Violence, Protection and Commerce

Abstract

Like other maritime spaces, and indeed even large oceans such as the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean was not at all a ‘no man’s sea’ — as the sea in general appears, opposed to territorial conquest and occupa- tion of land, in a prominent way in Carl Schmitt’s opposition between a terrestrian and a ‘free maritime’ spatial order.¹ Large oceanic spaces such as the Indian Ocean and smaller ones such as the Mediterranean were both culturally highly saturated and legally regulated spaces.² The Inner Sea has even been considered as a matrix of the legal and political scenario of imposition of the Roman ‘policy of the sea’ that had efficiently guaranteed free circulation and trade by eliminating the pirates — Cicero’s ‘enemy of mankind’³-who formerly had infected the Mediterranean. Convergence between Roman and Islamic legal tradi- tions seemed to ensure, after the decline of the Roman Empire, a zone of free maritime navigation and trade.⁴ This ‘Inner Sea’ was made of other regional inner seas, gulfs, channels and straits — as represented (a shared feature) in Early Modern European, Islamic and Ottoman cartography. The Mediterranean has been, from the medieval glossators of Roman Law to the main protagonists of what has been called the ‘hundred years battle of the books’⁵ of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, conducted most prominently by Hugo Grotius, Serafim de Freitas and John Seiden, a rich fund of examples and situations, and indeed a labo- ratory to forge, according to specific contexts and divergent interests, in a kind of ars combinatoria, both the arguments for free navigation at sea and free use of its riches and, on the contrary, legitimate control of territorial waters.