ich Spain and Italy do not supply, and enriched the
merchants by means of whose capital the exports of London and of
Alexandria were conveyed into each other's harbours.

[Sidenote: Maritime laws.]

The usual risks of navigation, and those incident to commercial
adventure, produce a variety of questions in every system of
jurisprudence, which, though always to be determined, as far as
possible, by principles of natural justice, must in many cases depend
upon established customs. These customs of maritime law were anciently
reduced into a code by the Rhodians, and the Roman emperors preserved or
reformed the constitutions of that republic. It would be hard to say how
far the tradition of this early jurisprudence survived the decline of
commerce in the darker ages; but after it began to recover itself,
necessity suggested, or recollection prompted, a scheme of regulations
resembling in some degree, but much more enlarged than those of
antiquity. This was formed into a written code, Il Consolato del Mare,
not much earlier, probably, than the middle of the thirteenth century;
and its promulgation seems rather to have proceeded from the citizens of
Barcelona than from those of Pisa or Venice, who have also claimed to be
the first legislators of the sea.[613] Besides regulations simply
mercantile, this system has defined the mutual rights of neutral and
belligerent vessels, and thus laid the basis of the positive law of
nations in its most important and disputed cases. The king of France and
count of Provence solemnly acceded to this maritime code, which hence
acquired a binding force within the Mediterranean Sea; and in most
respects the law merchant of Europe is at present conformable to its
provisions. A set of regulations, chiefly borrowed from the Consolato,
was compiled in France under the reign of Louis IX., and prevailed in
their own country. These have been denominated the laws of Oleron, from
an idle story that they were enacted by Richard I., while his expedition
to the Holy Land lay at anchor in that island.[614] Nor was the north
without its peculiar code of maritime jurisprudence; namely, the
Ordinances of Wisbuy, a town in the isle of Gothland, principally
compiled from those of Oleron, before the year 1400, by which the Baltic
traders were governed.[615]

[Sidenote: Frequency of piracy.]

[Sidenote: Law of reprisals.]

There was abundant reason for establishing among maritime nations some
theory of mutua