Balthasar de Ayala

Balthazar Ayala (1548–1584) was a military judge in the Habsburg Netherlands during the opening decades of the Eighty Years' War who wrote an influential treatise on the law of war.

Life Ayala was born in Antwerp in 1548, the son of a Spanish cloth merchant, Gregorio Ayala, and his wife Agnes Rainalmia, a native of Cambrai. He studied at Leuven University, graduating licentiate of laws. On 27 May 1580 the Prince of Parma appointed him auditor general of the Army of Flanders. English translation published in 1912 in the Carnegie Institution Classics of International Law series.