This chapter surveys the nineteenth-century Italian debate on natural law through an analysis of the Venetian context and of the impact of the Venetian situation – after the end of the Republic (1797) – on the historical tradition of the law of nations as a political tool for legitimization of the European state system. The main argument is twofold: first, that in the Venetian Republic natural law was a tool supporting the role of the small state in the international system; second, that the disappearance of the Venetian Republic in the new post-Restoration European context transformed the use of natural law in university teaching and the very perception of natural law and the law of nations until it was reduced to an outdated source.
The use of natural public law in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century allows us to open a window on how the law of nations influenced the generation of scholars and law practitioners as well as international politics during the years of the Napoleonic Empire and then the culture of the Restoration.1 This was a context profoundly different from that of the initial spread and discussion of natural law in the eighteenth century. Emer de Vattel’s Droit des gens (1758) was at the centre of this debate,2 and Göttingen was the place where one of the scholars who most influenced the law of nations and the theory of diplomacy in the early nineteenth century was undertaking studies: Georg Friedrich von (de) Martens (1756–1821). Moreover, his father, Conrad, had been the Danish consul to Venice from 1739 until his death in 1786, and his brother Wilhelm Conrad (1748–1828) remained in Venice as Danish consul, founding the Venetian branch of the family. The study manual that de Martens published in 1785 (Primae lineae iuris gentium Europaearum practici in usum auditorum adumbratae) gave early evidence of his indebtedness to the work of Vattel and this was consolidated by further reflection on the importance of the voluntary element in the sources of international law.
This cultural heritage was collected by Georg Friedrich de Martens’ nephew Charles (or Karl). When Charles de Martens started publishing Causes célèbres du droit des gens (1827), Vattel’s work may have seemed outdated. In reality, the collection of cases recorded by Charles de Martens to prove the birth and the codification of a modern international law had strong roots in natural law and in Vattel’s Droit des gens, considered not only as a theory but also as a practical tool for the solution of international disputes. Through some of these cases, in particular that of the diplomatic crisis between the Republic of the United Provinces and the Republic of Venice in 1771–1785, we will show some aspects of the fortune of Vattel’s work in nineteenth-century Europe.
1 Natural Law and the Law of Nations in the University of the Venetian Republic
The emergence of the modern ‘civilized monarchies’3 in eighteenth-century Europe presented great challenges to the old trade Republic of Venice and to much of the old Europe in general. If the old Europe was like Christian Wolff’s ‘civitas maxima’4 or Voltaire’s ‘great republic’,5 that is, a state in its own right, the new Europe threatened to fall apart because of commercial rivalries and needed to be reformed. Different explanations were provided for the phenomenon of ‘jealousy of trade’ and for the perishing of republics in the new inter-state system.6
The response to these challenges by the University of Padua, the only university in the Republic of Venice in which the leading classes of the Serenissima were formed, was not adequate. In particular, during the second half of the eighteenth century, natural law was mainly taught as private, not public law, thus completely obscuring the relevance of jus gentium. The University of Padua had a monopoly on the teaching of law; the only exception was a chair of civil and criminal law established in Venice in 1575 and reactivated in 1765 to educate the nobles in government responsibilities. In the 1760s, the teaching of natural law at the University of Padua was essentially a novelty. The first tuition of natural law took place in 1760, and from 1764 the abbot Giovanni Battista Bilesimo, a specialist in feudal law, was the first teacher in natural law and the law of nations.7
In this context, the teaching of natural law was always kept within the limits of a rigid Catholic orthodoxy and great care was taken to avoid authors suspected of ideas that could be dangerous for religion and for the government. As the historian Vettor Sandi wrote in 1769, it was necessary to defend the Republic from the ‘poisonous theory spread all over Europe’ and in particular from natural law and the law of nations.8 As a consequence, the teaching of natural law did not go beyond the use of Wolff’s works and in particular his Institutiones juris naturae et gentium.9
