Resumen de Public service and private trade: Northern seamen in seventeenth-century Venetian courts of justice
This article presents some of the findings of ‘Sailing into Modernity: Comparative Perspectives on the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century European Economic Transition’ (ERC, Starting Grant), a research project designed to analyse the diversities and peculiarities of the civil maritime jurisdictions of Northern and Southern Europe during the long seventeenth century (1570–1729). This article concentrates on a subsection of this research, merchantmen employed in support of naval activities, especially those English and Dutch mercantile vessels providing logistic support to Venetian naval campaigns during the War of Candia, 1646–1669. Through some particularly detailed cases of common legal challenges experienced by Northern ships active in the Venetian Mediterranean, the article explores the variety of employment opportunities available in the Mediterranean to Northern European vessels and highlights the Venetian Republic’s efforts to guarantee the regular functioning of sea trade in the region even when it was an active theatre of naval war.
