Marsilius of Padua

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Hello, for someone who denounced the papacy as a fraud, Marciles of Padua lived a remarkably long time, from around 1275 to 1343.

His major work was Defense of Pacis, or Defender of the Peace, yet there was little peace in his time, as the Papacy, the Holy Roman Emperor, and the French king fought over who had supreme power on earth.

Marsilius was clear that it was not the Pope.

And in the last centuries, he's been seen as an early advocate for popular sovereignty and republican democracy, a reflection of his central status in political philosophy, though perhaps not of his work itself.

With me to discuss Marsilius of Padua, Annabel Brett, Professor of Political Thought and History at the University of Cambridge, George Garnet, Professor of Medieval History and Fellow and Tutor at St.

Hughes College, University of Oxford, and Serena Ferente, Professor of Medieval History at the University of Amsterdam.

Serena is an unfamiliar name to many of us.

Can you give us an idea of the background of Marsilius?

So, Marsilius was a Paduan citizen.

Padua is a city in the northeast of the Italian peninsula.

He was born there.

His father was probably a notary.

But the very first document we have about his life is actually quite late.

It dates from 1313, and we find Marsilius in Paris as the rector of the university.

The rector at the time was a member of the student body.

Marsilius was a master in the liberal arts, but not a student of the higher faculties, probably.

Already from this, we can see that he has an interesting European background.

He traveled a lot during his lifetime.

He moved from Paris to Munich at a later stage, and then from Munich again to the Italian peninsula, and perhaps back to Munich again.

So the most interesting thing about Marsilius, in my opinion, is that he produced his masterpiece at the beginning of his career.

In 1324, Marsilius wrote The Defender of the Peace in Paris, as many manuscripts say.

And the manuscripts perhaps circulated anonymously, although Marsilius' name is at the beginning of the work, although it's not entirely clear if he could be identified.

And after writing this book, with perhaps the help of his friend and associate, John of Gendon,

he escaped to Munich because the book was proscribed by the papacy.

Why did it matter to Marsilius that Padua was his place of birth and growth?

So Marsilius' family came from what scholars would call the popolo of Padua, that is,

the working classes of the city of Padua, although this included also very rich people, such as merchants.

And as such, he and his family were fully part of the political life of the city.

And this matters because we can use this background to interpret his work and his intention, but also because Marsilius is not similar to a great deal of other scholastic masters active in Paris because of this Italian background.

There were many other Italian scholastic masters, but Marsilius has a background in one of the largest and more powerful city republics of the 14th century.

Thank you very much.

Annabelle, Annabel Brett, there were a lot of power struggles going on then.

We've heard that Marsilius had been in France.

Can you start by telling us about the French king's issues?

We first pick up Marsilius's trail in 1313 when he's the rector of the University of Paris.

So we think that in order to have been elected and to be rector at that time, he must have been there by about 1310.

So that puts his arrival in Paris really not long after the sort of major power struggle between the French king and the pope, which took place at the end of the 13th century and at the beginning of the 14th.

So this is a contest really of both words and ultimately physical force between the French king, which is Philip IV,

Philip the Fair, and the Pope Boniface VIII.

And there were two episodes of this struggle, one in sort of around 12967 and the other in 1301.

The first concerned the question of exemption of the clergy from royal taxation, and the other was over the arrest of the Bishop of Parmier by Philip.

So, it was a question about the limits of royal jurisdiction versus the limits of papal jurisdiction, and both of these were set on a sort of maximalist interpretation of the limits of their power.

So it didn't go too well for the Pope in the end.

And famously, the French ambassador Pierre Flotte is supposed to have said to the Pope, you know, your power is verbal and ours is real.

But in fact, everybody recognised that the pen is a mighty sword, there's a power in words.

So it generated this pamphlet warfare, and one of the most famous ones was from a French Dominican called John of Paris, which is called On Royal and Papal Power.

This contest did change the tone, I think, of political discourse because it makes political questions questions of power, on the power of the church, on the power of the pope, on the power of the king, who's got the power.

So I think that that question, who's got the power, that way of framing the question, inflects his thought.

This man, Marsilis, is going to make a dramatic entry with his early book, well, the greatest book wrote when he was a young man.

What books was he reading?

Where did he get his ideas from?

Going back a bit into the 13th century again, the curriculum of the Arts Faculty at Paris had been revolutionised by the rediscovery in the Latin West of the scientific works of Aristotle, largely via the work of Islamic scholars and intermediaries.

So he's steeped also in natural sciences and it's really important that the culture of natural sciences at the Arts Faculty in Paris had been throughout the 13th century increasingly an object of suspicion to the ecclesiastical authorities because it was a domain of knowledge that did not acknowledge the hegemony of theology over the domain of knowledge.

It was a kind of, and it came out of an Islamic tradition.

