Research Project

The Right of Reprisal in Practice as Used Against Late Medieval Florentine Merchants

The right of reprisal, also referred to also as the community responsibility system, was a form of medieval mercantile customary law whereby individuals from one community were granted the right to seek redress from members of another community for a wrong done by one of their own. This right, authorized merchants to seize the person and/or property of other traders from a different locality, in retribution for acts committed by members of the offending community thereby addressing through a civil process the problem of debt security. In this way, traders were discouraged from leaving unpaid debts in a distant town, as they would receive pressure both from that polity and their own, as their poor behaviour affected the entire group. Unknown in ancient times, this medieval answer to the issue of how to ensure proper payment for goods given in good faith or loans arranged between traders from a different community developed in Europe during the eleventh century in response to increasing long-distance trade. For long-distance traders, the risk of loss due to bad debts was significantly higher; and so the right of reprisal arose as one of the means to ensure accountability.

Till now, most of the research on the right of reprisal has dealt with its normative legislation and debate over its legitimate usage and efficacy as a ward against moral hazard and insolvency. Individual cases on the other hand, have received far less attention, and these have further rarely, if ever, been placed in a comparative perspective. This research proposes to analyse real case examples of reprisals involving Florentine merchants as a means to assess the way this “common custom” was exercised in practice.