, Reg. 3644/4,  f. 15v (July 7, 1379), the proceeding against the commander Vettor Pisani.  See also Camillo Manfroni, "La disciplina di marinai veneziani nel secolo XIV," Rivista marittima XXXV (May, 1902): 237-248, and idem, "Nuove note sulle disciplina dai marinai veneziani," Rivista marittima XLIII (June, 1910): 487-502.

58 ASV, Avogaria del Comune, Raspe, Reg. 3644/4 (1378-1393), f. 3rv (May 29, 1386), and  ASV,Senato, Deliberazioni Misti, Reg. 40, f. 34 rv (May 29, 1386).  These sentence initially condemned the two to a five-year suspension and fines of of £200; this term was nevertheless commuted, and the extent of their fines reduced  to £100; note  ASV, Maggior Consiglio, Deliberazioni, Reg. 21, Leona, (1384-1415), f. 29r (January 20, 1389); and ff. 30v-31r (May 23, 1389).  See also Donald E. Queller, The Venetian Patriciate: Reality vs. Myth (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 230-231, and Tai, Honor Among Thieves, 300-301.

59 ASV, Avogaria del Comune, Raspe 3642/2, f. 27v (July 27, 1347).

60 ASV, Maggior Consiglio, Deliberazioni, Ursa, f. 1 rv (April 18, 1415).

61 The strategic importance of Sardinia is discussed by Vincente Salavert y Roca, "El problema estratþgico del Mediterrˆneo occidental y la politica aragonesa (siglos XIV y XV)," Actas y communicaci„nes del IV Congreso de historia de la Corona de Arag„n (Palma de Mallorca, 1955), 1:201-221, and idem, Cerde¿a y la expansi„n mediterrˆnea de la Corona de Arag„n, 1297-1314, 2 vols., Consejo superior de investigaci„nes cientificas.  Escuela de estudios medievales, Estudios, vol. XXVII (Madrid, 1956).  See also the collection of essays in Els catalans a Sardenya, ed. Jordi Carbonell and Francesco Manconi, Encyclopedia Catalana, S.A. (Barcelona, 1987), and Meloni, esp. 1:30-34.  For Crown administration in Sardinia, see the inventory of the Archivio Comunale in Alghero, in Antonio Era, Le Raccolte di carte: Specialemente di Re Aragonesi e Spagnoli (1260-1715) esistenti nell'Archivio del Comune di Alghero (Sassari, 1927).  For the Judges of Arborea and their alliance with the Viscounts of Narbonne, see Evandro Putzulu, "Cartolari de Arborea: Raccolta di documenti diplomatici inediti sulle relazioni tra il Giudicato d'Arborea e il Re d'Aragona (1328-1930)," Archivio storico sardo XXV (1-2) (Padua, 1957), 70-170; and Luisa d'Arienzo, Documenti sui Visconti di Narbona e la Sardegna, 2 vols. (Padua, 1977).  For piracy in Sardinia, see Evandro Putzulu, "Pirati e corsari nei mari della Sardegna durante la prima metš del secolo XV," IV Congreso de historia de la Corona d'Arag„n.  Actas y Communicaciones (Palma de Mallorca, 1959), 1: 155-179; and Tai, Honor Among Thieves, 339-349; 378-385.

62 ACA, CancillerÍa real, Procesos judiciales, Procesos en quarto, 1369A (April 6-27, 1369).  The process was initiated on posthumous behalf of Guillem Arius, the captain of the panfilo Saint Anthony that had been attacked, and who Bayonne had murdered by throwing overboard;   Note also f. 3r "ÄEt aÐo fet lo dit Johan Burguino ab molta gent de ballestres e d'altres gens armades per forÐa...en lo dit panfil cridant "Arborea, Arborea"Ä." f.. 4rÄen les dues galeis den li jutge e den Johan Jutge los quals facere molts desonors diuerses damptages a nos senyorsÄ."   These circumstances were confirmed by additional witnesses on fol. 13v, and 18v-19r.  Ff. 27v-39r describe how Bayonne formed his relationship with the house of Arborea and their allies, the Viscounts of Narbonne.  Descriptions of Bayonne's torture and death sentence are given ff. 47r-55r.