So it's a kind of understanding of nature that is independent of the kinds of constructions of human nature that feed into theology.

It was, in a sense, it was a challenger.

It was, absolutely.

And I think that Marsilius really buys into that literature because it's a domain of knowledge that doesn't lead you straight back into the claims of the church.

So, and John of Jandon, his friend, is part of that intellectual culture, a kind of naturalising philosophy that's in itself a challenge to ecclesiastical authorities.

Thank you.

George Garnet,

we talked about the Holy Roman Emperor.

Was Marsiliusn sympathetic to the fact that it was the Holy Roman Emperor?

How did he assess that?

He thought that potentially the Holy Roman Emperor was the solution to the problems of Christendom.

And in my view, at least, that is is the point of his book that he sees the aspiring Holy Roman Emperor he's not Holy Roman Emperor yet Ludwig or Louis of Bavaria as the force who will take on the papacy and destroy the pretensions which in his view are corrupting Christendom

well that's quite a big sentence

so

when he thought that did he express his thoughts did Marsilius write about it that's what That's what most of the book is about.

I mean, what Annabelle has talked about thus far is the first discourse.

The book is in three discourses.

First discourse is about 100 pages.

The second discourse is about 300 pages.

And the third discourse is about 10 pages.

And contemporaries, not just the Pope who became obsessed, but all contemporaries

obsessed by the book, they all react to the second discourse, which is all about the potential solution to the problems of Christendom, as Marsilius sees it.

The defender of peace of the title is Louis of Bavaria.

So he didn't have to write this book.

Why did he write it?

He wrote it at a comparatively young age.

It had a very powerful effect in some quarters.

Can you tell us a bit about that?

In 1319, we know that he was offered some sort of minor ecclesiastical preferment by the Pope.

For whatever reason, that didn't happen, and almost immediately Marsilius went over to the imperial side, to the Ghibelline side.

Within five years, he produced this massive book, which is an analysis of everything that's gone wrong in Christendom, certainly since the reign of the first Christian emperor Constantine, and arguably, I think, what's gone wrong in the world since the fall of man.

And he thinks, that is, Marsilius thinks, that we may be coming up to the last days, that it may be it's an apocalyptic book in my view, because as far as he's concerned, the clash between sin

and the faith has become catastrophically acute because the Pope is trying to usurp the role of the Emperor.

He's trying to prolong the Imperial vacancy, but also to exercise all the powers which should rightly be exercised by the emperor.

And in Marsilius' view, this means that human history is careering towards its end.

Why does he think that?

Well, there was a lot of argument about that at the time, particularly in the Franciscan order.

Many of the extreme Franciscans regarded the papacy as the embodiment of corruption and and saw the only solution as a return to the apostolic life, the life of Christ's apostles of poverty, which they saw as in effect restoring life in the Garden of Eden.

That's what Marsilius is backing, I think,

that argument.

Thank you.

Serena, it's been said that Marsilius wanted power or saw power coming from the people.

That's a big step at that time, isn't it?

It is.

Can you tell us about that and why he followed that path?

Well, Marsilius doesn't quite use so much the notion of the populus, but he comes up with this concept in the Defender of the Peace of the human legislator, which is the whole body of the citizens, he says.

And to him, this is where the power to create a government or a princely entity, a princely part, he calls it, that's where it comes from.

And it is important to stress that it's a human legislator.

So power doesn't have a a divine origin.

It is a human origin.

And the process through which this power is transferred onto the government, we could say, or the princely part, is an electoral process.

So Marsilius thinks that election, which encompasses more than just the kinds of elections we are used to, but election is the fundamental origin of power, although he acknowledges that there are some kinds of laws that have a completely divine origin, mosaic law, for example.

But for everything that concerns the life of human beings on earth and their purpose of not just living but living well, this is really straight from Aristotle, then it is the human legislator that is the origin of the law and therefore the origin of this political power.

Now, this is not an unprecedented idea.

Clearly, there are echoes of Roman law, and there may be an influence of all kinds of practical instances of power from below that Marsilius knew personally, not only in Padua, which was ruled by a mixture of assembly politics and some sort of government bodies, but also in the university itself, which was fundamentally ruled by the masters and the students as a body through a lot of elections.

So, Marsilius, perhaps the first thinker in the medieval period that puts the question

of the origin of power in such clear terms, and this is very striking for us.

I would take a slightly different approach in that he seems to me to elide the faithful human legislator, and he emphasizes that the legislator is faithful, that is, Christian, and the emperor, so that the ruler, the ruling ruling part, the pars principans, and the faithful human legislator, as the book proceeds, become more and more blended.

I take it, you know, the polemics about power are centrally in Discourse 2, and of course, that's where the Pope's going to home in on.

But Discourse 1 is there for a reason.

