Cum libeat et causa subsit: guerra, Stato e diritto in Pierino Belli. Una ricerca sul "crollo" del regime di cristianità

This article is focused on Pierino/Pietrino Belli, a XVI century jurisconsult who is quite known among the italian historians of Medieval and Early Modern Law. Belli was a judge from Alba (in Piedmont) who served first under Charles V and Philip II of Spain and, after Cateau-Cambrésis, at the court of Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy as state counselor. Only one work is attributed to Belli, the treatise De re militari et de bello, first printed in 1563 in Venice. We also have a manuscript copy of it in the Turin National University Library. Despite little consideration from historians of political thought in the Early Modern Age (and even less so by historians of Christianity), the success and distribution of Belli’s work were quite significant in earlier times. The treatise's inclusion in the 16th tome of the Tractatus universi iuris (in their Venetian edition of 1583-84), earned Belli a double mention in Grotius’ De iure belli ac pacis and, earlier, served basically as an outline (or perhaps as the “stone guest”) for Alberico Gentili’s De iure belli. Belli is an extraordinary witness to the forging of at least some characteristics of the modern state, as, in its theoretical assumptions, matures between Hobbes and Rousseau. In Belli’s societas militaris, which is the army, he who holds the monopoly of force, by virtue of a power that is sovereign in its own way, confers on the soldier a position which, while imposing duties (in the form of disciplina), also recognizes them as a legal subject. Belli, by transforming a situation of fact into one of law, attests to a transformation of the horizon of the medieval lex (thus the sphere of ius divinum, naturale, etc.) into a system of rights that depend on a new principle, on a Grundnorm that is not legal but political and that is the arbitrariness (libido) of the princeps. To do this, Belli ascribes new meaning to a set of ius in corpus norms drawn from the heritage of ius commune and characteristic originally of the way canonists had always defined ordinaria potestas to be used against heretics.