of various nationalities. They could not therefore fail to stimulate trade and the interchange of ideas, arouse a keener sense of common interests, and awaken a deeper consciousness of the unity of Christendom. They also prepared the way for the destruction of feudalism by weakening the resources of the nobility — a condition from which the free cities and kings were not slow to profit.

47. Influence of Chivalry. The influence of chivalry upon the amelioration of warfare has probably been exaggerated. Although it undoubtedly tended somewhat to soften manners and humanize the conduct of the nobles during the later Middle Ages, it is an open question whether its tendency was not rather to increase than to mitigate the barbarities of medieval warfare, which often rivaled, if indeed they did not sometimes exceed, those of the ancient Orient.80 The obligation of chivalry extended only to equals, and the desire for ransom added the motive of greed to the lust for combat and the exercise of brutal passions.81

50 On the barbarities of medieval warfare, see Nys, Origines, ch. 11; Walker, History, 63 ff.; Hosack, History of the Law of Nations, chs. 2-4; Ward, Enquiry, etc., I, chs. 8-9, and II, ch. 14.

Nys (Origines, p. 188) gives the following summary of the character of mediæval warfare: "In the Middle Ages war bears the stamp of an indescribable cruelty; adversaries injure each other as much as possible; the annihilation of the enemy is the final end of hostilities. Hence, unheard-of acts of barbarity; the use of poisoned weapons; the mutilation of prisoners, devastation, the sack and destruction of towns; recourse to treason and perfidy. We are unable to furnish a complete picture of the atrocities committed."

The Church made some slight efforts to mitigate the horrors of warfare, as, e.g. its prohibition of the use of the crossbow and of projectiles hurled from machines, but these efforts were unsuccessful. It also condemned the enslavement of Christian prisoners. Although prisoners were often massacred and sometimes enslaved, the Church deserves the gratitude of mankind for its crusade against slavery. Prisoners of note were generally ransomed, sometimes exchanged, and in a few cases released on parole. In the latter case hostages were usually given.

The following passage from a Christian historian descriptive of the capture of Jerusalem, which was taken by storm on July 15, 1099, may serve as an illustration of the unrestrained brutality of the Crusaders when their fierce and unbridled passions were aroused: "No barbarian, no infidel, no Saracen, ever perpetrated such Wanton and cold-blooded atrocities of cruelty as the wearers of the cross of Christ on the capture of that city. Murder was mercy, rape tenderness, simple plunder the mere assertion of the conqueror's right. Children were seized by their legs, some of them were plucked from their mother's breasts and dashed against the walls or whirled from the battlements. Others were obliged to leap from the walls; some tortured, roasted by slow fires. They ripped up prisoners to see if they had swallowed gold. Of 70,000 Saracens there were not left enough to bury the dead; poor

E

48. Influence of Medieval Commerce. Another important influence upon the development of the Law of Nations was that of medieval commerce, which centered in certain Italian cities $2 of the Mediterranean, and was greatly stimulated by the Crusades. It flourished in spite of war, piracy, and the opposition of the Church, and was later extended to the north by way of the Atlantic as well as along overland routes. The desire to protect and extend medieval commerce led to the formation of leagues of cities. The most important of these confederacies was the Hanseatic League (1250-1450) which, at the time of its greatest extent, "included more than ninety cities of the Baltic and North Sea regions, both seaports and inland towns." 8

49. The Discovery of America. - The necessity for opening up new trade routes to India, which resulted from the Turkish conquests of the fifteenth century (more particularly the capture of Constantinople in 1453), led to the discovery of America and the circumnavigation of Africa and the globe. These, in turn, transferred the center of greatest commercial activity from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, and greatly extended the circle of international and commercial relations.

50. The Consolato del Mare. It is to mediæval commerce that we owe those collections of maritime law which have exercised such a great influence upon the subsequent development of this branch of international jurisprudence. By far the most important of these was the Consolato del Mare, a private collec

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Christians were hired to perform the office. Every one surprised in the Temple was slaughtered, till the reek from the dead bodies drove away the slayers. The Jews were buried alive in their synagogues." 4 Milman, History of Latin Christianity, p. 37 (American ed., 1881). Cited by Hosack, History of the Law of Nations, p. 68. Hosack adds that the brutality of the Crusaders has often been contrasted with the remarkable generosity with which Saladin, the renowned Sultan of Eygpt, treated the captive Christians when he retook Jerusalem in 1187.

