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Martinus Garatus Laudensis on Treaties

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Introduction Martinus Garatus Laudensis' De confaederatione, pace et conventionibus principum is widely acknowledged as one of the first monographic works on the law of treaties. Whatever the merits of such a characterisation, there is a risk that it may obfuscate some of that work's essential features in its proper legal-historical context. Before considering the substance of the work, it is therefore necessary to consider some of its formal features, if only as a general methodological caveat. Martinus Garatus on the prince and the law Before the second half of the seventeenth century, legal monographs on treaties are scarce. That, of course, does not mean that the rich civil and canon law literature of the later medieval centuries does not yield much material on questions related to the law of treaties. As for most questions on aspects of ius gentium (whether understood as ‘law of nations’ or in a less anachronistic sense) and, indeed, for what modern lawyers would be prepared to recognise as questions of international law, much of the material is scattered over a wide range of commentaries in utroque iure, repetitiones, summae, consilia and so on, even though in any of those works there may be privileged loci on particular questions.