Piracy and Treaty Law
Piracy was an early and constant subject of negotiation between the Ottomans and their treaty partners, who developed a legal and diplomatic framework prohibiting piracy and establishing the procedures for redress when attacks did occur. Focusing primarily on Ottoman-Venetian relations, this chapter parses the form and content of their treaties (ahdname), examines how their antipiracy provisions were understood, and traces their development from the late fifteenth century to the early seventeenth century, by which point treaties with similar antipiracy clauses had been extended to France (1569), England (1580), and the Netherlands (1612). The antipiracy articles of these treaties were regularly expanded and modified to address new challenges, including how to deal with and defend against the proliferation of uncontrollable nonstate actors, but developments around the turn of the seventeenth century threatened to bring down the entire order on which the treaty regime was founded.