Zwischen bellum iustum und modernem Völkerrecht. Überlegungen zum Denken über Krieg und Frieden am Ende des Mittelalters

摘要

Framed by the theories of the bellum iustum (just war) that were completely defined by the end of the thirteenth century, on the one hand/and the formation of the International Law during the sixteenth and seventeenth century, on the other, the fifteenth century is to be considered not only as a period of stagnation. Its contribution can be understood less in terms of originality: Jurists like Juan Lopez da Segovia (1440-1496) and Martino Garati da Lodi (died 1453) repeated more or less what was already elaborated by their predecessors of the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries. Although, at first sight, the praise of war (commendatio belli), composed in 1468 by Rodrigo Sanchez de Arevalo (1404-1470), could be considered »innovative«, as it is the utmost opposition of the pacifist intention of just war theories, it still remains within its historical and intellectual context, for Sanchez de Arevalo merely escalated the scepticism of St. Augustine who argued that perfect peace was possible only in the future reign of Jesus Christ. In this perspective, both moments, the repetition and the escalation of what substantially was already said in former centuries, can be understood as symptoms of a crisis: the theories already elaborated did not fit anymore to the political realities of the end of the late Middle Ages, and new explanations were still out of reach. In retrospect, the experience that just war theories and their explanations did not fit anymore seems to be, besides the impulses set by the discovery of the American continent, one condition for the development of the International Law in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.