However, the city of Venice was an important centre for spreading the culture of natural law thanks to its printers and the editions and the translations of many important eighteenth-century texts. The debate on natural law had been intense since the 1730s, in particular through the comparison between Catholic and ‘modern’ Protestant natural law.10 In 1757–1758, Giambattista Almici published the first complete translation of Pufendorf’s masterpiece on natural law and the law of nations in Venice, and Heineccius’ texts were often reprinted in Venice.11 The use of Vattel’s Droit des gens was carefully avoided, as this text above all was considered dangerous as source for a new theory of sovereignty and the state,12 but in 1780 it was translated into Italian by Ludovico Antonio Loschi.13 This situation did not change with the Restoration. The territory of the Republic of Venice came under the control of Austria and the teaching of private natural law was based on the work of Franz Zeiller, and that of public natural law on the work of Carl Anton von Martini, in a neo-absolutist framework.14 Even Wolff’s work was shelved because of his idea of the natural origin of private law, which questioned the prince’s positive sanction. So Wolff was considered too anti-absolutist and enlightened.15
Following the Restoration, the political culture of Italy made use of Emer de Vattel’s Droit des gens while viewing it from two different but complementary standpoints. On the one hand, there were those who read the text as it had been written by Vattel, with his typically eighteenth-century language and concepts attached to interpretative systems belonging to the culture of natural law and the Enlightenment.16 On the other hand, the intellectuals of the Restoration were well aware also of the interpretations that had been made of Vattel’s work in the age of the Atlantic revolutions, in particular the readings (in Naples, Rome, Bologna) that had transformed it into a dangerous and ‘revolutionary’ text, when it had been invoked to call into question the sovereignty and principles of authority that supported the ancien régime.17
At the beginning of the nineteenth century and especially after the Restoration, the profound changes in the meaning of words like ‘homeland’, ‘nation’, ‘constitution’ and ‘representation’ (keywords in Vattel’s text) made it clear that it was no longer possible to read the Droit des gens with eighteenth-century eyes. To be sure, the parts of the work dealing with international relations between the states could still be useful in the new contexts of nineteenth-century diplomacy, but the first book, on the internal constitution of states, had to be radically reinterpreted in order to avoid arguments that might prove dangerous to supporters of liberal constitutions and democratic revolutions. The Italian culture of the Restoration thus set in motion a multifaceted operation aimed both at divesting the Droit des gens of its character as a philosophical and political work, and thereby of its potential political project, and at transforming it into a simple university textbook of international law.18
At the same time, European scholars and commentators, mostly in Germany, Italy and Portugal, initiated a radical critique of the first book of the Droit des gens, which in some cases actually involved revising and reworking the text. There remained some interpreters who still tried to use Vattel’s work in a subversive sense, that is, to defend the freedoms and rights of nations and individuals, as happened in the political trials of mid-nineteenth-century Italy. Others used it to question the idea that the positive laws of the state could prevail over the natural law of communities and over individual safeguards. But among the majority of interpreters the idea prevailed that the Droit des gens was a historical document of a bygone age, a text that was no longer relevant, and a source that was simply technical, which presented basic concepts of international law but was not enough to elucidate political and international reality. This ‘renaissance’ of the Droit des gens as a manual for use in universities and in diplomacy was, however, destined to produce greater divergence between the culture of the Enlightenment and the culture of the Restoration.
A large part of the new Italian editions and studies of the Droit des gens in the first half of the nineteenth century were therefore devoted to commenting on and criticizing Vattel’s text.19 As a result, in the climate of the Congress of Vienna, of the Restoration and then of the liberal revolutions, it became more and more necessary to explain, clarify and define the ideas of the Swiss author. What is more, increasingly commentators realized that a serious campaign was needed to neutralize the political use of this text but, in the opinion of contemporaries, there were only two ways in which this could be done effectively: by historicizing the Droit des gens, in other words, by delimiting its value to the historical period in which it was written; and by relegating it from the status of a politico-philosophical text to that of a practical juridical manual.
