Quando alia remedia cessant. La rappresaglia nel regno di Napoli in età angioina

The reprisal, whose assumption, in the Middle Ages, is the 'denied justice'; in a foreign land, is an act through which a subject to obtain compensation for the damage suffered, in the absence of a higher authority able to sanction the conduct of a foreign debtor, asserts his own credit reasons on him or on the things belonging him, extending the contractual responsibility to debtor’s whole community also. The reprisals appear first as a custom and only in the eighth and ninth centuries they are regulated in order to curb their arbitrary use. This retaliatory practice operated as an ordering factor in medieval society, offering guarantees for the commercial traffic development, although burdened by the nefarious and sometimes lasting effects resulting from the concrete execution. The reprisals and their problems spread arouse the interest of the most important jurists of that time (Iacopo d'Arena, Bartolo da Sassoferrato, among the first to deal doctrinally with reprisals, Alberico da Rosciate, Giovanni da Legnano, Martino Garati) who try, already from the XIII century second half, through the first treaties, to examine the phenomenon, highlighting the unlawful nature of a widespread practice, and to offer an order able to contain the lacerations caused by a violent practice, in fact forcing in more residual spaces  the use of this compensatory instrument.