It's there to establish these constructs and conceptions that he can then use to disentangle the kind of papal conflation of powers, even if at a certain later stage he's happy to conflate them in a different direction.

So I think that Discourse 1 does play a key function in the strategy of the work.

Very careful about the words he uses for these concepts, especially when Aristotle comes into the, let's call it, an equation.

The role of history in the Defender of the Peace, I think that's absolutely clear.

It's not just that the Pope is corrupt, there's a history of corruption that is cumulative.

How is that corruption manifest?

Can you give us some examples?

Well, one of the manifestations that Martilius cites is precisely Boniface's attempt to say to Philip IV that Philip is actually subject to him, both in respect of spirituals and in respect of temporals.

So, earthly matters, religious matters, Philip is subject to the Pope.

So, it's that claim of subordination, subjection, to the Pope.

That is the corruption.

And it's a corruption both in the Church and in the secular domain, all at the same time.

It's also, of course, that the Pope can tax in the French kingdom, that he is raising massive revenues.

That's why Philip the Fair objects.

And in Marsilius' view, it's not a priest's business to be raising money to fund massive estates.

What a priest should be is another apostle.

He should espouse poverty.

Let's go back to Aristotle.

Yes.

So I think a sort of history of, and it's encapsulated in this papal claim to plenitude of power, all power is given unto, that is held by the Pope.

So I think Marsilius's claim is that this corruption of power has actually inflected the language of government itself.

So, the standard language in which these debates are conducted is itself infected with the same corruption.

So, I think that Discourse 1, Marsilius steps out into a completely different universe.

It's a universe of Aristotelian natural science.

He builds up the human community, not by using the same terminology as the Pope's, because there's too much of a danger that that's going to slide you straight back into the arms of the Pope, from scratch in a science that's independent of theological implications.

This is all from Aristotle.

This is largely from Aristotle.

There's a bit of medical background.

He's trained in medicine, but actually medical science and Aristotelian natural science are pretty close at the time.

So we have a kind of, this is what I'm calling a kind of naturalising science of human beings coming together into a political community.

And it's all built up from there.

And at the beginning of Discourse 2, where he does turn to join battle with the Pope, he starts with a warning about the kind of oppression of falsehoods that's going to stand in the way of his discourse.

And then, the very next chapter is all about the correct meaning of words, the correct meaning of the church, the correct meaning of temporal, of spiritual, and key, the correct meaning of the judge.

And he can do that now because he's in possession of a kind of analytic that doesn't in the first instance buy into the papal use of those terms.

The Aristotelian.

I would add to that that he says that both discourses are directed to the same subject, but the first discourse is based on reason and the second discourse is based on authority.

But as far as he is concerned, the two are complementary.

They are arguing for the same end through via different routes.

Does he what kind of a secular rule does he favour, George?

He favours, ultimately, universal rule within Christendom.

One of the few modern concepts which have not been foisted on Marsilius is federalism.

And the reason is because there's absolutely or almost no discussion of lesser political units within Christendom.

There are few references to Italian cities, a very few, some references to the French kingdom, and that's about it.

As far as Marsilius is concerned, he is talking about the rulership of Christendom, and he thinks that the Emperor should be exercising all secular power, should be appointing all priests, should certainly be appointing the Bishop of Rome.

And indeed, in 1328, with Marsilius playing a central role in the operation, Louis marched on Rome, deposed the Pope.

We think that Marsilius composed the deposition decree and Louis appointed a new Pope.

Thank you, Serena.

I want to add something to what you were saying, George, because from the perspective of a thinker who grew up in an Italian city-state, it is possible to think of support for the Empire without necessarily thinking that the Emperor should hold all effective power.

So the Empire is a structure, is a structure of order of the entire world.

And from this order descends the law.

But then the effective power could be held by all kinds of other entities, including very small ones such as cities.

And these had been a little bit, as you know very well, the construct that ideologically underpins Roman law in the Middle Ages, but also in general the way all of these multiple princes and cities in Italy, but also in Germany, manage some sort of independent power of their own.

We are at a point where Marsilius, like Dante before him, is arguing for restoration of this order.

What Marsilius really cannot tolerate is this dualism, the fact that the priestly part of the body is taking over the body.

And this is what the corruption that Annabel was mentioning before could be, also in medical terms.

There is intranquility and there is illness in the body, politic, when one part is overtaking every other part.

Animal, could you develop that medical analogy?

Because it's very important to him, isn't it?

I think Marsilius's theory can accommodate a sort of variety of different political structures in local places.

I agree that the overarching regulator is the emperor, so if the emperor can't do his job, then there is strife.

So the Marsilian structure of the political law or polity,

what he calls regnum, has two elements.

One is the legislature, and that is the whole body of the citizens or the prevailing part, and the other is the prince.

So, the princely part he describes as like the heart in the animal.