2 The Role of Venice from de Martens to Ranke: Large States versus Small States in the New Power Politics
The large number of new editions and translations of the Droit des gens published during the nineteenth century are, therefore, only a partial indication of the real success of Vattel’s work. It was not a desire to disseminate the text that brought about that success, but, paradoxically, an ever more pressing need to circumscribe and curb it. While keeping this in mind, we must first reflect on the cultures and geographical and political areas from which most of the new editions and commentaries came. During the course of the eighteenth century, the bulk of the readings, commentaries and translations of the Droit des gens appeared – as we have already seen – in the small European states, which had found that Vattel’s work provided them with the toolkit they needed to assert their dignity and sovereignty within the system of balances that ensued from the Treaty of Utrecht (1713). Now, however, the new editions and commentaries came mostly from the cultural circles of the great powers, that is, from the protagonists and arbiters of the new system of European balances established by the strategy of Metternich. Thus France was at the forefront of the criticism of Vattel which, without disclaiming the relevance of the work, emphasized the need to update it and explain it in a context completely different from the one in which it had been written. But even in the German Empire, which had begun to take form as the German Confederation, the approach was similar. In all these cases, the operation was carried out not by intellectuals and men of letters interested in debating the relevance of the Droit des gens in support of internal social reforms and the arrangement of their states, but rather by diplomats and statesmen concerned with observing the foreign policy guidelines of their countries on the international stage.
The de Martens dynasty played a key role in the transformation of the Droit des gens from a work of political philosophy to a practical manual, and also in the neutralization of Vattel’s theories of constitution, state and nation. Originally, as many biographers have noted, Georg Friedrich de Martens had been formed intellectually and academically in the second half of the eighteenth century, learning from Vattel both as the author of a classic of the law of nations and as a councillor to the court of Saxony.20 His indebtedness to Vattel can be discerned in many pages of his Primae lineae iuris gentium Europaearum practici in usum auditorum adumbratae (1785),21 which later became the Précis du droit des gens moderne de l’Europe (first edition 1788),22 as well as in his Einleitung in das positive europäische Völkerrecht (1796).23
It has been observed that the position of de Martens does not appear to have been against natural law but instead represented an evolution of it.24 But his cultural orientation – of admiration for but also criticism of the natural law tradition – is evident from the moment that he entitled his work Das positive europäische Völkerrecht and then in French Droit des gens moderne de l’Europe. In his opinion, the law of nations was relevant as a positive and modern system, not as an expression of an older tradition. De Martens was more interested in the law of nations in force – the one actually implemented by laws and international treaties – than the philosophical system of natural law. The adjective ‘modern’ – which has only a vague and circumstantial connection with the German ‘positive’ – was clearly used as the antonym of ‘ancient’, thus marking a clear break with the tradition that preceded Vattel.25
The de Martens family is the missing link that allows us to understand how the historicization of the Droit des gens took its place in the new international context of the power politics inaugurated by Metternich. As well as their villa in the countryside of Mira, the family had a house in Venice, in Rio di san Cancian, from the time of Conrad’s and then Wilhelm Conrad’s service as Danish consuls to Venice in the final years of the Republic. These connections between the de Martens and Venice, between the historical function of natural law and the history of Venice, as well as among the de Martens and Leopold von Ranke (see below), have never been studied. The grandson of Conrad and son of Wilhelm Conrad (and thus the nephew of Georg Friedrich), Karl de Martens was a significant figure who eventually took up his uncle’s work and played host to Leopold von Ranke in Venice. The approach taken by Karl (or Charles, as he signed his name from the 1820s onwards) to the law of nations would, as we shall see, partly reflect his sensitivity to history and the commitment he shared with Ranke to the recovery of diplomatic sources in the Venetian archives.26
