The European Research Council funded
project MICOLL (ERC-2020-COG 101002084), led by Professor Stefania Gialdroni, aims at
analyzing the development of commercial law by means of a tool almost ignored in this field: historical
linguistics.
The borrowing and transfer of legal terms will be carried out through a comprehensive and systematic
investigation of medieval and early modern legal sources, in particular commercial letters, contracts
and statutes. Even though legal historians tend to deny the effectiveness of a body of customary laws
uniformly adopted across medieval and modern Europe, the “myth” of the ancient lex mercatoria continues
to provide historical legitimacy to the supporters of corporate self-regulation.
According to a widespread historiographical topos, merchants all over the world “spoke the same
language” when it came to what was important for them: to make profits. As legal institutions are
represented by technical legal words, an analysis of the terms merchants actually used is a powerful and
never attempted way to verify the impact of merchants’ migrations on the development of commercial law,
which had, in its turn, tremendous effects on social and economic history.
The center of this project will be Venice, for several centuries the mandatory stop for merchandise
coming from the East and directed both to northern Europe and to Genoa, from where men and goods would
reach other trading centers (e.g., France and the Iberian peninsula). Our time-frame spans from the
“commercial revolution” of the 11th century to the beginning of the modern period, when the new dynamics
of transoceanic trade left Venice at the periphery of a world that was changing its very dimensions.
Did merchants actually use the same legal terms in different geographical areas? And, above all, did
they grant these words the same legal meaning? MICOLL will answer these questions by means of two main
tools: a “Glossary of medieval commercial law terms” and an interactive digital map of the land routes
connecting Venice with northern Europe and the Tyrrhenian Sea.