This article deals with the doctrine of diplomatic immunity elaborated by the French jurist and humanist Pierre Ayrault (1536–1601). After a brief outline of the debate on diplomatic immunity from the end of the Middle Ages to the middle of the sixteenth century, the article focuses on Ayrault’s discussion of the topic in the works he published between 1563 and 1588, and points to some important changes that occurred in the way in which the figure of the ambassador was conceived at that time. These changes offer us a number of elements which could lead to a better understanding of the transition from the medieval to the early-modern conceptions of diplomacy and ius gentium.
Lucas de Penna’s commentary on the Tres Libri Codicis – and, in particular, that commentary’s section on the part de legationibus – documents how late-Medieval civil law scholarship contributed to work out the status of ambassadors. Although De Penna’s text has been overlooked in legal historiography and studies on Medieval diplomacy, the author’s specific approach was at the time unique in late-Medieval legal scholarship, both in terms of method and content, and anticipated in many ways essential themes of early-modern scholarship on the status of diplomats.
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