HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF THE TERRITORIAL SEA 541 



the neighbouring state as far as one hundred miles from the 

 coast, and even further unless the proximity of another state 

 interfered. 1 



It is thus clear that long before the beginning of the seven- 

 teenth century, the original simplicity of the Roman law re- 

 garding the appropriation of the sea had undergone a change 

 at the hands of its commentators, and that the doctrine of 

 sovereignty or dominion over a very considerable maritime 

 zone was widely held by jurists. But there is no evidence 

 that either of the boundaries prescribed by Bartolus or Baldus 

 was sanctioned by the general usage of nations. They do not 

 appear ever to have been adopted by any state of northern 

 or western Europe as the limits of its territorial sea or maritime 

 sovereignty; although they were occasionally used in argu- 

 ments in State Papers, as when the Earl of Salisbury justified 

 to the Spanish Court King James's proclamation of 1609 

 against unlicensed fishing, on the ground that maritime juris- 

 diction was " generally received to be about one hundred miles 

 at the least into the seas." The actual application of these 

 large boundaries appears to have been confined to parts of 

 the Mediterranean, where the doctrine took its rise, and where 

 it survived till the eighteenth century. 2 A more recent and 

 a curious survival of the old boundary of Bartolus is to be 

 found in the abortive Russian Ukase of 1821, by which 

 foreigners were prohibited from navigating in Behring Sea 

 within one hundred Italian miles of the coast, a claim which 

 was revived by the United States as late as 189 1. 3 



Another general principle for the demarcation of the seas 

 belonging to a state had even wider currency than the above. 

 It consisted in the transference to the sea of the principle of 

 the mid -channel, or thalweg, as applied to rivers in appor- 

 tioning the waters pertaining to either bank, a doctrine laid 

 down in Roman law and in vogue among the Anglo-Saxons as 



1 "Et dicunt doctores, quod domini Veneti, et Genuenses, et alii habentes 

 portum, dicuntur habere jurisdictionem, et imperium in toto mari sibi propinquo 

 per centum miliaria, vel etiam ultra, si non propinquant alteri provincise. " Loc. cit. 



2 Azuni, Systema, Universale dei Principii del Diritto Maritime dett' Europa, 

 i. 58, 1798. Jurisdiction was conferred within certain boundaries on land, "et 

 intus mare centum milliaria." 



3 Parl. Papers, U.S., No. I., 1893. Behring Sea Arbitration, British Case, 

 37, 133. 