It can never stop beating, otherwise, the animal will die.

So, although Marsilius has this participatory dimension, the weight is thrown onto the prince as what's going to keep that animal going.

How did I go with the idea of a commune?

Marsilius is absolutely clear that there must be this element, the whole body of the citizens,

but it plays an electing role in the prince.

But through this notion of the weightier part, the valential part,

the prevailing part, that could actually be quite a small body of the citizens that then elects the prince.

And with the legislative role, well, in some communes, all the citizens in an assembly could approve the law, or that power could be delegated, as seems clear.

Yes.

But it's really key to Marsilius that it is there as a construct and in principle.

Otherwise, we do not understand the functioning of the political correctly.

Otherwise, the way is open for the Pope to come in and claim it.

So he must have that move, but he can move away from it in different contexts.

One interesting episode that happened in 1318 when Marsilius was back in Padua or in the Veneto region, and we know that he was conducting some sort of diplomatic negotiations on behalf of the Ghibellin party, is that the city of Padua, which had so proudly governed itself as, let's call it a republic, but sort of collectively through assemblies, elects its first lord, Jacopo da Carrara.

So this is a fundamental moment.

And the lord is...

Well, something that is not unknown to us in contemporary times, is a particularly prominent citizen that comes to power and never goes away, comes to power legally and never goes away.

This is what a lord is in the Italian later medieval period.

And initially he is elected only for his lifetime and then this election becomes hereditary.

So what is happening in Padua is that the power that the people have to transfer this, let's call it sovereignty, although this is not a word that Mercedo uses, onto someone is actually evoked at the very moment where the Republican institutions are being corrupted, are being in fact twisted in a direction that is that of a strongman regime.

It's not really a monarchy yet, but it is something new.

George.

I think the contrast between monarchy and republicanism can be overdone, because if you think about it, the model is Rome.

And the Roman Republic

becomes what we call an empire.

But as far as the Romans were concerned, the Republic continued.

When you say continuing until when?

Well, until the collapse of Byzantium.

And technically, there was a Senate in Byzantium for centuries, until 1453.

And that's what, of course, all of the ancient historians, well, Tacitus in particular, is obsessed with, the fact that the facade of a republican constitution continues while it's eviscerated from within.

And the way in which modern historians contrast the rule of signore in Italian cities with prior communal regimes, of course, as far as contemporaries were concerned, the communal regime continued.

It's just that there was a magistrate who was in office for rather longer than was previously the case.

Well, that makes a difference, though, doesn't it?

Hereditary.

Yes.

A further element that I think is interesting about Marsilius' background in medicine, or sort of which is not very prominent at all in the Defender of the Peace.

He doesn't cite any medical authority particularly and he doesn't write as a physician.

But clearly, this idea of this diagnosis of the problem in terms of intranquility and lack of equilibrium, lack of balance, is echoes the ways in which Galenic medicine saw illness.

Illness is a lack of balance in the body, and the fact that Marsilius, this is a very, very important thread throughout his work.

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Animal, can we just get to how he argued the papacy power base should be demolished?

There's two elements to his strategy.

One is a kind of negative, knocking it down, and the other is actually positive and constructive.

So with the negative.

So it's key to the kind of papal ideology that's being propagated by Boniface VIII, for example, that is that the papacy is about jurisdiction and it's a power to judge.

So the Pope is that spiritual man who judges everything and is judged by no one.

At the heart of the papal claim to that jurisdiction over both spiritual and temporal matters is the power of the keys, which was the power to bind and loose sins, which apparently, according on this position, was handed to Peter by Christ.

Behold, I shall give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven.

So Marsilius's first strategy is to knock down the power of the keys.

A, he doesn't think that Peter was given anything that any other apostle

wasn't given, but B, he does not think that the power of the keys is a power of jurisdiction.

There are only two judges.

One is the prince in the city, the other is Jesus Christ.

All jurisdiction is either human or genuinely divine, not like this pseudo power that the Pope is claiming to judge, which just isn't a power at all.

So, by reinterpreting the power of the keys, it's just a kind of signifier.

It's actually not a judgmental power at all.

So, that's his first move in knocking down the power of the Pope.

The second move is to line himself up, we've already mentioned this a little bit, with

the Franciscan ideal of poverty.

So, he's very clear that the clergy as successors of the apostles should own nothing.

So, that the church and together jurisdiction and property form what contemporaries would call dominium, dominion.

So, the church is not a structure of dominion at all.

That's the real radicalism.

So, what is it?

And that's his constructive move.

He goes back to the early days of the church and how he tries to read in the Acts of the Apostles how did the faithful behave, how did they conduct their community.

And it's from there, and that's where he pulls in the history, that we can begin to positively reimagine what the church would be without this oppression of kind of dominative power that the papacy has.

And wealth and the state.