82 The most important of these were Amalfi, Venice, Pisa, and Genoa.

83 Harding, Essentials in Medieval and Modern History, p. 187. See map on pp. 184-185, showing extent of mediæval commerce, trade routes, and the Hansa towns and settlements. The objects of the League were common defense, the acquisition, maintenance, and security of trade; and it provided for the settlement of disputes between members by arbitration.

84 On the Consolato del Mare, see especially Pardessus, Us et coutumes de la mer, I, 21–34, 206-209, and II, 1-368 or ch. 12. For English translations of the most famous chapters of the Consolato, see Wheaton, History, 63-65; and Manning, 280283. Both are copies of Robinson's translation of the Prize Chapters of the Con

tion of rules derived from maritime practice in the Mediterranean, which was published in Barcelona, Spain, in 1494.8

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These rules showed a remarkable liberality toward friends or neutrals. They made ownership of the ship and goods the test of liability to forfeiture, and laid down the principle that a friend's goods found on board an enemy ship were to be restored to the owner on payment of the freight. It was even provided that the owner of the cargo might purchase the vessel at a suitable price. On the other hand, enemy goods found on a neutral vessel were subject to confiscation, although even in this case the vessel, which might be compelled to carry the cargo to a place of safety, was restored to its owner, who received the same freight that he would have received if the goods had been carried to their original destination.

51. The Mediæval Origin of the Modern Consulate. The interests of medieval commerce led to the establishment of consulates. At least as early as the twelfth century, naval and merchant consuls (consules marinariorum et mercatorum), chosen by the seamen or merchants themselves, settled disputes among their countrymen and represented the interests of the seamen and merchants of leading Italian cities in Mohammedan countries. These officials (also called consul-judges) were, at first, generally confined to Oriental countries, where (except in Japan) they still exercise civil and criminal jurisdiction over nationals of their own country. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries this institution gradually spread to the West; but, owing to the rise of permanent embassies and the

solato del Mare, in Collectanea Maritima, No. 5. See also 3 Twiss, Black Book of the Admiralty, 539 and 611.

Other important medieval collections or codes of maritime law were: (1) The so-called Amalfitan Tables, which appear to date from the eleventh century. (2) The Laws of Oleron for Western Europe, which seem to have been completed in the latter part of the twelfth century. (3) The Laws of Wisby, dating from about 1288, for the Baltic Nations. (4) The Maritime Law of the Hanseatic League, completed in 1614. (5) The so-called Rhodian Sea-Law of the Roman Empire and the early Middle Ages, which, however, is generally regarded as apocryphal. It was first published in 1561, though Ashburner (in The Rhodian Sea-Law, 1909, p. cxii) presents some strong arguments in favor of his opinion that it was "probably put together by a private hand between A.D. 600 and A.D. 800."

Nys, Origines, p. 232. But its actual development dates from a much earlier period, probably the fourteenth century. It was applied by the sea consuls of Barcelona who existed as early as 1279.

"In the North, i.e. among members of the Hanseatic League, the consular judges

development of the doctrine of territorial jurisdiction, the extraterritorial powers of the consuls greatly declined in the course of the sixteenth century.

52. The Rise of the Modern European States-system. — The mediæval consuls were, however, in no proper sense agents or organs of internationalism. Although Christendom was aroused to some sense of its community of interests by the Crusades, mediæval man still lived in a world largely disordered and unorganized, while dreaming of "kingdom come" or the universal rule of Pope or Emperor. The latter dream was dispelled through the mighty forces set in motion by the Renaissance and the Reformation; and the evils of disorder and disorganization were largely overcome through the rise of the modern States-system of Europe, which was based on the ideas of the absolute territorial sovereignty of princes, the legal equality of States, and the maintenance of a balance of power or equilibrium of forces between them.

The main agents in this reorganization of Europe were the cities of Italy, the dynasties of France, England, and Spain (more particularly Louis XI, Henry VII, and Ferdinand of Aragon),87 and the system of resident embassies which was established first in Italy 88 (from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries), and later were known as aldermen. Like the consuls of the South, they represented the powerful merchant guilds or corporations rather than the governments. We should remember in this connection that the Middle Ages were still dominated by the idea of personality of law, and that it was entirely natural that colonies or corporations of foreigners residing in a certain quarter of a mediæval city should be permitted to administer their own law, and that they should especially demand these privileges in the Orient.

