Gentili, Alberico [key], 1552–1608, Italian writer on international law. Forced to leave Italy because of his Protestantism, he went to England (1580), where he became regius professor of civil law, Oxford, and in 1605 became advocate for the king of Spain in the British admiralty court. His De legationibus (1585) had a great influence in shaping modern diplomatic practice. In De jure belli [on the law of war] (1598), one of the earliest works on international law, he developed many ideas on the legal conduct of war to which Hugo Grotius later gave wider circulation.
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