Absolutely.

All of that secular power.

That is corruption.

He says that everything went wrong under Constantine.

When the emperor converted,

the fatal error he made

was to confer in law on the bishop of Rome the powers which bishops of Rome had previously exercised during the pagan empire in order to reduce the Christian church to some sort of unity.

Otherwise, Christianity would simply have collapsed.

At precisely the point, Marsidius says, when the Bishop of Rome ceased to have to perform any such role, because now the Emperor could perform it, Constantine made the catastrophic error of cementing that power in law, and on its basis, over succeeding centuries, successive bishops of Rome have tried to grab more and more power and eventually, in his own day, to usurp, in effect, imperial office.

Thank you.

Serena, can I ask you then?

What was the risk of tyranny in Marsilius's view?

Yes, so Marsilius adopts a sort of fundamentally Aristotelian structure for describing what tyranny is.

And tyranny can happen in all kinds of constitutional models, whether we're talking about a monarchy or an aristocracy or popular government, tyranny is when one of these systems is perverted.

But I think in his particular case and for his particular polemical purposes, the real tyranny is what we were trying to describe earlier as this corruption of the body politic, which comes from the monstrous development of one of its parts.

Marcides thinks that there are six parts to the body politic, and the priestly part, the ecclesiastical part, is only one of six.

But it's taking over.

It is developing beyond its natural function.

And this is really the form of tyranny that he is extraordinarily concerned with.

Annabel, was there any room in Marcides' view for some sort of power still staying with the papacy?

Not a power of jurisdiction, not property, no.

So he refigures, he's not abolishing the papacy, but he is abolishing its self-understanding.

What does that mean?

So that he thinks that the papacy has no divine, is not a divine institution at all.

It is a purely human institution, and it grows up from the days of the early church where some kind of organisational input was needed, and the faithful from different parts of the empire sort of naturally deferred to Rome because it was generally the source of more knowledge.

But there's nothing divine about that at all.

It's simply a kind of human administrative convenience.

So the Pope is a kind of administrator, really, no more, no less.

It's not the power to judge, it's not coercive.

It's not welfare, it's not wealthy.

It's got no money, yes, exactly.

So all of those, it's a kind of the church is nested, those structures belong to the polity, the secular sphere.

And the papacy and the church is kind of nested within it.

Now, Now, how exactly it's supposed to function is not 100% clear.

As Serena said, the pars saccadotalis, the priestly part, is simply part of the faithful human legislator.

It's, as it were, an office of the Christian Empire, but it is a Christian empire as far as he's concerned.

Unlike Dante, she talked about Dante earlier, but one of the differences with Dante is he's not talking about world monarchy.

He's talking about universal Christian monarchy.

He's not interested in non-Christian parts of the world.

But I was going to add to what Annabel said,

and this is really telling, I think.

He says, there's no evidence that Peter was ever bishop of Rome.

There's some evidence that Paul was bishop of Rome.

No evidence that Peter was ever bishop of Rome.

This is just a charade which has been created over the centuries.

One of the difficulties with Marsilius, I find,

and one of the interesting things, is that while he is a representative of this breed of political thinkers who are also political activists, Marsilius writes his big work

before

his most intense years of political activity.

So in fact, you can use the Defender of the Peace as a sort of blueprint for what Marsilius perhaps did afterwards, but in fact, you cannot argue the opposite, as you would in the case of Machiavelli, for example, that this is the experience of him having had to deal with the practical problems, for example, of managing a diocese while having rejected papal politics and writing about it afterwards.

So it's all

reversed with him.

And there are clues that he continued to author not only important texts such as the deposition of of the pope and the institution of an anti-pope or sort of a new pope in Rome, but also pamphlets that were meant to circulate, for example, in the city of Milan or in Lombardy.

So he was keen to use his ideas, which are produced in a very scholastic manner, but to persuade real people, to persuade political actors that were not scholars.

But it's interesting that even in The Defender of the Peace, Marsilius is clear that the ending of the work is not the final page.

The ending of of the work is something outside it.

And Discourse 3, which is very short, is like a condensation into sort of simple things that you can act on.

It's a programme.

And yes, and it's addressed to both princes and subjects.

And again, he talks about the ending, this outside ending.

So we need to see.

What does he mean by our time?

I think what he really external to the text.

It's like the text, the book is not an end in itself.

It's like, here's my book.

The ending of the book that Marsilius hopes for, and clearly it is the deconstruction of the the medieval papacy.

So

it's orientated to action from the start, even though Marsilius at that point had not himself gone into action.

I was going to say that the end outside the book is the last judgment, in my view,

which he thinks is quite imminent.

Obviously, he can't predict exactly when it will come to pass, but as far as he's concerned, it's inevitable and it's part of the providential ordering of creation for the ultimate salvation of mankind.

