The sixth volume in The Cambridge History of International Law covers the developments of inter- and transnational laws in early modern Europe (1492–1660). The preface explains how recent revisionism of traditional state- and Eurocentric views on the history of international law impacts the study of this subject and how this is reflected in the volume.

This chapter offers a discussion on the laws of war, or jus in bello, as the previous one. However, it provides an exclusive focus on maritime warfare. Old Regime Europe was marked by the expansion of permanent state battlefleets and the strengthening of naval administrations. At the same time, a complementarity between public and private forms of maritime warfare, notably privateering, persisted as one of the defining aspects of naval warfare. The chapter deals with the specificity of waging war at sea and related legal issues. It draws both from state-military practice and from the specialised legal literature that started to appear at the time. Subjects which are covered include the main rules of naval warfare, privateering, the treatment of prisoners of war, the bombardment of coastal cities, prize law and the role of admiralty courts. Particular attention is devoted to the issue of maritime neutrality. Indeed, the recurrent tension between the respective rights and duties of neutrals and belligerents assumed great relevance in this period, being often dealt with in international treaties and legal scholars’ treatises.

Between 1660 and 1775 the number of European countries with diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire that obtained ahdames of their own grew rapidly, but many of these newcomers did not establish networks of consulates and vice-consulates in the eastern Mediterranean. Instead, they appointed the consuls of other European nations as their vice-consuls. This did not hurt the legal privileges of the merchants from these countries. In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some nations asked the Ottoman government to renew their capitulations several times with the single aim of obtaining more privileges. This development culminated in the French capitulations of 1740, which incorporated the clauses of virtually all earlier ahdnames. In the eyes of many Ottomans, the capitulations of 1740 came to symbolise the Europeans’ ceaseless attempts to obtain more and more privileges from the Turks. But the French renewal of their capitulations in 1673 already laid the foundations for the rise of imperialism. It was then that the Ottoman authorities granted Ottoman subjects working for foreigners as interpreters or as warehousemen the same fiscal and legal status as the Westerners. It was also in 1673 that the French had their role as protectors of the Christian Holy Places in Jerusalem, as well as of all Catholic clergymen – not just Western missionaries, but all Catholic clerics – in the Levant codified in their capitulations. It was this French model that the Russians used in 1774 to claim their own protectorate over all Greek Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman realm.

By the middle of the seventeenth century, a category of sovereign princes and polities had succeeded in monopolising jurisdiction over external relations and the internal machinery of government that allows to speak of sovereign state. The Old Regime saw the further emergence, in governmental and diplomatic practice as well as in learned writings of the paradigm of the law of nations as the preserve of sovereigns. As legal practice and literature, it also expanded in scope and mass to new regulatory fields such as the law of the sea, maritime warfare, neutrality or dispute settlement. The great treatises on the law of nations of the middle of the eighteenth century fleshed out the dualist system of law of nature and of nations that formed one of the intellectual backbones to Grotius’ work into an elaborate framework of the governance of international relations inside Christian Europe and for its imperial expansion outside.

In the early modern age, the settlement of disputes between the actors of ‘international’ relations hinged on communication channels and negotiation networks that were meant to limit the recourse to violence. Multireligious Renaissance Europe saw the emergence of the jus gentium – as a distinct, gestating branch of law – and modern diplomacy, perceived as a social and cultural practice used not only by sovereigns, but also by non-sovereign actors – a practice allowing both Europeans and non-Europeans to engage in formal and informal interactions, in state and non-state settings, through the elaboration of common languages, of (verbal and symbolic) communication practices and of shared political and legal cultures. In a belligerent era, which spawned many wars, European diplomacy developed new forms of negotiation that attest to an elaborate ‘art of peace’. By the end of the period, the Thirty Years War ended with the first experience of dispute settlement through multilateral talks involving nearly all European powers in Westphalia (1643-9) and reflecting conflicts that attest to the successive integration of non-European territories in ongoing European dispute. The congress demonstrated both the effectiveness and the limitations of this innovative negotiation model.

In the period of the Renaissance, trade became a matter of legislation and policy. Municipal governments and princes aimed to facilitate trade. International trade relations became increasingly supervised by states. This came in tandem with more treaties. From the middle of the fifteenth century onwards, specialized institutions were created and they increased control over foreign merchants. As a result of growing government intervention, the rules relating to trade were found in bylaws, charters and statutes. Besides those there were customs of trade, which were mostly local. New mercantile techniques, becoming widespread in this period, were maritime insurance, bills of exchange and partnerships of merchants. Insolvency became regulated in the sixteenth century. From the 1500s onwards, rights of hospitality for traders and a right of trade were developed in ius gentium writings. However, due to the mostly local customs and legislation, trade across European countries was far from harmonised. Gerald Malynes proposed a universal custom of trade, but he struggled with the combination of ius gentium ideas with the more factual customs of trade. His views nonetheless laid the basis for later categorisations of commercial law as being customary and transnational.

This chapter examines the development of the law governing warfare on land in Renaissance Europe. In this formative period, the law of war became a central feature of international relations and a distinct legal field. Wars of religion, the growth of the Ottoman Empire, dynastic disputes and the European expansion all contributed to an almost permanent state of warfare. Against this background, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, several scholars contributed to the development of the law of war, responding to the political, religious and cultural turmoil of the Iron Century by elaborating different theories of such law. They derived concepts and principles from medieval theology, canon and civil law, as well as from history, literature and philosophy. The chapter relies on both primary and secondary sources drawing on state and military practice as well as scholarly – legal, historical and relevant military literature. It surveys the major principles of the ius in bello on land, the international law governing warfare including booty, siege warfare and the treatment of civilians and prisoners of war. Rather than describing the distinct contributions of several scholars to the early modern jus in bello – which could not do justice to the works of relevant scholars, especially in the light of recent outstanding works in the field – this chapter adopts an analytical approach focusing on key themes of the jus in bello, analysing and critically assessing the contributions of various scholars to the same.

