The Foreigner and Ownership Rights in Eastern Adriatic Medieval Communes
The Foreigner and Ownership Rights in Eastern Adriatic Medieval Communes

Author(s): Ante Birin
Subject(s): History of Law, Civil Law, Rural and urban sociology, 13th to 14th Centuries
Published by: Hrvatski institut za povijest
Keywords: Ownership Rights; Eastern Adriatic medieval cities; ownership rights for foreigners;
Summary/Abstract: The legal position of foreigners in Eastern Adriatic medieval cities, which in the period from the 12th to 14th centuries organized themselves as communal societies, is a subject that surpasses the existing juridical sources, same as in the case of Italian cities. Limited almost exclusively to the city statutes, i.e. codices of urban law, these sources – chronologically determined by their time of composition and conceptually insufficient concerning the fact that they were more or less regulating only some questions regarding the foreigners – reveal only the tip of an iceberg in terms of their legal status. The lack of juridical sources from the pre-statutory period, on the one hand, leaves open the question how the legal position of foreigners was regulated at the time and how it gradually evolved. Partnership and commercial contracts with which the Eastern Adriatic communes sought to regulate, bilaterally, their relations to each other, as well as towards the Western Adriatic communes during the 12th and 13th centuries, reveal that the two fundamental principles on which they were based - the principle of reciprocity and the principle of protecting the property and person of foreigners (merchants) – became and remained the basis of their legal status when codifying urban law.

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