Just to skip on a bit,

he appealed very much to English Protestants, as I understand it.

Well, not just to English Protestants, but to all Protestants for obvious reasons.

The root and branch attack on the foundations of papal power was bound to appeal, and it did.

So the first printed edition of Defense Or Parchis is 1522, I think in Germany.

Three years after

precisely

but in 1535 an English translation was produced which may have been commissioned by, was certainly subsidised by Thomas Cromwell and that's for a long time was said simply to be a translation of the book.

It isn't a translation of the book.

It's a highly selective adaptation of the book in order to appeal to Cromwell and ultimately, I suspect, to Henry VIII, who of course was a considerable and attentive reader of books.

So all of the elective element which Serena was talking about disappears.

There's very little said actually about Parliament or about representative assemblies in it.

So it's tailored in order to appeal to a particular Protestant viewpoint.

Serena, you've said, as I understand it, that Marsilius's work is canonical, essential for any student of history or politics.

Why is that?

In overviews of the history of political thought, we often, when the Middle Ages are present, because

occasionally you have students jumping from antiquity to Machiavelli, but when the Middle Ages are present, you generally have Aquinas and that's it.

Or if we consider Augustine a medieval thinker, Augustine and Aquinas.

But I think Marsilius completely belongs to the canon.

And even though I'm not a big fan of the canon per se, we do need a canon, and Annabel has produced a fantastic translation into English of the work, so it's very accessible.

It belongs to the canon because this early 14th century moment in the history of political thought is extraordinarily important.

It cannot be seen separate from what comes later in the 15th and in the 16th century, as George was saying, because in great part the debates, not only about church and state, but about the nature of power, are the same and they continue.

And there are some very radical positions that are being put forward.

Plus, Marsilius writes in a way that I find very engaging.

His prose is, especially in Discourse I, I must say, which I find more readable.

But it is very

indeed.

I find that the pace of...

It is very readable.

If you know a bit of Latin, it's not difficult Latin, although it's technical Latin, but it's not difficult Latin, but you can read it in English, and you can read it in many Italian, French, German translations as well.

So there were translations, we should have said, in the 14th and 15th century into vernacular, into French and Italian.

And Italian.

In Florence, they translated Marsidius shortly after the publication or sort of the circulation of the manuscript.

Annabel, I mean, high claims are made for Marsilius as an advocate of democratic republicanism.

What do you make of that?

Well, you know, I mean, in a broad sense, in the sense that Marsilius says that the universal body of the citizens is the human legislator and elects the prince.

Yes, so you can see that as broadly democratic or republican.

But we haven't really talked about his notion of this notion of the valentio pars, which is so he always says the universal body of the citizens or its valentio pars, which you can translate weightier part or prevailing part or prevalent part.

So this is the idea that it excludes sort of bad or malicious elements of the citizen body, but it can also exclude a lot more because it's a kind of mix of qualitative and quantitative considerations.

So it can end up being quite small.

So the valentio pars of the Holy Roman Empire is the seven electors, right?

Who elect the emperor.

So that's not exactly participatory.

So actually if you think about about the mechanics of it, it's quite exclusive and it's also extremely flexible and it also tends to throw the weight on the prince.

So in that sense I don't see it as a kind of programmatic democratic republicanism in any way.

I think it has to be read in the context of its times and not sort of lifted out into some kind of you know modern readings can tend to focus on the participatory element, but actually if you see it working in practice, it's not going to come out like that.

Thank you, Serena.

One element that doesn't play an enormous role in Discourse 1, but is interesting and it's important for later debates about the nature of limited power, at least, is the fact that Marsilius acknowledges that the human legislator doesn't only have the power to transfer its sovereignty onto the prince, but also to keep the prince accountable.

So it doesn't take much space, but Marsilius thinks that actually what the princely party is doing, and he says whether it's one person or several, so there he acknowledges that

it doesn't have to be a one person kind of regime, it could be an assembly government, but their government needs to be kept in check.

There needs to be accountability after they've performed their governing duties.

Now, there were offices around Europe, in Italy, and other countries as well, that would hold officers accountable after their term of office.

And this was often a process in Italy, it was called syndicator or syndication, that was exoficio.

So,

you didn't need a citizen to complain about the government in order for the process to work.

And I wonder if, in modern politics, we have anything similar, because the way we hold elected officials accountable is generally through further elections, so we do not vote for them the next time.

But there's no real process for elected members of government to have to give account of the way they've operated systematically systematically as part of their term of office and this is something that i find very creative and and interesting about marsilius' vision

and i would also say having sort of said that he's not any kind of democratic theorist there is a democratic element to Marsilius and I see that mostly in the politics of knowledge.

I mean he's very insistent that the multitude is not stupid, that they're capable of political agency, that the peace, he says, at the start of Discourse 2, belongs to both princes and subjects.

