The Court of the Consoli del Mare in Pisa
Another peculiarity of the Tuscan situation is that its most important maritime tribunal lay outside of the city where most of the maritime commerce was actually taking place, much to the frustration of Livorno-based merchants. This was the court of the
Consoli del Mare (the Consuls of the Sea), which stood just over 20 km away from Livorno in the ancient maritime republic of Pisa. Despite its undoubted contemporary importance and rich archival patrimony, little scholarship exists that directly concerns this important court.
1 Andrea Addobbati, ‘La giurisdizione marittima e commerciale dei consoli del mare in età medicea’, in Marco Tangheroni (ed.), Pisa e il Mediterraneo: uomini, merci, idee dagli Etruschi ai Medici (Milan: Skira, 2003), 311–15; Calafat, ‘La somme des besoins’; Massimo Sanacore, ‘I consoli del mare a Pisa, dall’età medicea alle riforme leopoldine’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Pisa, 1983); Lo Bartolo, ‘The consoli del mare’. There is also currently no modern-day index of cases for the voluminous documentation that the
Consoli produced, which makes working with the sources more difficult than it might otherwise be. While this situation leaves a lot to be desired, and further research in this area would be welcome, it is nevertheless possible to sketch out an administrative history of the institution, albeit largely from the top-down perspective of the Grand Ducal government.
The early modern court of the
Consoli was a Medici resurrection of an ancient Pisan institution. During the Middle Ages, the court had been the most senior element of the
Ordo Maris, a powerful corporate body with responsibility for all maritime matters and which remained the principal economic governing body even after the conquest of Pisa in the 1400s.
2 Addobbati, ‘I consoli del mare’, p. 311. Having been briefly abolished under the rule of Alessandro de’ Medici, the first Duke of Tuscany, the court was refounded in 1551 by Cosimo I, this time with two
Consoli based in Pisa. Both were to be Florentine citizens and ideally would be possessed of some commercial experience. The court was twinned with the Florentine
Mercanzia, the Florentine court with jurisdiction over both commercial cases and those between Florentine citizens and foreigners. This meant that the two courts were meant to enjoy the same jurisdiction in their respective cities.
3 Sanacore, ‘I consoli del mare a Pisa’, pp. 57–8. It was declared by Cosimo I that the
Consoli should have the same competences as their republican forebears, but in 1557 and 1561 it was necessary to issue reforms to define what this actually meant in practice. This 1561 reform was a key piece of legislation.
4 ASF, Auditore poi Segretario delle Riformagioni, 116. Originally, it gave the
Consoli a role in the management of the city and surrounding countryside, though this was reduced over the course of the seventeenth century.
5 Sanacore, ‘I consoli del mare a Pisa’, pp. 51–79. Significantly for our purposes, the reform also gave the
Consoli jurisdiction over all maritime cases between shipmaster and merchants or the master and his mariners, with the Captain (later Governor) of Livorno retaining only disputes between mariners themselves. Since GAs always involved a master and merchants, this meant that GA fell squarely in the Consular remit.
6 The Captain of Livorno was given the right to redact consolati in 1577. See Guillaume Calafat, ‘Livorno e la camera di commercio di Marsiglia nel XVII secolo: consoli francesi, agenti e riscossione del cottimo’, in Andrea Addobbati and Marcella Aglietti (eds), La città delle nazioni: Livorno e i limiti del cosmopolitismo (1566–1834) (Pisa: Pisa University Press, 2016), 237–76, at pp. 242–3. The judgements issued by the
Consoli were in theory unappealable, but an important change for the court occurred in 1600 with the creation of the
Consulta Regis based in Florence, which provided a means of effectively overturning them.
7 Sanacore, ‘I consoli del mare a Pisa’, pp. 178–9; Addobbati, ‘I consoli del mare’, pp. 311–12; Luca Mannori, Lo stato del granduca, 1530–1859: le istituzioni della Toscana moderna in un percorso di testi commentate (Pisa: Pacini Editore, 2015), pp. 70–1; Calafat, ‘La somme des besoins’, pp. 4–6; Burr Litchfield, The Emergence of a Bureaucracy, p. 89. The basis of this transformation was Grand Ducal ideology, which cast the prince as
paterfamilias of his people, a site of justice and clemency that transcended the rigid strictures of the law.
8 Calafat, ‘La somme des besoins’, p. 3. Any judgement issued by a Tuscan court, even one that was considered immediately executive and unappealable, could be overruled by the prince if he felt it was unjust or if he felt that clemency should prevail. In reality, petitions were soon too numerous for a single Grand Duke to manage. Manned by three jurists of considerable experience, the
Consulta would therefore decide on behalf of the Grand Duke to which court petitions should be ‘delegated’ for further consideration.
9 Calafat, ‘La somme des besoins’, p. 4; Mannori, Lo stato del granduca, p. 70. The original court, meanwhile, might be required to provide ‘information’ (
informazioni), justifying its original decision. Cases coming from the Consular court in Pisa would almost always be delegated to the Florentine
ruota, the highest civil court in Tuscany.
