82 Law and Morality Abroad (to ca. ad 1550)Eu ro pe an maritime states following the En glish lead. In France, for example,
an ordinance of 1400 provided rules for prize adjudication.
Th e question of state sovereignty over the seas, or portions of them, caused
diffi culties. While it was widely recognized in natural law that the seas were
free and open to all of humankind, there were contentions that this principle
applied only to the wide oceans, with coastal states then being allowed to as-
sert jurisdictional claims of varying kinds over sea areas to which they re-
garded themselves as having historical ties. Venice, for example, claimed sov-
ereignty over the Adriatic Sea and Genoa over the Ligurian Sea. Th ere was
natural room for overlapping claims if this were allowed. For example, both
France and En gland claimed sovereignty over the En glish Channel.
A somewhat diff erent approach to this question was taken by the county of
Flanders, which claimed sovereignty not over a whole sea area, but only over
a coastal strip (stroom in Flemish, or estrum in French) immediately off its
own coast. Th e French government formally recognized Flanders’s title to
the stroom in 1370. En gland, along with the Dutch states of Holland and Zee-
land, followed suit in the early fi ft eenth century. In 1394, Holland claimed
the entire Zuyderzee as a stroom. Th e actual width of a stroom was, however,
the subject of some uncertainty. In the fi ft eenth century, it came to be gener-
ally acknowledged that the width of a stroom was the distance from which a
person at sea could discern the coast and its buildings, which would be about
three German leagues, or twenty- one kilometers in modern terms.
One of the lawyers who addressed this problem was Bartolus. He lent his
considerable prestige to the right of states to claim sovereignty over off shore
sea areas— in his opinion, extending to “a modest distance” of two days’ sail-
ing from the land (or about a hundred miles). Th is fi gure was apparently
taken from the canon- law standard for determining “neighboring.” One of
Bartolus’s students, also a highly learned lawyer, Baldus of Ubaldis, was more
restrained, allowing about sixty miles. Th ere was a great deal more disput-
ing to be done on this vexed question for a long time to come— not until the
late twentieth century would the matter fi nally be resolved. Th e wheels of
justice turn particularly slowly when they are being pulled in diff erent direc-
tions by interested parties.