Valladolid, Alberico Gentili’s Wars of the Romans (1599) and the Emergence of International Justice

Augustine’s Ambiguous Legacy

While for Augustine gloria remained highly ambivalent at best, Machiavelli gave it a straightforwardly sympathetic rendering (Irwin 2007: 725-43; Perreau-Saussine 2007).  Adopting Augustine’s dichotomy between pagan and Christian virtue, but appraising pagan virtue in a way diametrically opposed to the church father, Machiavelli aims to show how the Romans’ virtue (as opposed to fortune) was instrumental in expanding their empire.  This is in stark contrast to Cicero’ own stance; the point is that when writing on virtue, Cicero has in mind, not Augustine and Machiavelli’s pagan virtue with its concern for glory, but rather other-regarding virtue, what he calls the honestum (Skinner 1981; Colish 1978, without sufficient emphasis on the conflict; Berlin 2013, taking Machiavelli's Augustinian pagan-Christian dichotomy at face value however).

The same Augustinian framework concerning glory that can be shown at work in Machiavelli can also be found in the Spanish writers of the sixteenth century.  Indeed, the debate at Valladolid in 1550-51 concerning the justice of the Spanish empire reflected in many important ways the key features of Augustine’s view of the Roman empire and of the Carneadean debate.  Augustine’s ambiguous account of the justice of the Roman empire served as the main battleground, with both parties of the controversy trying to enlist him on their side.

Augustine’s “unimpeachable” (Lupher 2003: 65) authority made it difficult for anti-imperialist writers such as Domingo de Soto and Bartolomé de las Casas to eschew his views as to why the ancient Romans gained the favour of the true god, so that he increased their empire.  One among many interesting adaptations of Augustine’s view came from the jurist Vázquez de Menchaca.  In his Controversiae illustres (1564) he explained Augustine’s account by saying that the Romans were granted their empire by God not on the grounds of their desire for glory (gloriae cupiditas) in conquering it, but rather because, quite apart from their warfare, they were excelling other peoples in terms of other, moral virtues (vol. 2, c. 20, 31). 

The proponents of Spanish imperialism were conscious of Augustine’s value, too.  Sepúlveda, in his controversial dialogue Democrates secundus sive de iustis causis belli apud Indos (which nominally gave rise to the debate in Valladolid), combined Aristotle’s theory of the natural slave (Hanke 1959; Tierney 1991) with Augustine’s exemplary account of Roman imperialism to assert a civilizing mission as a just cause of war.  After quoting from the City of God 13.5 Sepúlveda interpreted Augustine as saying that the Romans had gained their empire (Lupher 2003: 114f.) “in order that by means of the excellent laws they observed and the virtue in which they excelled they might abolish and correct the barbaric customs and vices of many peoples.”  One hears the words of Cicero’s Laelius from the Carneadean debate, filtered through Augustine.  Theodore Beza (1554) perceived Carneades as a potential enemy of Calvinism, and the Carneadean dialogue from De re publica was subsequently referenced by the Spanish jurist Ayala in an international legal context.  Ayala mentioned the Carneadean debate in his Praefatio de Jure Belli (1582), arguing that Laelius had been utterly persuasive in his defense of justice against Carneades (Popkin 2003: 11).

Alberico Gentili and the Carneadean Debate

When we turn to Gentili (Panizza 1981) and his work The Wars of the Romans (Gentili 2011) we encounter a treatise modeled after the Carneadean dialogue in Cicero’s Republic (see my Introduction in Gentili 2011; Lupher 2010) The Augustinian emphasis on glory as the chief Roman virtue is reflected, but—as opposed to Machiavelli’s vision—ultimately clearly rejected.  In the first book, which constitutes an attack on Roman imperialism from the viewpoint of justice very much in the vein of Carneades, glory-seeking is identified as the chief trait of the Romans (1.1, p. 8/9, citing Cic. Mur. 22).  Similarly, referring explicitly to Cicero’s Republic and to the distinction drawn in the Carneadean debate between civil justice, which is born of mere necessity and reflects simply a contractarian bargain, and natural justice, which if it even exists is identified by Carneades with foolishness, Gentili or rather the Carneadean accuser of book 1 addresses Cicero directly in an accusatory tone (1.13, p. 118/119, citing August. De civ. D. 2.21).

While in book one, Lactantius’ sympathetic report of the Carneadean attack clearly serves as the model and sets the tone, Gentili’s response in book two follows the general path sketched by Cicero’s Laelius, namely a defense of Roman imperialism in terms of a universal natural law, which in Gentili’s hands now is being identified with the Roman law of the Corpus iuris civilis.  There is in Gentili a palpable concern with the expansion of law, one might say with the imperialist expansion of “natural constitutional law” (the kind of law Scipio alludes to in his definition of res publica in Cicero, Rep. 1.39; see Cancelli 1972; Suerbaum 1977; Schofield 1995; Asmis 2004) and the imposition of peace. 

Subproject III will seek to address important questions that arise from Gentili’s work, its use of Cicero’s conception of justice and its own place in the contemporary debates concerning international justice.  How did these concerns map onto Gentili’s conception of domestic justice?  Cicero too had thought that the law in force at Rome during the heyday of the Roman Republic was more or less identical with natural law (depending on one’s interpretation of De legibus).  What was the relationship between Roman law and Gentili’s defense of the justice of empire?  And how does this defense relate to Augustine’s account of Roman empire?  Do Gentili’s two books really map neatly onto the viewpoints put forward by Philus and Laelius in Cicero’s Republic?  What is the wider significance of the distance Gentili seemingly opens up between himself and Augustine?  Finally, to what extent is Gentili indebted to the debate on the justice of the Spanish empire waged earlier in the 16th century?

The recently published critical edition of Gentili’s text (Gentili 2011) with introduction and critical apparatus, provides the work’s first translation into a modern language from the original Latin and will serve as the textual foundation for this subproject.  This fascinating foundational work of early-modern international law has only recently met with renewed attention (Tuori 2009; Kingsbury and Straumann 2010b; Wagner 2011; Wagner 2012) and merits further study.

Given this critical edition, which has already provoked scholarly interest from a wide array of scholars comprising classicists, ancient historians, historians of political thought, legal historians as well as political theorists, the timing would be ideal for a book-length monograph on De armis Romanis.  Important open questions for scholarship include the relationship between Gentili’s treatise and Augustine’s conception of justice; the influence of classical historiography and Roman law on Gentili’s normative views; the relationship between Gentili, Machiavelli, the politiques and the raison d’état tradition; and the connections between De armis Romanis and Gentili’s mature work on the law of nations.