Cosmopoleis

by Sophus A. Reinert

Although scholars have often attributed the sentiment to the first-century Stoic philosopher Gaius Musonius Rufus, during his exile by Nero to the Cyclades, it was instead the formulation of Baldo degli Ubaldi that resonated loudly and deeply in the commercial law of Renaissance and early modern Europe. Addressing the question of whether territorial lords could summarily expel foreign merchants from their lands, the famed fourteenth-century Italian jurist replied: "the world is the common fatherland of everyone (mundus est omnibus communis patria)", and thus merchants cannot be expelled...