The “Historical Lexicon of Commercial Law: German, Italian and Latin” is a core scientific output of the ERC project MICOLL. This digital resource investigates the development and migration of commercial legal terminology in Western Europe from the 11^th century onwards, providing a new perspective on the history of the lex mercatoria.

The Lexicon focuses on four essential pillars of commercial law that revolutionized European trade:

1. Company and Partnership
2. Business Crisis and Insolvency (e.g., bankruptcy)
3. Typical Mercantile Contracts (e.g., insurance)
4. Credit Instruments (e.g., bills of exchange).

The Italian-German Laboratory

The project’s primary case study focuses on the encounter between Italian and German merchants between the 11^th and the 17^th centuries. These two groups represented particularly diverse linguistic families (Italo-Romance and Germanic), yet they maintained intense commercial traffic between the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. The epicenter of this interaction was Venice, where the Fondaco dei Tedeschi stands as a symbolic crossroads where these different legal and linguistic traditions merged.

To provide a rigorous historical-legal context, the Lexicon is based on original archival research conducted in key trading hubs. This research primarily utilized sources from the archives of Venice, Nuremberg, Augsburg and Lübeck, as well as the Fugger archives.

Terminology Beyond Borders

While focusing on the Italian-German axis, the project recognizes that legal terms – much like the law itself – do not respect geographical or political boundaries. Terms often migrated across Europe through loans and calques.

To analyze this broad spread, the Lexicon draws upon existing historical lexicons (such as the Deutsches Rechtswörterbuch for German and the Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini for Italian) alongside the project’s own specialized corpus. This approach allows researchers to track “semantic galaxies” – clusters of German, Italian and Latin terms related to specific legal institutes – across a thousand-year timeframe in Western Europe.

Chronology

While the project’s primary archival research is concentrated on the 11th to 17th centuries – the period from the “Commercial Revolution” to the rise of commercial law literature – the use of established historical and etymological lexicons allows for a more comprehensive tracking of how terms migrated and evolved from the late Middle Ages until today.

Methodology 

The Lexicon employs a dual semasiological and onomasiological approach:

• Semasiological: It tracks the semantic evolution and changes in the meanings of specific words over time.
• Onomasiological: It identifies the various terms used across different languages (Italian, German, and Latin) to express a single legal concept.

The interface is designed for both specialists and a wider audience, with English as the bridge language. Users can search for a general concept (e.g., bankruptcy) to find its technical equivalents in Italian (e.g. bancarotta, fallimento), German (e.g. Bankrott, Falliment), and Latin (e.g. decoctio). Each entry includes data from the MICOLL corpus, etymological notes, and a legal-historical commentary explaining the diffusion of the specific legal institute. 

This digital repository aims to bridge the gap between historical linguistics and legal history, providing researchers and the public with a definitive tool to understand the transnational roots of Western commercial culture.

Provisional Structure 

1. Forms

2. Etymology

3. First attestation

4. Geolinguistic distribution

5. Synonymous and parasynonymous entries

6. Equivalent and parasyntonymic entries in other languages of the Lexicon

7. List of definitions

8. Expressions

9. Linguistic note

10 Legal-historical note (with bibliography)

11. Other notes

12. Date and signature of the editor

The final version of the “Historical Lexicon of Commercial Law: German, Italian and Latin” will be fully accessible and searchable on this website by the conclusion of the MICOLL project in March 2027.