And in Discourse 3, it's both princes and subjects who are called upon to act.

Thank you.

Finally?

Yes, Marsilius definitely gives us an argument in favour of democracy in that decisions taken together are bound to be better decisions.

That's what he says, because

the multitude has many people with good ideas, even though not all the people have good ideas.

Provided it's the valential part.

Yes.

Well, thank you all very much.

Thanks to Annabel Brett, Serena Ferrenti, and George Garnet, and to our studio engineer, Jackie Marjoram.

Thank you for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

I enjoyed that.

I hope you did.

Now then.

It hasn't stopped yet, I'm afraid.

Not for you anyway.

We come to...

What would you like to have said that you didn't get time to say?

I would have liked to have said more about the sources he uses because he's very inventive in the use of authorities to overturn papal claims.

And what most interests me, as certainly Annabel is well aware of this, is the way that he picks up this Carolingian collection of canon law and makes it his primary source.

And he does that because this collection of canon law, which is called the pseudo-Isidorian decretals,

is a collection of documents, many of them forged, many of them not forged.

They're papal letters, proceedings of church councils, and so on, in chronological order.

So it's perfect for him because it's a collection of historical documents which he can track the development of papal corruption through time in this collection.

And he carefully avoids saying anything directly about the main source of canon law in the High Middle Ages, what to all of his contemporaries was the most important source.

He just ignores it altogether.

He ignores all of the 13th century papal legislation.

And then he goes for the early 14th century popes, Boniface VIII, John XXII, etc.

So he knew all of the high medieval stuff.

He just chose not to use it.

And instead, in a highly original and inventive way, he picked up this source, which is compiled in the 840s and used it as his major source.

And I think that's amazing, but I thought it wouldn't go down very well with the radio audience because it's too fast.

The radio audience signal check anything.

Don't worry about them.

They look after themselves and they look after us.

Would you like to say what you would like to have said if you had time to say it?

Maybe I would have liked to say something about the fact that a physician or someone who has medical expertise writing about politics connects Marsilius to a sort of particular group of people that exist well beyond Europe.

And this marriage of medicine and politics is very important and not just in the Middle Ages.

And throughout the Islamic world, there are very important political thinkers who have a background as physicists, not just in the Mediterranean Islamic world, but in Persia and in Central Asia.

Avicenna is also a political thinker.

And if you go to Confucian, Neo-Confucian authors in East Asia, in China, and Korea, many of them connect knowledge of the body and its illnesses with knowledge of the political, whatever the political means and whatever the vocabulary for politics is used in such different languages and cultural areas.

So I think there is something very interesting about Marsilius that connects him to a specific attitude to politics that comes from medical training.

Yes, and I think that that's part of it, so stepping out of a particular world and into another in order then to sort of reshape that world from outside.

So I think that's a really important part of it.

And yes, I suppose in relation to George's point, so yes, Discourse 2 is an argument from authority, but what is an authority?

I mean, that's, so he's actually constructing the authorities that he'd appealed to in the course of his argument.

I think I would have liked to say a little bit more about his use of the early church to think about, so he has the universal body of citizens which he establishes in Discourse I,

but in Discourse II, this is the universal body of faithful citizens.

And he's reconstructing the correct functioning of this from the early church and from the Acts of the Apostles, including processes of electing their leader.

That's where I think history is key, and it's also key in the sense that he thinks that knowledge, and he gets this from Aristotle's metaphysics, that knowledge is cumulative, we build it up together, but also it can be corroded together.

So, I think one place where I think we can have the history without the apocalypticism, that would be my.

I see the history as much more open-ended and not so about to come to a head, if you like.

Did we say enough about Aristotle?

Well, I could say so much about Aristotle, but let me say a bit more if there's taste.

So I think some of these ideas are being developed in the Paris arts faculty.

So there's been a lot of work recently on a Paris Master of Arts called Peter of Auvergne.

And he wrote both a commentary and a sort of series of questions on the politics, and really from the work of a scholar called Christophe Fleuler from back in the 90s, 1990s.

If you read Marsilius against them, so there's a question that so Aristotle raises in book three of the politics, it's about whether the multitude should participate in politics.

And he says, well, they're not that virtuous, so so that's an argument against, but on the other hand, there are good reasons for including them.

And he ends up giving them a role in electing, judging, and calling to account.

So Aristotle's politics in this curious translation by William of Merbeck, which precisely doesn't domesticate Aristotle to prevailing idioms of government, becomes a kind of laboratory or sort of space in which they can think about political ideas and they can kind of repoint existing medieval vocabularies of government and really elucidate a notion of a citizen as somebody who has a participatory role.

Even if they don't hold the high office themselves, they may have this role in government in a kind of more dilute sort of way.

I think Discourse 1 is more important than perhaps others do.