Charles de Martens made two key contributions to the reception of the Droit des gens. It was he who received and administered the legacy of Georg Friedrich through the re-editions and summaries of his writings. In addition, by virtue of his diplomatic work – he became foreign commissioner to the King of Prussia – he promoted the use of Vattel’s work as a simple depository of historical-diplomatic information rather than as an international politico-philosophical project. His friendship with Leopold von Ranke was conducive to this approach. The link between the two has never been closely studied despite its importance not only for the transformation of the Droit des gens into a source of historical-diplomatic information, but also for how a series of cultural connections that would be used during the nineteenth century was activated. In this way Vattel became a source, for example, for the historical role of the Church of Rome in the early-modern architecture of alliances and, in the drafting of treaties, to fathom the system of Westphalia, and to evaluate the historical function performed by the Catholic Church and the pope.27
To understand how Ranke’s work intersected with readings of Vattel, it is necessary to return to the German historian’s early education. As we know, his interest in the past was not the mere curiosity of an erudite man and the years of his education in the philological school of Leipzig should be read in relation to his later studies in Berlin. History, for Ranke, was an ‘ideal’ story, that is, one full of cultural and spiritual tensions. The study of antiquity illuminated the modern era, just as the study of great empires of the past threw light on the history of recent great ‘empires’, such as the German one or the papacy.
In the years after the Restoration, when Ranke applied the philological method to historical criticism, he witnessed the emergence of the Europe of nations and of new great powers, which appeared to him the manifestation of the absolute in the finite individual. He believed the study of the history of nations, and of Germany in particular, to be essential in order to understand the history of humanity, of the generations and peoples. It must be recognized that ‘the particular holds within itself the universal’ and thus every nation must be traced back to a time that is both absolute and finite, irrational and earthly, arbitrary and necessary.28
It was against this background that Ranke laid the foundations for his essay on the great powers (Die grossen Mächte, 1833), which contained a radical reformulation of the concept of the ‘great power’, and which would have a significant influence on the culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As with most statesmen of the time, Ranke held that the only great powers were those that – thanks to their economic and military strength – were able to create a sphere of influence with which the other states had to maintain a simple droit de regard. Ranke’s distance from the work of Vattel, and from eighteenth-century culture in general, became unbridgeable from this point. For Vattel, power (puissance) was a quality commensurate with the exercise of political power, with its effectiveness and interest. It was much closer to the idea of the reason of state than to the actual measure of influence exerted at the interstate level.29 For Vattel, all states, irrespective of size, operated in a framework of formal equality and could therefore play a role within the logic of exercising their power to maintain interstate balance. For Ranke, however, this vision was no longer possible, for the great powers in their historical mission were incompatible with the pluralism of Vattel’s international system.30
This reasoning could also be used to analyse the historical events of the pre-Restoration states and in particular of the Republic of Venice. In the second half of the eighteenth century, Venice, as we saw above, had wanted to use the Droit des gens to establish the opposite principle. This principle was that even as a small republican state Venice – now without effective military or economic power – could have the dignity to place itself in the international forum on the same level as a great power. It was the internal organization and good government that satisfied the criteria for a constitutional state and thereby allowed formal equality between nations. Ranke had been fascinated by Venetian history since his youth, and in order to grasp the greatness and decline of the Republic he was among the first to take advantage of the opening of the Serenissima’s archives, which was made possible by the Austrian government after the definitive cession of Veneto to Austria. In 1828, he first went to Vienna, where Friedrich von Gentz facilitated an audience with Prince Metternich, and then, with the necessary permissions to access the Venetian archives,31 he arrived in Venice, where he was welcomed by the de Martens family. His study of these archives and of the history of the Republic led to a long series of publications, starting in 1831, and convinced him that Venice could have been a power in the sense intended by Vattel, but not a ‘great power’ in the international political sense, especially after it had ceased to be faithful to its own institutions and tried instead to imitate those of others.
