Альберико Джентили: Халықаралық құқықтың негізін қалаушысы

Italian jurist (1552–1608)

Alberico Gentili (14 January 155219 June 1608) was an Italian jurist, a tutor of Queen Elizabeth I, and a standing advocate to the Spanish Embassy in London, who served as the Regius professor of civil law at the University of Oxford for 21 years. He is regarded as the co founder of the field of international law, and thus known as the "Father of international law". The first medieval writer on public international law,in 1587 Gentili became the first non English person to be a Regius Professor. He also authored numerous books, which are recognized to be among the most essential sources for international legal doctrines, yet that also include theological and literary subjects.

He was born into a noble family in the town of San Ginesio, Macerata, Italy. It has been conjectured that Gentili's mother might have been the source of his early love for jurisprudence, but it was his father, Matteo Gentili, a renowned physician, who assumed the role of his tutor in Latin and Greek. His father was a protestant. He obtained a doctoral degree in law at the University of Perugia at the age of 20. He was commissioned to prepare a revised version of the statutory laws of his home town, a task which he completed in 1577. After a short stay in Wittenberg, Germany, he 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 in 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 this was six months later 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 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. He died in London and was buried in the Church of St Helen Bishopsgate in the City of London. He married Hester de Peigne, a French Huguenot, in 1589. His eldest son was Robert Gentilis, who graduated from Oxford University at the age of 12 and was made a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford at the age of 17 through the influence of his father.

Gentili's fame as an international lawyer was soon eclipsed by the publication of Hugo Grotius' seminal work De Jure 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.

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|