Freitas, Serafim de

De justo imperio lusitanorum asiatico. [On the just empire of the Portuguese in Asia.]

Valladolid, Jerónimo Morillo, 1625. 4to. 8 + 190 + 28 leaves. Title printed in red & black with woodcut arms of Spain. Modern full calf, spine gilt with red labels, some leaves browned. Scarce first edition. The first vernacular translation appeared only in 1882, and then in French. It finally received a Spanish translation in 1925, three hundred years after it was first issued. In this work Serafim de Freitas attacks Hugo Grotius, who objected to the Portuguese control of the Seas. In Mare liberum (1609) Grotius had defended the right of the Netherlands to freely sail across the seas to India; and in so doing he also asserted the universal freedom of the seas. The recognition of the right of the Dutch to sail to the East Indies and to trade there was achieved by the treaty of Antwerp in the month following the appearence of Mare liberum, and no reply from the Portuguese or Spaniards to the arguments of Grotius was published till sixteen years later, when Freitas’s elaborate defence of the rights of Portugal in the Indies and a reply to Grotius was published in De justo imperio lusitanorum asiatico. Daya de Silva, The Portuguese in Asia. An annotated bibliography, 1987, 760. Lach & Van Kley, Asia, 3:1, 1993, pp. 340–1. Thomas Wemyss Fulton, The sovereignty of the sea, Edinburgh & London, 1911, p. 350. For an analysis of the substance of the Grotius-Freitas controversy see C. H. Alexandrowicz, An introduction to the history of the law of nations in the East Indies, Oxford 1967, pp. 49–57 & 65–71. Anthony Pagden, Lords of all the world. Ideologies of empire in Spain, Britain and France c. 1500–1800, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 1995, pp. 48–49.

• GBP 9,000.00 > другие валюты
• номер заказа: 04169

• продавец: Lowendahl Rare Books Ltd (THAILAND)