Dynamics in the creation and consolidation of Commercial Law in Western Europe: Examples from Italy and the Low Countries (15th-17th centuries)

14. Oktober 2025

Date: 12 November 2025
Time: 06:15 PM - 07:45 PM (Local Time Germany)
Location: Max planck Insitute for legal history and legal theory (Frankfurt am Main), Conference room Z01

For a long time, the history of commercial law in the later Middle Ages and early modern period was categorized in terms of a spontaneous emergence of norms (consuetudo mercatorum, lex mercatoria). Over the past decades, the influence of jurists and urban administrators has been emphasized more. However, what is lacking is an explanatory framework that captures the coming into being of rules relating to mercantile contracts and situations, as well as their canonization. The dichotomies of local versus transnational, customary versus official, mercantile versus juristic and merchant versus state fall short when the focus is on these problems. Challenges that impede with this exercise have to do with the relationship between law and the economy and the contribution of different social groups to the normative framework. In the lecture, it will be demonstrated that the convergence of rules relating to mercantile contracts and situations happened relatively late (only at the end of the seventeenth century). It happened in tandem with state formation processes or the adoption of rules referred to the commercial prestige of cities. Before the 1670s and 1680s, convergence in western Europe was limited. The rules for many mercantile problems, even on fundamental issues, were “in the balance”. They were not settled and remained debated. In connection thereto, a mercantile “logic” was absent. There were several instances of rules regarding mercantile contracts in which individual traders, and also groups of merchants, held different opinions. Moreover, jurists were in dubio: the lack of fixation of commercial law in the period until the 1670s and 1680s had much to do with difficulties in legal interpretation because several mercantile arrangements were difficult to square with the ius commune. This doubt also explains why rules could change in relative short periods of time. All this will be demonstrated starting from the commercial law that was applied in Bruges, Antwerp, Amsterdam and Genoa. In the lecture several examples will be given relating to bills of exchange, commission trade, partnership and insolvency.

Contact: vogenauer.office@lhlt.mpg.de

Source: Max planck Insitute for legal history and legal theory Newsletter; https://www.lhlt.mpg.de/events/42979/2078412