Beyond the Free Sea: The Law of the Sea in Renaissance Europe

The question of whether or not the sea can be owned or controlled has occupied the minds of many over the centuries. The discovery of America by Columbus made the questions of ownership of the sea and how regimes to govern the sea could be created and managed gain importance on a global scale. This chapter discusses the history of the law of the sea from the perspective of ‘Renaissance Europe’, focusing on the ‘battle of the books’ dominated by the publication of Mare Liberum (1609) by Hugo de Groot (Grotius) and John Selden’s Mare clausum (1635). It shows that the concept of the free sea was perfectly compatible with the adjacent or territorial sea both in legal practice and in principle. The idea of the free sea, defended and made explicit by Grotius, was not new but originated in Roman law and its medieval interpretations. Rather than the free sea, mare clausum was the new contribution of early modern thinking on the law of the sea. The concept of mare clausum had been shaped by the division of the world’s oceans between Spain and Portugal based on the papal bull Inter Caetera (1493) and the treaties of Tordesillas (1494) and Zaragoza (1529).