Honor Among Thieves: Merchants and Pirates in Mediterranean Europe, 1200-1500

FAIN: FT-52885-04

Emily Sohmer Tai
CUNY Research Foundation, Queensborough Community College (Bayside, NY 11364-1432)

Honor Among Thieves: Merchants and Pirates in Mediterranean Europe, 1200-1500 studies the process by which legal and practical distinctions were established between unlicensed maritime theft, or piracy, and state-sanctioned maritime raiding, or privateering, in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean. It argues that the settlement of disputes over both forms of maritime predation contributed crucially to the construction of the nascent territorial state; the state's relationship with agents of commerce, or merchants; interactions between states, or diplomacy; and judicial process in Europe. European experience during these centuries moreover has implications for the agency of piracy and extra-territorial violence in world history.