AYALA

 

Balthazar Ayala was born in 1548 in Antwerp to a Spanish noble family. He served in the Spanish Netherlands during the Dutch rebellion and the savage repression of that rebellion by the Duke of Alba, and was auditor-general, a sort of military judge, in Philip II's armies. He published his book, De Jure et Officis Bellicis et Disciplina Militaris, in 1582; two years later he died, only thirty-six. Thus his entire adult life was spent in the service of Philip of Spain.

Philip II had effected the transition to the princely state, the most powerful in Europe, with deceptive ease. The abdication of his father, Charles V, amounted to the abandonment of the imperial constitutional model. Now Philip, with a dynastic state unencumbered by the Empire, with increasing revenues from the Americas and a dynamic military force, provided the model to which other princes looked. Ironically, the princely state was to receive mortal blows while in his hands, for he more than any other prince embodied two traits of that state that would be shed by the kingly state: first, even if the society of states no longer belonged to a particular sect, the princely state itself was intensely sectarian—that was the outcome of the settlement at Augsburg—and there was no constitutional state more sectarian than the Catholic regime in Madrid. Second, the princely state was dynastic, and although Charles's will had bifurcated the continental holdings of the Habsburgs, the realm inherited by Philip gave him responsibilities for a wealthy and self-confident territory with which he had no national identification. He was seen as a Castilian, not as a Burgundian,* and he governed with a bureaucracy sent from Madrid. Both of these shortcomings came into play when he decided to divide the four existing bishoprics in the Netherlands into eighteen in order to combat heresy.

Philip's father had adopted a series of heresy laws in the Netherlands covering practically every conceivable offense against orthodoxy. In the forty years before the Dutch revolt, some 1,300 heretics had been executed. Philip, however, was even more inflexible in religious matters than his father. He changed the pattern of prosecutions, replacing impoverished Anabaptists as targets for repression with well-to-do Calvinists, and equating the crime of heresy with that of treason, thus leading to the confiscation of property as well as execution. When Egmont, who had fought so triumphantly on behalf of Philip's crown, led a mission of nobles from the Low Countries to Madrid to petition for a relaxation of the heresy prosecutions, Philip replied by letter: “As for the Inquisition, it is my intention that it should be carried out.” If, as Egmont argued, the executions merely created martyrs, then Philip advised that the executions should be carried out in secret. The velocity of the popular response to Philip's policies was proportionate to his attitude: it was total.

In Antwerp, Catholic images in churches were destroyed, and this practice spread to other cities. Revolt came the next year when two southern towns, Tournai and Valenciennes, were seized by Calvinists. At first Philip hesitated, but he eventually ordered a Spanish army under the Duke of Alba to suppress the insurrection. Alba instituted a reign of terror, immortalized by the Council of Blood set up five days after his arrival in Brussels in September 1567. That month Egmont himself was arrested, and the following June he was executed in the Brussels marketplace. In the next six years, the tribunal condemned thousands of persons, of whom a significant number were executed. The citizens of besieged cities that surrendered to Alba were massacred. Then in 1574 the “Spanish Fury” occurred, when unpaid Spanish troops sacked Antwerp in a gruesome display that sickened Europe. Alba was recalled in 1576, but by then the Low Countries were in complete rebellion.

In this struggle, Ayala was a man committed to reinforcing the princely state. Unlike the theologians who were his predecessors, he fully accepted the Augsburg constitution of states and did not attempt to subordinate those states to the papacy. In Ayala we see for the first time the notion that a war may be just from the point of view of both sides, a thoroughly statist view of the matter. In Ayala's opinion, it was not appropriate to discuss the “equity of the cause of a war between sovereign princes.” If such a war were lawfully conducted, it might be just from both perspectives.

In an interesting reversal of the events going on around him, Ayala maintained that treason could be likened to heresy, and thus could never provide the grounds for a just war. Rebellion was not only unlawful, it was unjust. Here Ayala broke new ground, for he considered the question of whether there could be an “unjust war,” a point not elaborated on by his scholastic predecessors. Because rebels do not have the legitimacy of law under the princely state, they can be treated as pirates and criminals. They may be enslaved and their property taken. There is no duty to keep faith with agreements struck with them. A usurper of the power of the princely state may be slain by anyone; the laws of war do not apply in the context of rebellion. Thus the very man who thought a just war might possibly be waged by both states party to a conflict, denied that a competing prince—without a state—could ever wage a just war.

This is the first notable treatment after Augsburg of the problem of the civil war. When the prince was supplemented by the princely state, the rules against regicide, and for that matter parricide—the term used by Ayala—that had hitherto applied in the feudal context now came into play in the guise of treason against the State. Arthur Nussbaum observes that Ayala's analysis would justify the Spanish edict that offered 25,000 gold crowns and a grant of nobility to the assassin of Prince William I of Orange, the leader of the Dutch forces. Quite so.

The civil war is uniquely a problem of the State, because it is an attack upon the State, not upon the person of the crown. It is noteworthy that the commencement of every new period in the procession of constitutional archetypes can be marked by a civil war or revolution.26 The State that ultimately emerged in the next century, the kingly state, differed from the princely state in its secular nature, among other things, and thus it is significant that the Dutch Revolt that began the era of the kingly state started out as a Calvinist-Catholic dispute.