Reprisals as a Measure of Redress Short of War

‘Reprisals’ is a mediaeval term which is first met with in the thirteenth century. Lawyers, who wrote in Latin, knew it as repraesaliae or repressaliae an almost exact rendering of the French représailles and the Italian ripresaglie. They tried hard to identify the usages it represented with practices they knew in the civil law. Especially did they try to identify it with the Roman pigneratio. It was not till the early eighteenth century that the essential uniqueness of reprisals was categorically asserted by Bynkershoek in such forceful terms as “operam ludunt qui rem apud Romanos incognitam Latino vocabulo conantur exprimere.”