War and Peace in the Western Political Imagination by Roger Manning;

Author:Roger Manning; [Manning, Roger B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474258715
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2015-12-17T00:00:00+00:00

The concept of holy war, in the various guises of the medieval crusade and the Reformation wars of religion, was never fully accepted in the mainstream of Western political theory because the usual legal and moral justification for declaring war was based on the concept of just war. That doctrine had its roots in classical antiquity, and always had its defenders during the medieval period. Except for periods when the papacy or other religious leaders asserted themselves when temporal authority and power were weak, it was usually assumed that only the recognized leader of a political society or a sovereign ruler possessed the right and authority to declare war.155 The sovereign states that emerged during the Renaissance and early-modern period of European history could not allow contending religious and aristocratic factions to disrupt the peace, as happened in France during the latter part of the sixteenth century. Violent confessional conflict came to be classified as civil war or nonwar, which could not be considered just war.156 For this reason, most states that aspired to sovereign status pursued Erastian state churches if they were Protestant, or severely limited the authority of the popes and bishops if they remained Catholic, as was the case in Spain and with the Gallican Church in France. The latter monarchies were major powers, and could apply pressure on the papacy to grant extensive royal control over the Catholic Church within their realms because they wielded military and political power in Italy or were in close proximity to the Italian peninsula. Also, both Spain and France gradually eliminated earlier policies of tolerating religious minorities. Spain had expelled the Jews and Moriscos who refused to convert to Catholicism, and Louis XIV revoked the Edicts of Nantes that had allowed the Huguenots to worship in certain designated places.

Increasingly, in the early modern period, political philosophers as well as monarchs rejected religion as a valid reason for going to war. In his The Law of War and Peace, published in Latin in 1625, Hugo Grotius argued that relations between states should be grounded in natural law and historical experience. This, of course, embodied the just war tradition, but it also reinforced the growing secularization of political thought. Grotius insisted that the only grounds for a just war were “the defence of persons and property.” He denied that the Church or the Holy Roman emperor had the authority to declare offensive war.157

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