Protestant attacks against papal corruption of the cult of saints and falsification of miracles led the Post-Tridentine Church to reform the processes of saint-making through an intensified collaboration with medical science. The alignment of faith and science at the nexus of the human body culminated in the eighteenth century under Benedict XIV Lambertini (r. 1740–58). Benedict published a monumental treatise, still influential today, that codified canonization proceedings on the basis of modern medical expertise, and he was a preeminent patron of scientific and medical institutions and practitioners for the advancement of medical knowledge and public health. The imperatives of the Counter-Reformation, canon law, experimental science and medicine, and the burgeoning Enlightenment coalesced, albeit uneasily, in his vision of a reformed Church, for which natural and saintly bodies became primary emblems in defense of the authority of the Catholic Church in a world increasingly resistant to it.

In recent years, the history of emotions has acquired an epistemological maturity that has established its legitimacy in the historiographic field. But what is an emotion? Although "emotion" is not a medieval word, the great historian of emotions, Barbara H. Rosenwein, refuses the semantic fixity of the vocables, by slipping voluntarily on the terms and by the playing of the synonymies. Emotional expressionism is the mark of the late Middle Ages in religious life but also in the political, ecclesial, and social worlds. The social sharing of emotions fulfills the function of strengthening the collective identity. In a sense, to rewrite the history of the Great Schism from the perspective of the history of emotions is to consider the great fresco of ecclesiastical passions in their experiences, their discursivity, and their subsequent reception. Passions were often silenced a posteriori by the great official narrative of the Church. That is the gap between archives and narratives.

Archdeacon Hildebrand, who became Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073–85), is associated with a radical and swift change in the Roman Church. The vision of a Christendom jointly administered by emperor and clergy, the famous model advanced by Pope Gelasius II (r. 492–96), was transformed into a new order where regnum and sacerdotium occupied separate stacked spheres, with the spiritual claiming superiority. Unlike tenth-century reform movements, the later eleventh-century Roman reforms centered on the papacy. Popes assembled a curia featuring more professional officials, legates, councils, and other technologies of power. The reformed Church cultivated trained lawyers and sympathetic lay leaders. It has been credited with launching a legal “big bang,” the invention of propaganda, the creation of a semi-institutionalized public sphere, and the formation of a persecuting society. Closer examination of institutional changes helps reveal the achievements and limits of this “new world order.”

The relationship of Catholic hierarchies with the medium of printing has always been multifarious, and even in early modern times it was far more complex than most current studies maintain. This chapter attempts to draw a concise and unbiased picture of the papacy’s publishing and censoring practices from the 1460s to the 1630s. It starts with the arrival of the first printers in Italy on the outskirts of Rome and ends with the Galileo Galilei affair, analyzing all intervening attempts to use moveable type in support of papal policy and the development of the Index of Forbidden Books. Highlighting the interconnections between prohibition and promotion, it proposes a unified interpretation of these two lines of action rather than present them in opposition, as is often the case.

The Christian community of Rome, since its origins, was adamant in preserving written texts. Documents and books of multiple kinds were treated as important, precious objects. The history of the popes’ libraries exemplifies this approach. In addition to spreading Christianity and keeping records of discussions and decisions taken by the Church, the library was intended as a repository not only of religious books but also of literary and scientific texts of non-Christian traditions, including pagan classics and others. The mission of ensuring the conservation and spreading of the knowledge was clearly stated during humanism, when the current Vatican Apostolic Library was founded. Books were there made accessible “for the common benefit of the learned.” Such a mission continues today. The papacy considers the Library and its books to be the “heritage of mankind,” one that needs to be made available for generations through continuous technological innovations and cutting-edge preservation strategies.

This chapter examines the role of the papacy in the history of marriage regulation in a long-term perspective. The core theme of corporeality is investigated between doctrine and practice. On the one hand, the body is a central good whose rights of use are mutually exchanged by the spouses within the framework of the marriage contract; on the other hand, it is a deadly burden, the place where the flesh manifests itself with its law that contradicts reason. In the light of this tension, the position of papal authority – in particular the power to bind and dissolve – is addressed by examining its pronouncements, especially the Decretales, conciliar legislation, and the publication of encyclicals and apostolic exhortations up to the most recent on the subject: Amoris laetitia, by Pope Francis I. Finally, some cases that have been dealt with by courts such as the Penitentiary, the Holy Office, and the Rota are examined.

For nearly two centuries after the French Revolution, papal attitudes towards Judaism remained rooted in theological notions of the Jews as deicidal “others” whose salvation would only be achieved through repentance and conversion to Catholicism. Enlightenment notions of religious freedom and tolerance offered Jews an emancipation based on secular citizenship and assimilation, a development which repudiated the Church’s theological and eschatological views of Judaism. As a result, papal attitudes towards the Jews hardened through the nineteenth century, as popes associated emancipated Jews with liberalism, freemasonry, socialism, and democracy, the very ideologies which had undermined papal authority. It was not until the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) that the Church definitely repudiated its negation of the Abrahamic Covenant and the Jewish people. The council document Nostra aetate disavowed anti-Semitism in all forms and recognized Judaism as the wellspring from which the Church emerged, creating a template of interfaith kinship and cooperation which the modern papacy has embraced and expanded upon.