10 On the Florentine ruota see Giuseppe Pansini, ‘La ruota Fiorentina nelle strutture giudiziarie del Granducato di Toscana sotto I Medici’, in Leo Olschki (ed.), La formazione storica del diritto moderno in Europa (Florence: Società italiana di storia del diritto, 1977), 533–79. On the advice of this tribunal, the Grand Duke would give his response in the form of a rescript (
rescritto), written on the original petition itself. This might ask the
Consoli to ‘reconsider’ or ‘revise’ their original judgement, thus recognising their formal right to issue final and unappealable pronouncements but in effect ordering that it be overturned.
Despite the fact that the location of the court in Pisa made life difficult for Livorno-based merchants, the
Consoli managed to retain and even increase their ample maritime jurisdiction throughout the seventeenth century. Though there were periodic disputes over jurisdiction between the
Consoli and the Governor’s Court in Livorno, the Florentine authorities almost always sided with the
Consoli.
11 See Massimo Sanacore, ‘Le fonti giurisdizionali Pisano-Livornesi e i conflitti di competenze nei secoli XVI–XVII’, Studi Livornesi 4 (1989), 77–93. In 1623, it was decided that the court of the
Consoli was the sole court of appeal for cases coming from the Governor’s court; previously, his decisions could also have been appealed directly to the
ruota.
12 Addobbati, ‘I consoli del mare’, pp. 314–15; Sanacore, ‘I consoli del mare a Pisa’, p. 56; Calafat, ‘La sommes des besoins’, p. 9. It was also possible to appeal to the
Consoli from the
Governor of Livorno’s tribunal for all civil lawsuits with a value greater than 100
lire (later increased to 200
lire).
13 Sanacore, ‘I consoli del mare a Pisa’, p. 56. In 1632, exclusive Consular jurisdiction over insurance cases was confirmed.
14 Sanacore, ‘I consoli del mare a Pisa’, p. 215. There was a particular crisis point in the 1650s as Consular executive powers and maritime jurisdiction were challenged by the Governor’s court, but the
Pratica Segreta – the body responsible for resolving jurisdictional questions in the Grand Duchy – eventually ruled that the Governor’s court should not impede the activities of the
Consoli in any way.
15 Sanacore, ‘I consoli del mare a Pisa’, pp. 216–17; the Pratica Segreta was an advisory council created by Cosimo I to advise on fiscal, administrative, and jurisdictional questions. Its members were chosen by the Grand Duke and usually included the auditore fiscale, the auditore delle riformagioni, and the auditore della giurisdizione. See Furio Diaz, Il Granducato di Toscana. I Medici (Florence: UTET, 1976), pp. 97–8. The only decision that went against this general direction of travel during this century was that of 1684, which established that cases involving corsairs could be resolved in Livorno, not being strictly ‘commercial’ in nature.
16 Sanacore, ‘I consoli del mare a Pisa’, p. 219; Addobbati, ‘I consoli del mare’, pp. 314–15. The jurisdictional boundaries regarding GAs were therefore fairly clean cut. Since requesting a GA involved a shipmaster and receiving merchants, this fell squarely into the Consular remit. If a merchant wished to challenge a GA, he had to submit a petition to the Grand Duke and in these instances the case would go to the Florentine
ruota.
As will be explained further in Chapter Two, the foundational 1561 reform offered no clarification as to how GA cases ought to be dealt with by the court, despite its comprehensive nature, with the original reform document containing more than 400 different directives. In this respect, Tuscany stands in contrast to some other states who were reforming their GA procedures in the same period. Amsterdam had instituted a new Chamber of Insurance and Average in 1598, after merchants complained that they were causing too many problems to be handled by the ‘wise men’ who had previously resolved such disputes.
17 See Sabine Go, ‘The Amsterdam Chamber of Insurance and Average: a new phase in formal contract enforcement (late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries)’, Enterprise & Society 14 (2013), 511–43; Sabine Go, ‘GA adjustments in Amsterdam: reinforcing authority through transparency and accountability (late sixteenth–early seventeenth century)’, in Maria Fusaro, Andrea Addobbati, and Luisa Piccinno (eds), General Average and Risk Management in Medieval and Early Modern Maritime Business (Cham: Springer, 2023), 389–414. The three Commissioners of this court were generally experienced merchants who retained their position for six years in order that the court should avail itself of considerable experience in judging cases. Similarly in Genoa there was an attempt to add new certainty to Average procedures in 1588 with the institution of a new office, the
Calcolatori (Office of the Calculators), who were to be specifically instituted to adjudicate and award Averages and to assess damages.
18 Iodice, ‘General average in Genoa’, p. 280; Go, ‘GA adjustments in Amsterdam’, p. 394. In both these cases, the creation of new bodies was accompanied by the creation of new statutes which were to clarify the norms and procedures surrounding Averages.
19 Iodice, ‘General average in Genoa’, p. 279; Go, ‘GA adjustments in Amsterdam’, p. 395. The Genoese innovations were admittedly not destined to remain unaltered for long, with the
Conservatori del Mare (a body manned by members of the nobility)
first taking the independent calculators under their aegis, then gradually robbing them of many of their competences over the course of the seventeenth century.
20 See Iodice, ‘General Average in Genoa’. It is, nevertheless, curious that we see no similar moves in the Tuscan case, with GA remaining, as we will see, something of an uncharted blank space on the juridical and statuatory map.