War Laws and Florentine State Liberty: Archbishop Francesco Frosini’s Legal Discourse in the Bellum Diplomaticum of the Early Eighteenth Century Between the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and the Holy Roman Empire

Abstract The article examines the manuscript authored by the Archbishop of Pisa, Francesco Frosini (1654–1733), written in the context of the bellum diplomaticum between the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and the Holy Roman Empire over the succession of Tuscany during the early decades of the eighteenth century. Throughout this international controversy, the Tuscan ruling class and its jurists were engaged in defending the autonomy and independence of the Tuscan ‘small state’ against imperial expansion, by examining the erudite works of the exponents of the ‘modern natural law school’. Notably, the Tuscan legal scholars, trained at the University of Pisa, drew on these auctoritates in a deliberately instrumental manner, extracting from their weighty treatises precisely those arguments best suited to advance selected principles of public law within international public opinion, immediately before, during, and after the numerous multilateral diplomatic conferences of the period, with the aim of negotiating their outcomes. In his Legal Discourse on the Liberty of the Florentine State (1715), Francesco Frosini – graduated in law at the University of Pisa, and in his capacity of Archbishop with a considerable formal standing within the academic hierarchy – quoted extensively from Grotius and his major commentators, notably Gronovius and Van der Muelen, and thereby also Pufendorf, placing them alongside the works of German public lawyers such as Ziegler, Multz, Besold, and others. The central objective of this unpublished legal opinion was to demonstrate that the Diploma issued by the Emperor Charles V on 28 October 1530 – concluded in the wake of the capitulations of the Florentine Republic on 12 August of the same year – was never intended as an act of sovereign acquisition. Accordingly, it could not legitimately be invoked by imperial jurists, in their eighteenth-century historical-legal texts, as evidence of the ‘suppression of the ancient liberty of Florence’, as Frosini explicitly maintained.