The Benvenuto Stracca Editions

Convinced of the historical perspective inherent in commercial law and a lover of rare books, Angelo Sraffa showed a particular predilection for Benvenuto Stracca. He owned many editions, which he had probably found one by one, perhaps following the meticulous indications contained in an 1888 essay by Luigi Franchi (Benvenuto Stracca. 16th-Century Ancona Jurist. Biobibliographical notes). This was one of the items preserved in his Miscellanea.

The Success of De Mercatura

The merchant environment that inspired Benvenuto Stracca's work was certainly not among the most bustling in Europe: in the mid-16th century, Ancona had recently been conquered by the papal government and there were many other marketplaces where the most interesting business and earnings took place. As a result, the treatise is not particularly original and its contents are incomplete, since many of the contracts devised in mercantile procedure are not included in the work. Stracca, for example, does not deal with insurance, foreign exchange or companies.

However, despite its obvious defects and shortcomings, De Mercatura had an immediate and lasting "worldwide" success: the first Venetian edition was followed by other 16th-century Lionian, German and Venetian editions. Using schemes and concepts of the ius civile, Stracca manages to confer autonomy and a scientific dimension to the ius mercatorum, proposing a specific system for trade activities: the science of commercial law had fully Italian origins, precisely at the moment when the center of gravity of trade had moved elsewhere.

His work continued to be published in the 17th century including in the Dutch Republic, which at that time contended with England for the leadership of trade on the seas. Moreover, the Netherlands of that period had its own original, modern legal doctrine that focused on the needs of trade (elegant Dutch jurisprudence).

Most of the time, in order to meet the needs of a professional audience, publishers bound and sold Stracca's treatise with other texts, from different eras and geographical origins, all of which were useful to practicing the commercial law of the time, which had internationally uniform characteristics.

Also tested in other legal publications, this method was in perfect harmony with the law field that continued to reference old sources alongside modern ones, from the Middle Ages to the 19th-century codes. In a temporal (and spatial) horizon that may seem flattened from a modern viewpoint, which in reality was in continuous turmoil, the De Mercatura was offered together with the 15th-century Treatise on Insurance by Portuguese writer Pedro Santarém. It could also be found in bookseller shops included in collective volumes that brought together a summa of knowledge on the subject, alongside a selection of the opinions of the 14th-century commentator Baldo degli Ubaldi (consultant to the merchants' guild of Perugia), those of Rodrigo Suárez, the work of Johannes Nider (who studied commercial contracts from the point of view of their canonical and moral lawfulness), as well as the 16th-century decisions of the Genoese Rota. More simply, De Mercatura was also often published with a treatise on insurance by Stracca himself.