I

On the Medieval Origin of the Consulate, see Bonfils (Fauchille), Nos. 734-741; 1 Halleck (Baker's 3d ed.), 369-370 and note; * Holtzendorff, in 1 Handbuch, § 77;2 Martens, Traité, § 18; Hautefeuille, Histoire, 95 ff.; 2 Mérignhac, Traité, 314 ff.; 2 Nys, Droit int., 396–400; 1 Oppenheim, § 419; 4 Pradier-Fodéré, Traité, Nos. 2036-2043.

*

87 These "three magicians" (as Bacon called them), whose reigns fall within the latter half of the fifteenth century, all contributed powerfully to the development of that royal power which resulted in the destruction of feudalism as a political force, the unification and nationalization of the State, and the establishment of the modern States-system of Europe. The main "organizers" of European diplomacy appear to have been Ferdinand of Aragon, Louis XII, and the Emperor Maximilian at the close of the fifteenth century. See 2 Hill, History, p. 309.

88 The researches of Nys (see especially his Origines, ch. 14) and others have rendered almost worthless earlier accounts of the origin of European diplomacy. The system of permanent resident embassies was unknown to antiquity. It originated

(during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) in Western Europe. The idea of the balance of power and equilibrium of forces also found its first modern application in the interstate relations of the leading Italian cities in the fifteenth century, and was later applied in the larger field of general European politics.90

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53. The Peace of Westphalia. -The actual existence of a secular community of States in Western Europe was first fully revealed to the World by the Treaties of Westphalia - the work of the Congress of Catholic and Protestant States which met at Münster and Osnabrück in 1644-1648.91 This Peace,

in Italy (Venice taking the lead) in the thirteenth century. In the fifteenth century the Italian cities had permanent representatives in Spain, Germany, France, and England. These States maintained similar relations with one another in the sixteenth century, but the system of resident embassies cannot be said to have been generally established throughout Europe until the age of Richelieu, Mazarin, and Louis XIV in the seventeenth century. The terms "diplomatist" and "diplomacy" did not come into general use, however, until the end of the eighteenth century. On the origin of European Diplomacy, see especially, in addition to Nys (cited above), Baschet, La diplomatie vénitienne; Ibid., Les archives de Venise (1870); Bonfils (Fauchille), No. 656; 1 Calvo, § 392; 2 Fiore, No. 1177; 1 Flassan, Histoire (1811), passim; *Hill, History of European Diplomacy, vols. I and II, passim, more particularly I, ch. 8, ad fin., and II, chs. 2, 4, and 7; Holtzendorff, in 1 Handbuch, §83; Krauske, Die Entwickelung der ständigen Diplomatie (1885); 1 Mauldela-Claviere, La diplomatie au temps de Machiavel; 1 Oppenheim, §§ 358-359; *3 Pradier-Fodéré, Traité, Nos. 1231-1236; Ibid., 1 Corps diplomatique, 203-214; I Rivier, 431.

*Le. Venice, Florence, Milan, Naples, and the Papacy. It was especially applied by Lorenzo de Medici. Italy also seems to furnish us with the first example of the modern State, viz. the centralized administration of Frederick II in Southern Italy and Sicily in the thirteenth century. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance (Eng. trans. by Middlemore), p. 5. Cited by Nys, Origines, p. 166.

* Evidences of the application of this idea may be found in the policy of England and France during the sixteenth century, but the balance of power can hardly be said to have been established as a European system prior to the latter part of the seventeenth century. It was first formally and officially recognized by the Peace of Utrecht in 1713.

On the origin of the system of "European Equilibrium," see Nys, Origines, ch. 8; 2 Hill, History of European Diplomacy, passim, particularly, 158, 238, 294 ff. "In the negotiations at Münster and Osnabrück all the leading European powers were represented, except England, Poland, Muscovy, and Turkey, viz. the Papacy, the German Empire, France, Spain, Sweden, Venice, Denmark, Portugal, and the States General of Holland. The various German States and the Dukes of Tuscany, Savoy, and Mantua also sent delegates. The Swiss cantons were represented through the good offices of the French and included in the general pacification. The independence of Holland was also recognized. England and Poland were included