The Intercultural Context of the French Ransom Economy During the Modern Era

Abstract

In the modern era, notarial contracts for the redemption of French captives were undoubtedly considered legitimate by the parties involved, but the question of mutual recognition between the different religious authorities seems to remain unclear. The absence of mention of a double validation could suggest several things. Among them, the implicit trust in the application of existing notarial law as sufficiently representative of the two systems, underlined that cooperation between Christian and Muslim authorities was not always formalized by contractual practices, but rather by customary law not legally formalized.
In other words, this omission in the normative development could reflect either non-conflictual cooperation or, on the contrary, tensions in the management of interreligious relations within the legal systems of the time.