3 Venetian Politics and Natural Law by Charles de Martens
As we have seen, there was a direct link between the de Martens family and Venice and between Ranke and the de Martens family. And the course of events affecting Vattel’s work during the nineteenth century and its new function as a practical tool for the study of diplomatic history were linked to these actors.
From the time of the Précis du droit moderne de l’Europe (translated into English in 1795) Georg Friedrich de Martens had engaged in direct dialogue with the leading authors of public and natural law of the eighteenth century, from Burlamaqui to Mably and Vattel himself. Indeed, the Droit des gens was one of the main sources used in the Précis for documentary and interpretative purposes.32 After the Précis, which enjoyed an uninterrupted period of success lasting several decades, de Martens had written another two volumes which contained a collection of well-known cases of modern international law selected for explanatory reasons to cover about fifty years, from the War of the Austrian Succession to 1799.33
As the formulation of the project and the introduction to the collection of cases made clear, this work and the Précis were complementary and should be read together; the Précis, which still followed Vattel’s approach, provided the key to the case work. In the new context of the Restoration this connection was, however, no longer useful and the separation of the case studies from their eighteenth-century and natural law interpretative matrix gained impetus when Georg Friedrich died in 1821, only a few years after having been appointed representative of the King of Hanover to the diet of the German Confederation in Frankfurt.
Charles de Martens, Georg Friedrich’s nephew, was resident minister of the Grand Duchy of Weimar in Dresden. Shortly after his uncle’s death, he began to rework his entire corpus, first publishing a Manuel diplomatique (1823) and then, shortly after, two volumes of Causes célèbres du droit des gens (1827).34
With the Manuel diplomatique de Martens shifted the public’s attention from the eighteenth-century primacy of natural law and the law of nations, understood as foundational rights of the state and as a set of natural principles to be used in harmonizing the conduct of nations. Instead, he focused on international law conceived as a living and positive law that was composed of cases and modified through practical explanations. At the same time, he launched another project, namely that of reworking and transforming the two volumes of his uncle’s Erzählungen. The resulting Causes célèbres du droit des gens, co-published by the printers Brockhaus of Leipzig and Ponthieu of Paris, was in fact an update of his uncle’s work in appearance only. Although the introduction stated that the author had taken up his uncle’s ideas,35 the work was actually profoundly different in approach. The cases presented twenty years earlier were reduced in number and abridged, while the timespan under review was extended to more than a century, beginning in 1703. The selected cases were therefore no longer representative of a ‘modern’ law of nations, in the current sense, but of a historical conception of law and diplomacy. Moreover, the two volumes were dedicated, significantly, to the leader of a great power, Nicolas I, Emperor of Russia and King of Poland, and the great majority of the chosen cases were examples of competition and confrontation between small and large states, and old and new powers: Savoy against France, Sweden against Great Britain, Spain against Great Britain, Portugal against Spain, the United Provinces against France, and so on. The references to Vattel were reduced to a few irrelevant citations, which completely weakened the importance and value which had been attached to the Droit des gens in the previous century.
The two de Martens constituted a point of reference for other authors who explicitly associated the criticism of Vattel’s incompleteness and generality with the problem of the nation, such as the philosopher and politician Silvestre Pinheiro Ferreira (1769–1846). His annotated edition of Vattel’s Droit des gens was also destined to be successful in Venice.36 According to Pinheiro, in order to make use of the Droit des gens it was no longer enough to create a commentary but, rather, a thorough revision of Vattel’s text and theories was necessary. The points given most attention should be those relating to the relationship between state and nation and the wrong definition of what a state was, because, according to Pinheiro, the nation was such only when it had the strength to respect and be respected by other nations and states. Another point for discussion was state sovereignty over diplomatic agents – with a specific reference to the old practices of the Venetian Republic37 – and the vagueness with which Vattel, in 1758, had defined the constitution as a fundamental regulation of the state.