But Merbecker's translation is often so unintelligible that they could use it to argue almost anything, I think.

But my point is that the unintelligibility is key because, in a way, it's creative, because it means that you can, yes, you can work out new political ways of thinking and then transfer them back to more established ways of thinking and give them a new sense.

So I think it's a very creative moment, and I think Marsilius is really deeply involved in that.

Oh, I agree, I agree.

Yeah, also on the nature of Merbicus' translation, the fact that he chooses deliberately not to update the vocabulary, transferring the word from

Aristotle's language into a contemporary institution, therefore suggesting all kinds of identifications.

That's a very interesting and creative...

It opens up space.

Is he becoming more read now,

more part of curricula and that sort of thing?

I don't think he's becoming more read.

No,

I think he has been read pretty intensively through the 20th century

and remains on most

serious curricula.

Because, as Serena says, if you're going to do a canon, you go Augustine, Aquinas, Marsidius.

And

of course, what I've been saying today makes Augustine and Marsidius an interesting pairing because they're they're both talking about history as about providential history as the main engine I think

and it would be interesting for somebody to work on to what extent Marsilius had been influenced by Augustine.

I certainly think he's much influenced by Augustine's friend Orosius.

But that, of course, makes the point that Marsilius's understanding of Providence is rather more mechanical than Augustine's, I think.

Is there any way you can talk about you can define the influence he's had on further thought, Annabel?

One strand we've already talked about, which is this radical anti-papalism, and that's that's certainly the message that everybody got.

Successive popes got it, and successive opponents of the papacy got it loud and clear.

It's not always traceable because, of course, he was declared a a heretic.

So, we don't know necessarily when somebody's reading this book they're not necessarily going to say it if they're within the Catholic Church they're not necessarily going to cite Marsilius so but but it's definitely there and we know that it was being read right through to I mean the 17th century

I think it's very clear that Hobbes read Marsilius and that he was deeply influenced by him but I can't prove that and Annabel knows a lot more about Hobbes so maybe she can prove it but particularly in what Hobbes says about the donation of Constantine and the corruption of the papacy, it's quite clear to me that he must have read Marsilius, because it's just too similar for him not to have done.

That kind of parallelism is very striking.

I mean, you know, Hobbes famously describes the papacy as the ghost of the old Roman Empire sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.

And I think that Marsilius's

is very good indeed.

So,

yes, absolutely.

And also, I think a parallelism is that Hobbes, like Marsilius, is insistent on the proper signification of language.

This is what this term means.

You have to understand that it doesn't mean this way that it's been usurped by whatever interested parties.

This is what it is.

So both of them are kind of programmes of linguistic legislation that we have to use science to get straight on basic concepts and then we can start to understand politics rightly.

And we can understand when somebody's claiming a power that isn't theirs.

Of course, for Hobbes, it was the Democratical gentleman trying to, and the Republicans trying to claim a power that wasn't theirs, and that's not so for Marsilius necessarily, but

they are similar projects.

George, can you tell us why it has enjoyed prominence, which doesn't seem to be fading at all?

Well, I think it he became very popular in the twentieth century

for all the wrong reasons,

because political scientists saw him as someone who was, quote, ahead of his time

and who was, quote, the first spokesman of the bourgeois democratic state, unquote, which he clearly wasn't,

but people can always find something in this massive text.

But he's had a renaissance over the 20th century because of this interest in him, and it continues.

And I've got into quite a lot of trouble for suggesting that I think it's completely wrong, that it misreads what's in the book.

But I'm sure that Marsilius would be grateful that he's still being talked about so many centuries after his death,

excommunicate in

an unconsecrated grave.

Despite his attacks, which the three of you seem to suggest are pretty pointed and sharp, the papacy went on.

Yes.

Yep.

They're still going strong, despite Marsilius.

So what do you say to that?

I don't know whether the Defender of Peace is still on the index.

Is there still an index?

I don't know, but it was put on the index of prohibited books.

Yeah, but being put on the index is one thing, being read is another.

Indeed.

It's almost an honour to be put on the index.

There's the best of the best of European literature.

Well, there was a reformation.

Yes.

But I mean, this

sort of.

Marsilius has a very, you know, activist position in the debate, but he participates in this fundamental late medieval European distinction of the sphere of religion from the sphere of secular politics, which is something we live with still today.

That's why these writers are so important.

They argue from different points, but they are all debating this fundamental distinction, which we now take for granted because it's part of the European legacy of political thought, but and it has expanded, it has been transferred with all kinds of nefarious results to the rest of the world.

But sort of it is something that is deeply, deeply rooted in our identity, I think.

Well, now we have the founder of the feast, the producer Simon about to make his entrance.

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Melvin tea?

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Coffee would be really lovely.

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In In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson, and it's a BBC Studios audio production.

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