63 Savona's tributary status was imposed in a series of agreements published in Liber iurium Reipublicae Genuensis, 2 vols., Monumenta Historiae Patriae, 7, 9 (Turin, 1854-1857), vol. 1 (7): docs. CLXXVII, col. 166; CCXIV-CCXV, col. 186-188; CCLVII, col. 230; CCCXXX, col. 316-317; CCCCXLVI, col. 477-480.  The most important and definitive of these was the treaty of Varazze of 1251, given in Liber iurium, doc. DCCXC, col. 1044-1054, and in I registri della Catena del Comune di Savona, 3 vols., Atti della Societš Ligure di Storia Patria, n.s., vol. 26, fasc. 1-3 (Genoa, 1986-1987), 2:72-83, doc. 9.  A copy of the treaty is also preserved among Savona's series of parchments, ASS, Pergamene, 3.16, inventoried by Filippo Noberasco, Le pergamene dell'Archivio communale di Savona, Atti della Societš Savonese di Storia Patria, 1.2 (Savona, 1919), 200-201, doc. 151.  See also Vittorio and Poggio Poggi, Cronotassi dei principali magistrati che ressero e amministrarono il Comune di Savona dall'origini all'perdita della sua autonomia, published in six sections, in Regia deputazione di storia patria per la Lombardia, Miscellanea di storia italiana, terze serie, 10 (1906): 240-369; 14 (1910): 1-98; 16 (1913): 1-235; and Atti della Societš Savonese di Storia Patria, 17 (1935): 17-151; 21 (1939): 5-102; 22 (1940): 3-155; esp. 14 (1910), 37-39.  Savona's importance as a trade center may be documented through the parchments published by Ausilia Roccatagliata, Pergamene medievali savonese (998-1313), 2 vols., Atti e memorie della Societš Savonese di Storia Patria, n.s. XVI (Savona, 1982-1986).  Savona's role in the cloth trade during the 1320s may be documented through acts of the notary Lanfranco de Nazario, published by Lþone Liagre de Sturler, Les relations commerciales entre G¡nes, La Belgique et L'Outremont d'aprús les archives notariales gþnoises (1320-1400), 2 vols., €tudes d'histoire þconomique et sociale publiþes par l'Institut historique belge de Rome VII-VIII (Brussels, 1969), 13-88, docs. 9, 14-15, 17-18, 20-22, 24-27; 29-36; 41; 43-46; 48; 50-55; 57; 64; 68-72. For Savona's importance in the salt trade, see also C. Manca, Aspetti dell'espansione economica catalano-aragonese nel Mediterraneo occidentale.  Il commercio internazionale del sale (Milan, 1996), esp. 201-217. See also I. Scovazzi and F. Noberasco, Storia di Savona, 3 vols. (Savona, Societš Savonese di Storia Patria, 1928), 1:341-348.

64 Savona authorized several reprisals between 1248-1347, which are preserved in two cartularies in the Archivio di Stato, Savona (hereafter cited as ASS), Cartularium Lodi I and II.  For these registers, see the discussion by Gabriela Airaldi, "Pirateria e rappresaglia in fonti savonesi," Clio: Rivista Trimestrale di Studi Storici X (1974): 68-88, esp. 79ff.   For contact between Savona and France during this period, see Renþ de Mas Latrie, Du droit de marque ou droit de reprþsailles au moyen-Šge suivi de piúces justificatives (Paris, 1875), 88-96, doc. XIV.  Savona's dealings with Venice during this period may be traced through the deliberations of the Venetian Senate, ASV, Senato, Deliberazioni Misti XV, indexed by Roberto Cessi and Mario Brunetti, Le deliberazioni del Consiglio dei Rogati Senato: Serie mixtorum, Tomo II: Libri XV-XVI, Monumenti storici, n.s. XVI (Venice, 1961), 30-32, 114, 137-138, ns. 99, 106, 405, 483; and ASV, Libri commemoriali, II, f. 182v (January 17, 1326), indexed by Predelli, 2:270-271, n. 457; III, f. 69v (October 30, 1331), indexed by Predelli, 2:40, n. 231.  See also Carlo Cippola, "Un litigio tra Venezia e Savona nel 1324," Atti della Reale Accademia delle scienze di Torino pubblicati dagli accademici segretari delle dieci classi, vol. 36 (Turin, 1900-1901): 388-400.

