Pirate

In the late sixteenth century, the Italian civil lawyer Alberico Gentili, a Protestant who settled in England after fleeing the persecution of the Catholic Church, wrote from his post at Oxford that enemies ‘are those who have officially declared war upon us, or upon whom we have officially declared; all others are brigands or pirates’ (‘hostes hi sunt, qui nobis, aut quibus nos publice bellum decreuimus caeteri latrones, aut praedones sunt’). ¹ Gentili used the Latin pīrāta/piratae in his treatise, deriving from the word for ‘attack’ or ‘assault’, as well as the associations with sea theft that emerged from Old French in the thirteenth century. ² Early printed English dictionaries, such as The dictionary of syr Thomas Eliot (1538), defined ‘pirate’ as ‘a rover or robber of the sea’. ³ Gentili drew on this meaning and the works of the Roman legal theorists Sextus Pomponius and Ulpian when developing his concept of just war (justum bellum) as a conflict between two or more sovereign states that shared the same legal status and respected the law of nations. As Gentili reminded his readers, it was impossible to have a ‘state of war’ with pirates and brigands since lawful war ‘is derived from the law of nations, and malefactors do not enjoy the privileges of a law to which they are foes’. ⁴ The law of nations was ‘an agreement and a compact’ and those ‘who have withdrawn from the agreement and broken the treaty of the human race’ could never enjoy any legal right. ⁵