LEGAL FRAMEWORK OF MARITIME TRADE IN MEDIEVAL BOKA KOTORSKA
LEGAL FRAMEWORK OF MARITIME TRADE IN MEDIEVAL BOKA KOTORSKA

Summary/Abstract: Maritime law offers a clear example of how legal norms originated and developed based on the development and expansion of certain activities in social communities. The need of these communities to preserve certain relations associated with such activities and to elaborate them further led to their standardization and codification. This process was constantly renewed with each significant change in the organization of key activities, and that also entailed a change in the organization of communities. The interrelationship of seafaring and trade is one of the key propellants of this development and contributes greatly to its intensity. The need for the expansion of markets makes constant and increasing demands to seafaring, and the technical development of maritime traffic contributed greatly to the flourishing of trade. The seafaring traffic and trade in the autonomous communes and states in the Adriatic made a particularly valuable contribution to this development not only in the Middle Ages, but also later, during the period preceding the emergence of civic social and legal systems. Kotor and other communes in the Bay of Kotor made notable contributions to the elaboration of maritime law. Their statutes and other legal acts, including the statutes of fraternities, collections of texts dealing with maritime law and numerous notarial records, represent a rich legal heritage and testify to the general development of maritime law. Kotor made a singular contribution to the general development of maritime traffic and trade by the activity of a professional association, the Fraternity of Saint Nicholas the Sailor. The importance of the economic activities connected with seafaring and the overseas markets, as well as for the life and progress of the Kotor community enhanced the importance of this guild to such an extent that some prerogatives of the public authorities – including even some deemed inalienable in other communities – were transferred to it. A detailed record of the organization of all sorts of relations associated with maritime traffic and trade, seafarers, and merchants, has been preserved in its numerous documents, which testify to its legislative activity and to the awareness of its great importance for the ordering of social relations. The ordinances regulating the joint ventures of merchants and seamen in entica, colleganzia and rogantia are among the earliest enactments of the kind not only in this Region, but in general.

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