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Throughout this chapter, ‘Restoration’ is used in the ‘continental’ sense to refer to the period from 1814 to the 1840s.
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Giorgio Zordan, ‘L’insegnamento del diritto naturale nell’ateneo patavino e i suoi titolari (1764–1855)’, Rivista di Storia del diritto italiano 72 (1999): 5–76, at 9–24.
Vettor Sandi, Principj di storia civile della Repubblica di Venezia. Dall’anno di N. S. 1700 sino all’anno 1767, 3 vols (Venezia: presso Sebastiano Coletti, 1769–1772), vol. 1, 292.
Zordan, ‘L’insegnamento del diritto naturale’, 24–30; Maria Rosa Di Simone, ‘L’influenza di Christian Wolff sul giusnaturalismo dell’area asburgica e italiana’, in Dal De Jure Naturae et Gentium di Samuel Pufendorf alla Codificazione prussiana del 1794, ed. Marta Ferronato (Padova: Cedam, 2005), 221–267.
Merio Scattola, ‘Protestantesimo e diritto naturale cattolico nel XVIII secolo’, in Illuminismo e protestantesimo, ed. Giulia Cantarutti and Stefano Ferrari (Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2010), 131–148.
On Almici’s translation, see Chapter 6 of the present volume, by Serenna Luzzi. On natural law in Italy and the Venetian printers, see Diego Panizza, ‘La traduzione italiana del De iure naturae di Pufendorf: giusnaturalismo moderno e cultura cattolica nel Settecento italiano’, Studi Veneziani 11 (1969): 483–528; Diego Quaglioni, ‘Pufendorf in Italia. Appunti e notizie sulla prima diffusione della traduzione italiana del De iure naturae et gentium’, Il Pensiero Politico 32 (1999): 235–250; Stefania Stoffella, ‘Assolutismo e diritto naturale in Italia nel Settecento’, Annali dell’Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico in Trento 26 (2000): 137–175; ead., ‘Il diritto di resistenza nel Settecento Italiano. Documenti per la storia della traduzione del De iure naturae et gentium di Pufendorf’, Laboratoire italien: Politique et société 2 (2001): 173–199; Maurizio Bazzoli, ‘Aspetti della ricezione di Pufendorf nel Settecento italiano’, in Dal De Jure Nnaturae et Ggentium di Samuel Pufendorf, 41–60.
Antonio Trampus, Emer de Vattel and the Politics of Good Government: Constitutionalism, Small States and the International System (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
Antonio Trampus, ‘Il ruolo del traduttore nel tardo Illuminismo: Lodovico Antonio Loschi e la versione italiana del Droit des gens di Emer de Vattel’, in Il linguaggio del tardo Illuminismo. Politica, diritto e società civile, ed. Antonio Trampus (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2011), 81–108.
Zordan, ‘L’insegnamento del diritto naturale’, 6.
Giampietro Berti, Censura e circolazione delle idee nel Veneto della Restaurazione (Venezia: Deputazione di Storia patria per le Venezie, 1989), 386.
For a complete history of editions and list of translations of Vattel’s Droit des gens, see Fiocchi Malaspina, L’eterno ritorno del Droit des gens, 262–272; a new edition of the 1797 English translation (the first of several had appeared in 1760) is Law of Nations, or, Principles of the Law of Nature, Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns, with Three Early Essays on the Origin and Nature of Natural Law and on Luxury, ed. Béla Kapossy and Richard Whatmore (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2008).
See Trampus, Emer de Vattel and the Politics of Good Government, 176–182.
See Luigi Nuzzo, Origini di una Scienza. Diritto internazionale e colonialismo nel XIX secolo (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2012).
Fiocchi Malaspina, L’eterno ritorno del Droit des gens, 167 ff.
Robert Figge, Georg Friedrich von Martens, sein Leben und seine Werke. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Völkerrechtswissenschaft (Gleiwitz: Hill, 1914), 19.
