Article of the Month - April 2022
“Jurisdictional Pluralism in a Litigious Sea (1590–1630): Hard Cases, Multi-Sited Trials and Legal Enforcement between North Africa and Italy”
(Guillaume Calafat: Histoire et Civilisations,
Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)
Guillaume Calafat, "Jurisdictional Pluralism in a Litigious Sea (1590–1630): Hard Cases, Multi-Sited Trials and Legal Enforcement between North Africa and Italy," Past & Present 242 (2019): 142–178.
Article Abstract:
This article was published in a special issue of Past & Present dedicated to the relationship between global history and microhistory. It examines in detail Pietro vs. Franchi, a ‘hard case’ between two Corsican merchants which hinged on two interrelated questions: does a master inherits his slave’s (mamluk) outstanding credits in Ottoman North Africa? And, if this is the case, can this debt rightfully be reclaimed on ‘Christian land’ (to borrow the terms used in the legal documents themselves)? This article looks to understand the transformation of disputes and claims across different legal arenas, regions, states, and political entities. This approach reveals the complex web of jurisdictions within which social actors of the early modern period often navigated. The Pietro vs. Franchi dispute was indeed a ‘multi-sited’ trial that unfolded on a transregional scale, circulating from Tunis in 1619 to Pisa in 1625, passing through different procedural stages in Corsica, Genoa, and Tuscany. Rather than comparing a priori different legal institutions across the Mediterranean, an approach which forever risks deploying brutal and anachronistic analogies, following specific disputes in close detail as they moved across multiple jurisdictions allows us to grasp specific legal questions as they actually played out in different locations and contexts. The first part of the article reconstructs the backgrounds of the three main actors of the trial: the bey of Tunis, Murād Bey, his nephew, the Corsican Anton Marco Pietro, and a second merchant, Simone Francesco Franchi. Their biographies shed light on the family ties and protection networks of Corsican merchants that criss-crossed the Mediterranean between the Ottoman province of Tunis, Cap Corse, and the Tuscan port of Livorno at the turn of the 17th century. The second part of the article analyses the roles played by written documents and oral evidence in different jurisdictions. It retraces the case as it moved through different magistracies, from Tunis to Pisa, with a particular focus on the difficulty of enforcing sentences, an aspect of the case that led to exceptionally lengthy trials. The third part of the article focuses on the uses of the law by litigants, who openly expressed their anger and hostility towards each other during their appearances in court. Far from being anecdotal, such personal animosity between litigants points to deeper mechanisms of political, economic, and diplomatic intimidation that were deployed in order to influence judges. The final section of the article focuses on the translation and application of Islamic rules of succession in a Christian country. It highlights the role of witnesses, merchant practices (the so-called pareri) and customs, but also the use of a vocabulary of religious antagonism as a means of disparaging the opposing party in the litigation process. The article as a whole draws on a wide variety of sources, including civil court records, parish registers, diplomatic correspondence, and Inquisition trials. When investigated in all its complexity, this ‘hard case’ allows us to articulate the social, institutional and emotional history of law with the technical and intellectual dimensions of legal operations and categories, bringing together two aspects that historiography often tends to study separately.
Keywords: Mediterranean, Tuscany, Tunisia, Corsica, Microhistory, Legal history, Jurisdictional Pluralism, Consuls, Merchant Networks, Mamluk, Debt
Nomination Statement:
“Jurisdictional Pluralism in a Litigious Sea” examines the legal suit of a Corsican merchant who accused another Corsican merchant of owning him a debt. The prosecuting merchant represented the Tunisian Murad Bey, who claimed that the owning merchant owed the money on account of a loan he had received from one of the Bey’s slaves, who had died in the meantime. Which systems allowed early modern North Africans to demand justice in European courts? What was the status of Islamic succession law in European courts? Calafat explores these questions, and topics such as the thriving Corsican community of Tunis, social uses of the law, Written documentation, and oral proof. As the author skillfully follows the case across different Mediterranean courts (Tunis, Florence, Pisa, Livorno, Corsica, and Genoa), he highlights the nature of Mediterranean jurisdictional pluralism.
Authors’ Comment:
While working on the commercial relations between Ottoman North Africa (Tunis and Algiers) and Southern European port cities at the beginning of the 17th century, I became interested in the numerous cases that were argued on both shores of the Mediterranean – sometimes simultaneously, more often successively. I sought to retrace these multi-sited trials through various archives and documents, in order to follow the litigants across the plurality of jurisdictions that they could mobilize throughout the Mediterranean. This approach allowed me to identify a trial which was particularly complex and acrimonious, and which left abundant documentary evidence. This is indeed a central aspect of this research project: the court records I study are key sources for understanding the history of economic, political, diplomatic, and cultural relations in the Mediterranean. The dispute in question was between Corsican merchants from the Tuscan port of Livorno and dignitaries from the Ottoman province of Tunis. These dignitaries included the bey of Tunis, Murād Bey, himself of Corsican origin, a figure on whose biography I was able to shed new light through my investigation. In its final iterations, the case ultimately questioned the possible mechanisms of enforcing Islamic legal principles of inheritance and succession in a Christian country – a ‘hard case’ for the Tuscan courts charged with judging it. By adopting the ‘close’ and ‘slow reading’ techniques of microhistorians, and by following the litigations pleaded before different legal authorities, I have tried to describe how the terms of a dispute could be transformed from one court to another: how a trial for unpaid cases of sugar in Tunis could evolve into a case brought before the Holy Office of Pisa. In this way, my analysis of this protracted lawsuit helps to map the jurisdictional plurality of the mercantile space. In doing so, it further allows us to reflect upon the uses of law in the early modern period, upon the social implications of recourse to tribunals, and upon the conflicts between Islam and Christianity in terms of laws, competences, and legal enforcement. In methodological terms, I have sought to reflect upon how it might be possible to weave together different legal documents in order to show how categories (such as ‘renegades’ or ‘calumny’) could be translated from one jurisdiction to another. I have tried to put forward the idea that the ‘hard cases’ we find in the archives call for an in-depth description, an inductive investigation which can allow us to reveal - or at least to better understand - the social and institutional conditions of possibility in which they occurred. One of the other goals of this research, which I am now extending in other sites and in other contexts, is to show how these ‘hard cases’ come to test institutions and how they allow us to reflect upon the history of the evolving jurisdictional configurations available to sailors and merchants as they moved across the early modern Mediterranean.
Would you like to discuss this article?
Start a thread on the Mediterranean Seminar list-server
See the other Articles of the Month here.