This article focuses on the consequences of a single major international affair — the shipwreck of a French ship carrying 165 Muslim pilgrims along the southern shores of Sicily in 1716 — to address two pivotal issues in the reordering of eighteenth-­century legal and political systems: the limits of domestic sovereignty in absolutist states and the status of non-Christian polities in the theory and practice of the law of nations. Both the time and place of this episode, which had a vast resonance at the time, have broad implications for how we write about the development of modern international law. While much of the debate on the maritime dimension of the eighteenth-century law of nations focuses on the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, we spotlight the Mediterranean, where endemic corsairing activities coexisted with age-old diplomatic and day-to-day practices of accommodation and mutual recognition between Christian and Muslim polities. Here we draw attention to shipwrecks that occurred in foreign territorial waters and their heuristic potential for better understanding controversial issues of maritime law, such as the status of shorelines, neutrality and the law of the flag. Even after the Peace of Utrecht (1713–15), which is often regarded as a watershed moment in the history of international law, these rules were far from settled and shipwrecks continued to fuel legal and philosophical battles that extended well beyond the confines of the famous controversy between supporters of mare liberum and advocates of mare clausum. The close examination of the 1716 shipwreck leads us to challenge the land/sea divide as constructed by Carl Schmitt and demonstrate that territorial waters were objects of sovereign disputes in much the same way as land territories. We also show how the emerging Eurocentric discourse about the ‘barbarity’ of non-Christian peoples and nations coexisted with intellectual, economic and diplomatic forces interested in establishing formal agreements between Western European nations, the Ottoman Empire and its North African provinces.

中文翻译：

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“土耳其人的沉船”：18 世纪地中海法律秩序中的主权、野蛮和文明


本文聚焦于单一重大国际事件的后果——1716 年一艘载有 165 名穆斯林朝圣者的法国船在西西里岛南海岸遭遇海难——以解决 18 世纪法律和政治制度重新排序中的两个关键问题：专制国家国内主权的限制和非基督教政体在国际法理论和实践中的地位。这一事件发生的时间和地点在当时引起了巨大的共鸣，对我们如何书写现代国际法的发展具有广泛的影响。虽然关于 18 世纪国际法的海洋维度的大部分辩论都集中在大西洋和印度洋，但我们关注地中海，那里的地方性海盗活动与基督教和穆斯林政体之间古老的外交和日常妥协和相互承认并存。在这里，我们提请注意在外国领海发生的沉船事故及其启发式的潜力，以更好地理解有争议的海事法问题，例如海岸线的状况、中立性和船旗法。即使在乌得勒支和约（1713-15 年）之后，这通常被认为是国际法史上的分水岭，但这些规则远未尘埃落定，沉船继续助长法律和哲学斗争，这些争论远远超出了 mare liberum 支持者和 mare clausum 倡导者之间著名争论的范围。对 1716 年沉船的仔细研究使我们挑战了卡尔·施密特 （Carl Schmitt） 构建的陆地/海洋分界线，并证明领海与陆地领土一样是主权争端的对象。 我们还展示了关于非基督教民族和国家的“野蛮”的新兴欧洲中心主义话语如何与有兴趣在西欧国家、奥斯曼帝国及其北非省份之间建立正式协议的知识分子、经济和外交力量共存。