21.17. 17. Of Commerce after the Destruction of the Western Empire.
After the invasion of the Roman empire one effect of the general calamity was
the destruction of commerce. The barbarous nations at first regarded it
only as an opportunity for robbery; and when they had subdued the
Romans, they honoured it no more than agriculture, and the other
professions of a conquered people.
Soon was the commerce of Europe almost entirely lost. The nobility,
who had everywhere the direction of affairs, were in no pain about it.
The laws of the Visigoths
[129]
permitted private people to occupy
half the beds of great rivers, provided the other half remained free for
nets and boats. There must have been very little trade in countries
conquered by these barbarians.
In those times were established the ridiculous rights of escheatage
and shipwrecks. These men thought that, as strangers were not united to
them by any civil law, they owed them on the one hand no kind of
justice, and on the other no sort of pity.
In the narrow bounds which nature had originally prescribed to the
people of the north, all were strangers to them: and in their poverty
they regarded all only as contributing to their riches. Being
established, before their conquest, on the coasts of a sea of very
little breadth, and full of rocks, from these very rocks they drew their
subsistence.
But the Romans, who made laws for all the world, had established the
most humane ones with regard to shipwrecks.
[130]
They suppressed the
rapine of those who inhabited the coasts, and what was more still, the
rapacity of their treasuries.
[131]
Footnotes
[129]
Book viii, tit. 4, section 9.
[130]
Toto titulo, ff. de incend, ruin. et naufrag.; Cod. de naufragiis; Leg. 3, ff. ad leg. Cornel, de sicariis.
[131]
Leg. 1, Cod. de naufragiis.
