Alberico Gentili

Career

After his graduation, Gentili was elected as the chief judge of Ascoli, but he then settled in his native town, where he filled various responsible offices. He was commissioned to prepare a revised version of the statutory laws of his home town, a task which he completed in 1577. Both father and son belonged to a confraternity suspected of meeting for the discussion of opinions hostile to the Roman church. The Inquisition was upon the track of the heretics, and Gentili, together with his father and one of his brothers, Scipione Gentili, was forced to leave Italy because of their Protestant beliefs.

The three first went to Laibach, now in Slovenia, then the capital of the Austrian Duchy of Carniola. From there, Alberico went on to the German university towns of Tübingen and Heidelberg. At their first halting place, Laibach (now Ljubljana), Matteo, doubtless through the influence of his brother-in-law, Nicolo Petrelli, a jurist high in favour with the court, was appointed chief physician of the duchy of Carniola. In the meantime, the papal authorities had excommunicated the fugitives and soon procured their expulsion from Austrian territory. Early in 1580, Alberico set out for England, preceded by a reputation that procured him offers of professorships at Heidelberg and at Tübingen, where Scipio was left to commence his university studies. Alberico reached London in August, with introductions to Giovanni Battista Castiglione, the Italian tutor to Queen Elizabeth I. Gentili soon became acquainted with Dr Tobias Matthew, the Archbishop of York. On 14 January 1581, Gentili was accordingly incorporated from Perugia as a doctor of civil law at Oxford, giving him the right to teach law, which he first exercised at St John's College, Oxford. Teaching at the English universities was then in Latin. Subsequently, Gentili was appointed as the Regius professor of civil law at Oxford by its Chancellor, Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester.

After a short stay in Wittenberg, Germany, Gentili returned to Oxford. In 1584, he was consulted by the English government as to the proper course to be pursued with Bernardino de Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador, who had been detected plotting against Elizabeth. He chose the topic to which his attention had thus been directed as a subject for a disputation when the Earl of Leicester and Sir Philip Sidney visited the schools at Oxford in the same year; and six months later this was expanded into a book, the De legationibus libri tres. As a result, Mendoza was expelled from England. Gentili held the regius professorship until his death, but he turned more and more to practical legal work in London from about 1590. He practised in the High Court of Admiralty, where the continental civil law rather than the English common law was applied. In 1600, Gentili was called to the Honourable Society of Gray's Inn.

Personal life

In 1589, Gentili married Hester de Peigne, a French Huguenot. Their eldest son was Robert Gentilis, born 1590, who graduated from Oxford at the age of twelve and was made a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, at the age of seventeen through the influence of his father. Gentili died in London and was buried in the Church of St Helen Bishopsgate in the City of London.

Legacy

Gentili's fame as an international lawyer was soon eclipsed by the publication of Hugo Grotius' seminal work De Iure Belli ac Pacis in 1625 even though Grotius owed much to Gentili's writings. It was only in the 19th century that interest in Gentili revived, to a great extent because of Sir Thomas Erskine Holland (1835–1926), who in 1874 devoted his inaugural lecture as professor of international law and diplomacy in Oxford to Gentili. According to a 2022 study, Gentili's work on the laws of war were of marginal interest until the late 19th century, when a group of international lawyers used his writings in part to establish the contemporary laws of war. Since then, numerous books and articles have been written about Gentili and his work. In his hometown, a monument was erected in his honour.

Statue of Alberico Gentili

The statue of Alberico Gentili is a monument made by Giuseppe Guastalla in 1908 in view of the third centenary of his death. The statue played a symbolic role during the Italian campaign, precisely during the liberation of San Ginesio by the Allies. The plaque added in 2009 briefly mentions the story:

Alberico Gentili, who died in London in 1608, was the first to advocate humane treatment for Prisoners of War. After the Italian Armistice in September 1943, thousands of P.O.W.s escaped from their prison camps. The country people in and around San Ginesio and all over German-occupied Italy gave them food and shelter, in spite of the danger in so doing.

Their bravery, compassion and self-sacrifice will never be forgotten by the Allied Prisoners of War, nor by their descendants.

Monte San Martino Trust - London. 2009