Professional paper
The Legal Position of Foreigners in the Statutes of Dalmatian Cities
Ante Birin
Abstract
When the trade on the eastern coast of the Adriatic started to experience a strong impetus in the middle of the twelfth century, foreigners, particularly foreign merchants, started to be more frequent guests of the eastern Adriatic communes. In order to protect their trade interests, the same communes were moved to regulate the legal position of these newcomers and started to conclude treaties with the communes on the opposite shore of the Adriatic, and also similar treaties among themselves, treaties whose main incentive was, besides the mutual liberation from tolls and different dues, the giving of guarantees for the protection of goods and the personal safety of citizens (merchants) of the treaties’ signatory parties. The basic rule emerging from these treaties – the principle of reciprocity – was later transferred and further elaborated in their city statutes. In this work, the author concentrated his research on the position of the foreigner in the statutes of Dalmatian communes.
Although in dictionaries of medieval latinity there may be a found long list of terms for styling different groups of foreigners – extraneus, forensis, peregrinus, viator, vagabundus and so on – foreigners were in medieval Dalmatian statutes regularly styled by the most general term forensis, or, very rarely, by that of extraneus. Particular categories of foreigners, except that of foreign merchants, are barely mentioned.
Medieval statutory law defined as a foreigner not only someone who was not born on the territory of the commune concerned, but, first and foremost, one who did not have his permanent residence on the communal territory. By guaranteeing the protection of his goods and money, as well as his personal safety and certain privileges, such as the right to an abbreviated judicial procedure, the communes tried not only to avoid uncontrolled escalations of violence, but also, in accord with the principle of reciprocity, to ensure that the same principles would be applied to their citizens. In cases when a foreigner decided to settle in one of the Dalmatian communes, he became an inhabitant of that city and equal to the citizens in almost everything except in political rights, with the addition that he able to acquie full citizenship after a certain term had passed or he had fulfilled certain conditions.
Besides foreigners and foreign merchants, the only particular group of outsiders mentioned in the statutes is that of Slavs/Croats. The attitude towards them was to a certain extent more restrictive than that towards the forenses, and the reasons for that were in the first place of an economic nature. Specifically, as Dalmatian communes could not be certain that they were capable of ensuring “their right and justice as lawful order requests and demands,” while facing the threat of their periodically occurring assaults – which were the results of the political ambitions of Croatian magnates or the duality of the central authority on the eastern coast of the Adriatic (the king of Hungary-Croatia and the Venetian Republic) – and were unable to provide compensation for inflicted damages from the property of culprits, they proposed rigid, in the first place economic, sanctions against this group. At the same time, however, they did not practise any discriminatory procedure if a particular Slav/Croat decided to settle on the territory of the commune and tried to integrate himself fully, the same as all other forenses, into the framework of the communal society concerned.
Keywords
Dalmatia; the Middle Ages; medieval communes; statutes; foreigners
Hrčak ID:
9391
URI
Publication date:
1.3.2003.
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