Georg Friedrich von Martens, Primae lineae iuris gentium Europaearum practici in usum auditorum adumbratae (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1785), 7, 138, 188, 242.
Georg Friedrich von Martens, Précis du droit des gens moderne de l’Europe: fondé sur les traités et l’usage. Pour servir d’introduction à un cours politique et diplomatique (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1788), 83, 97, 140, 160, 211, 283, 333, 392, 401, 425–430. The work was then constantly reprinted until the 1820s.
Georg Friedrich von Martens, Einleitung in das positive europäische Völkerrecht: auf Verträge und Herkommen gegründet (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1796), 54, 260, 273, 300, 306, 339. On Martens’ handbook in Italy, see Maria Rosa Di Simone, ‘I curricula giuridici prima di Napoleone’, in Le università napoleoniche. Uno spartiacque nella storia italiana ed europea dell’istruzione superiore, ed. Piero Del Negro and Luigi Pepe (Bologna: Clueb, 2008), 145–167.
Martti Koskenniemi, ‘Into Positivism: Georg Friedrich von Martens (1756–1821) and Modern International Law’, Constellations 15:2 (2008): 189–207, at 190.
Wilhelm G. Grewe, The Epochs of International Law, trans. and rev. Michael Byers (Berlin-New York: De Gruyter, 2000), 291, 358, 410.
Philipp Mueller, ‘Archives and History: Towards a History of “the Use of State Archives” in the 19th Century’, History of the Human Sciences 26 (2013): 27–49, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0952695113502483 (accessed January 2023).
Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in England (London: Longmans Green and Co., 1873), vol. 2, 41, refers to a comparison between Vattel, Droit des gens, and Ranke, Geschichte der Päpste.
Santi Di Bella, Leopold von Ranke. Gli anni della formazione (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2005), 61, 89.
Fiocchi Malaspina, L’eterno ritorno del Droit des gens, 28, 111.
On this point, with a specific comparison between Ranke and Vattel, see Iver B. Neumann, ‘Status Is Cultural: Durkheimian Poles and Weberian Russians Seek Great-Power Status’, in Status and World Politics, ed. T. V. Paul, Deborah Welch Larson and William C. Wohlforth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 85–114, at 89.
Theodore H. von Laue, Leopold von Ranke: The Formative Years (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950), 34–38.
Fiocchi Malaspina, L’eterno ritorno del Droit des gens, 51.
Georg Friedrich von Martens, Erzählungen merkwürdiger Fälle des neueren Europäischen Völkerrechts, 2 vols (Göttingen: Schröder, 1800 and1802).
The editorial history is provided by Oke Manning, Commentaries on the Law of Nations (London: S. Sweet et al., 1839), 52–53.
Charles de Martens [Karl von Martens], ‘Avant-propos’, in idem, Causes célèbres du droit des gens (Leipzig: Brockhaus; Paris: Ponthieu, 1827), vol. 1, ix–xviii, at xvi.
Italo Birocchi, ‘Traduzioni e cultura giuridica nell’Italia dell’Ottocento’, in Justement traduire. Les enjeux de la traduction juridique (Histoire du droit, droit comparé), ed. Marie Bassano and Wanda Mastor (Toulouse: Presses de l’Université de Toulouse, 2020), 31–55; Niccolò Tommaseo and Gino Capponi, Carteggio inedito dal 1833 al 1874, ed. Isidoro Del Lungo and Paolo Prunas (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1911–1932), vol. 2, 788; Niccolò Tommaseo, Venezia negli anni 1848 e 1849: memorie storiche inedite, ed. Giovanni Gambarin (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1950), vol. 2, 173.
See the notes by Charles Vergé in Georg Friedrich von Martens, Précis du droit des gens moderne de l’Europe augmentée des notes de Pinheiro-Ferreira, 2nd edition (Paris: Guillaumin et al., 1864), vol. 2, especially 32, 56, 151–152.