65For the original purview of the Officium Robarie, see Benjamin Z. Kedar, "L'Officium Robarie di Genova: un tentativo di coesistere con la violenza," Archivio storico italiano 143, no. 525 (1985): 331-372.  For the conversion of the Officium Robarie under Boccanegra and his successors, see Ausilia Roccatagliata, L'Officium Robarie del comune di Genova: da ufficio della pirateria a ufficio dei ribelli (Genoa, 1991); and Tai, Honor Among Thieves, 420-441; 462-508.

66 These cases, from ASG, Notai giudiziari, are inventoried by Roccatagliata, L'Officium Robarie.  Eight full cases refer to piracy perpetrated by natives of Savona; VII (November 13, 1394-September 17, 1395), inventoried by Roccatagliata, 1:33-47; VIII (November 19, 1394), inventoried by Roccatagliata, 1:48-49; XLIX (May 4, 1395-March 10, 1396), inventoried by Roccatagliata, 2:392-402; LXIII (July 29, 1395-August 11, 1395), inventoried by Roccatagliata, 2:477-481; LXXII (August 5, 1395-March 11, 1396), inventoried by Roccatagliata, 2: 518-525; LXXXV (September 13, 1395-July 12, 1396), inventoried by Roccatagliata, 2: 604-624; XCIX (November 13, 1395-April 18, 1396), inventoried by Roccatagliata, 2:704-712.

67 The main treaty, dated April 26, 1397, is published by Eugúne Jarry, Les origines de la domination franÐaise š G¡nes (1392-1402): Documents diplomatiques et politiques (Paris, 1896), 551-556, doc. XXIX. Jarry's subject is the years of rebellion against Adorno and their implications for Genoa and its surrounding Riviera. See also the agreements that followed, Registri della Catena, 1:243-246, doc. 140, and ASG, AS, Diversorum, Reg. 500, fol. 66v/68v, n. 219 (March 7, 1399), published in Registri della Catena, 2:63, doc. 4. For a recent treatment of this period, see also Stephen Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 257-260.

68 An example of how Savona continued to contend at near parity with Genoa are the negotiations between the two cities recorded in ASG, AS, Busta 21/361, "Privilegi e convenzioni della villa Savona (1014-1414)." For the events of 1526, see Poggi, Cronotassi 22 (1940): 115-119; Scovazzi and Noberasco, 2:93, and Braudel, 1:339.

69 For discussion of "postivist" and "naturalist" definitions of piracy, see Rubin, esp. 28-50 and 290-311.  See also Perotin-Dumon, 196-227; and Thomson, esp. 101-107.

70 In addition to Rubin, The Law of Piracy, 241-290, see also idem, Piracy, Paramountcy, and Protectorates (Kuala Lumpur, 1974).

71 For the history of the Malay peninsula, and essentialized characterization of its peoples as "pirates," see Nicholas Tarling, Piracy and Politics in the Malay World: A Study of British Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century South-East Asia (Melbourne: F.W. Cheshire, 1963), esp. 1-20; 206-231.  See also Carl A. Trocki, Prince of Pirates: Temenggongs and the Development of Jahor and Singapore, 1784-1884 (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1979).  Note also Rubin, Piracy, Paramountcy, and Protectorates, 52.  For a contemporaneous Malay view of the British in Malaya, note Abdullah Bin Abdul Kadir, The Hikayat Abdullah, trans. A.H. Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).  For an earlier history of the peninsula, note Sejarah Mulayu or Malay Annals, trans. C.C. Brown (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1970).

72 For this, see Bruce W. Holsinger, "Medieval Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Genealogies of Critique," Speculum 77, no. 4 (2002): 1195-1227; Kathleen Davis, "National Writing in the Ninth Century: A Reminder for Postcolonial Thinking About the Nation," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28, no. 3 (1998), 613-637; Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950-1350 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993); and Sharon Kinshita, "Pagans are Wrong and Christians are Right: Alterity, Gender, and Nation in the Chanson de Roland," The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31, no. 1 (2001): 79-111.

 
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