“Principis gloria propria, aut aliud commodum, non est causa belli justa. The Prince may not wage war to further either his glory or his own interests. And the wrong to be righted by war must be commensurate with the results of war itself (death, confiscation, rapine) ere a just war can be induced to right it.”
The friar seems to be going too far. Hear him:
“The end of war must be, not evil to the foe, but good.
“And victory must be enjoyed in Christian moderation.
“The people shall not suffer through the faults of their princes.
“Finally, a treaty imposed by force—even after victory—is not valid.”
Modern International Law is after all no growth from these uncomfortable precepts of a monk: it is a lapse and a decadence. The legal dicta of Vitoria are of an old tradition: they are a birth of the old breaking Synthesis of medieval Europe. International Law is the theoretic shred of what was once a spiritual Body.
e. The Rogue
The Spain of Isabel and Ferdinand, of Carlos and Philip II—wherein is she great? In her idea and Will. These prove the Globe and bind it: these in their own way prove and make her one with God. But Spain, the body of men living in towns and huertas, is indigent and disordered.
At her spiritual climax, under Isabel, Carlos and Philip II, Spain was squalid. By contrast with the state of England, of France, of the German towns and of the cities of Morocco, she was an economic laggard. Her nobles with their retinues cut swathes of gold through the landsides. She was full of heroes and of saints. But the land was arid with neglect. War had razed her forests. Seven centuries of Reconquest, making labor despicable beside the guerdons of battle, had sapped her burghers. What the long wars began, the Inquisition and Expulsions carried on. Jews—a solid class of craftsmen and middlemen—were expelled. The Granadan Moors—ablest of Spain’s cultivators—were making homesick songs about their Andalusian farms, in Fez and Marrakech. There were more vagabonds in Spain than farmers, more soldiers than laborers. There were more hidalgos and caballeros than artisans and merchants. There were seven million Spaniards—and nine thousand convents!