The first treatise on commercial law

In the history of commercial law in the Western world, a place of honour belongs to the Ancona nobleman, Benvenuto Stracca (1509-1578). As a lawyer and learned jurist, Stracca was the first to write a work on commercial law in the literary form of treatise. After him, commercial law has been qualified in all respects as an autonomous branch of law.

Stracca, Benvenuto, De mercatura, seu mercatore tractatus, Venetiis, Paolo Manuzio, [1553][30], 287 c. ; 8°

His De mercatura seu mercatore was published in Venice in 1553 by Paolo Manuzio. It is divided into nine parts: the definition of merchant and commercial transactions; the rights and obligations of merchants; what precludes someone from trading; what is traded; merchants' contracts (general part, order and risk); maritime trade; cases of discontinuing being a merchant; bankruptcy; proceedings in merchant courts. From the Middle Ages and up to that moment, at the European level commercial law was largely developed in the evolving business and trade by merchants themselves, through guild statutes, mercantile practices and customs, market fair rules and merchant court rulings. Many books had been circulating on the art of commerce, treatises on commercial accounting, moral treatises and even learned jurists had partaken here and there in passing, commenting on Justinian's compilation and the texts of canon law, or writing about them in their comments (consilia).

Although it rested on a solid scientific and practical foundation, the ius mercatorum was not included in doctrine until the middle of the 16th century by legal practitioners, i.e. jurists who were university graduates and enjoyed great prestige throughout Europe. On several occasions since the Middle Ages, moralists and theologians had focused on commercial law. The profit motive and "the sudden gains" denounced by Dante, in fact, had greatly worried the men of the Church, for the danger to souls. Thus, the Church was not shy of intervening in trade regulation. One example is the canonical prohibition of usury, which significantly conditions the very development of commercial law and was, for example, at the origin of the limited partnership. The history of commercial law in the modern age, which, from a doctrinal point of view, begins precisely with Benvenuto Stracca's De mercatura, is therefore also the history of its progressive secularization.