Ottoman Algeria in Western Diplomatic History with ... - Bibliothèque

piratical, even if engaged in raiding” simply because the westerners have
declared them to be so. 106 Therefore, this view legitimated the granting of
authorizations, i.e.: letters of marque, but conditioned these by the legality of
the authority (sovereign/polity) that granted them. A second tradition can be
traced back to On the Law of War and Peace, 1625, work of Hugo Grotius,
another jurist and pioneer in the science of international law. 107 Grotius rejected
Gentili’s notion that such actions could not be declared as piratical simply by
recognizing such polities as having legitimate authority. For him, lawful
seizure could not exist outside the existence of a state of war. 108
To sum up, and according to these different legal views, crossing the
line from piracy to corsairing, therefore from illegality to legality, necessitates
three prerequisites: an authorization or letter of marque granted by a sovereign,
legality of the authority (sovereign/polity) that granted them, and the existence
of a state of war. The implication of this legal thought relating to Algiers’
corsairing is that since “a state of war existed between European nations and
the Barbary states” therefore, the seizures operated at sea by the Algerian
corsairs were legal warfare. 109
By the 16 th
century, time by which the clash between Islam and
Christianity intensified, corsairing acquired a religious legitimacy too. On both
106 Lauren Benton, “Legal Spaces of Empire: Piracy and the Origins of Ocean Regionalism,”
Comparative Study of Society and History, 47: 4 (Oct., 2005), 705.
107 Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), a Dutch jurist, is well known for his work On the Law of War and Peace
(1625) which provided the basis for modern international law. “Grotius, Hugo,” Encyclopædia
Britannica. (Accessed 17 May 2008).
108 Michael D. Ramsey, “Textualism and War Powers,” The University of Chicago Law Review, 96: 4
(Autumn, 2002), pp. 1570-78.
109 Benton, “Legal Spaces of Empire,” p. 705.
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