The argument of this book is that radically new ways of discussing questions of power were developed in the period from the end of the thirteenth century to the early fifteenth century – the long fourteenth century of the European Late Middle Ages. This study is particularly concerned with the most fundamental problem of political thought – where does legitimate authority lie? In short, who is in charge? These years saw a remarkably intensive increase in the production of what may be called political thought texts, both in terms of quantity and quality. The works of these authors were characterized by an engagement with political reality and especially with a series of spectacular political and religious crises: they were not theorists writing in relative isolation from the world. The sophistication and depth of their discourses rested on the development of academic disciplines in thirteenth-century universities, but during the course of the fourteenth century, these writers took the elaboration of political ideas to a far higher level than had existed before in medieval political thought. The stimulus for their thinking came from reflection on the demands of reality in a manner and to a degree that was new for the Middle Ages; the rigour and originality of their ideas derived from the education they had received and the creative use they made of it. Historians' treatments of ideas of power in these years have so far tended to be piecemeal. A study like this, focused on ideas of power and authority in this period, has not been attempted before.

In the last thirty or so years, a great deal of research has been done on aspects of the political thought of the long fourteenth century. But largely because of the sheer variety of the sources, approaches have tended to be fragmented, following different lines of enquiry. A new overall interpretation has been lacking. Certain grand themes stand out in the work of modern scholars. Great advances have, for instance, been made in examining the origins of republicanism. Our knowledge of constitutionalism in both the secular, political arena and the church has been much advanced. A flood of light has been shed on the implications of the different languages or forms of discourse used to elaborate political ideas. Our understanding of questions of poverty and property has been deepened. Our appreciation of the nuances of natural law theory has also been greatly increased. I have learned so much from the work of other scholars, but their approaches and leading concerns have been different from my own. By concentrating on the fundamental questions of power and authority, I have sought to produce a distinctive and integrative interpretation which applies to all the various forms of political organization in the fourteenth century.

Preface

This book is the result of my growing fascination with questions of power and authority. This marks something of a change in my attitude to political thought. When I undertook my first research project I was driven on by the idea of consent. Maybe, over time, I have become more sensitive to the realities of political life.

In writing this book I have benefited so much from discussion with other scholars and students, both graduate and undergraduate. Pride of place must go to all my students over the years at Bangor University: those who took my Special Subject, ‘Ideas of Church and State, 1294–1356’, and my course on ‘Medieval Political Thought’, through their highly intelligent and informed discussions, helped me enormously in the development of my ideas. I am grateful to Bangor University for its support in granting me study leave at an early stage of composition.

The conflict over the question of apostolic poverty became the dominant issue in the church at the end of the thirteenth century and in the first half of the fourteenth century. In essence, the dispute was a theological one with ethical and spiritual implications – how to live the perfect Christian life. At first sight, it would not appear to be a political question at all. After all, poverty is not normally (or ever) advocated as a political prescription – rather, it is to be avoided or prevented. But, as will already be clear, this particular crisis was not a purely ecclesiastical matter: the defenders of the poverty ethos and their opponents, in addressing the whole issue of poverty and property, raised questions concerning power, powerlessness and legitimate authority which had fundamental implications for political thought.

The problem of poverty and possessions has been a perennial and central one for Christianity. The ethos of the New Testament was one of suspicion of riches. Examples abound. Christ stated that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven; he enjoined the rich young man to abandon all his possessions if he wished to be perfect and follow him; and he expressed a preferential option for the poor. The disciples sent on preaching journeys were to rely on alms and community of property was practised by the early church. Christ himself was not rich. In medieval Christianity there was a tension between the poverty ethos and the justification of possessions, including those of the church. Attitudes to property were also informed by fundamental presuppositions of medieval Catholicism: that the spiritual order was hierarchically superior to mere material things; an anti-materialism that assumed that worldly goods hindered human fulfilment; and the influence of Neoplatonic philosophy.

This book has shown that the long fourteenth century was the most creative and original in the history of medieval political thought. In confronting the realities of power, thinkers were forced to reinterpret their inherited intellectual authorities to cope with the demands of new political crises and fundamental changes in society. Their main contribution was indeed to the elaboration of notions of power and legitimate authority, a contribution of great variety and diversity, and one which was of fundamental importance in the history of political thought.

The major characteristic of these writers was that they were interpreting inherited intellectual authorities to try and answer problems which had emerged in their own times. Knowledge of historical context is crucial for understanding their works: the conflict between Pope Boniface VIII's universalist claims and the French king's pretensions to territorial sovereignty; the parlous state of Italy at the time of Dante; the claims of the papacy, in the context of papal–imperial conflict and Italian politics, during Marsilius of Padua's lifetime; the poverty dispute which came to a head in the conflict between the papacy and the Franciscans; the problem of applying Roman and canon law to the sheer variety of political forms in fourteenth-century Europe; and the crisis of the Great Schism as a stimulus to political ideas.

The tracts produced during the disputes between Philip IV and Boniface VIII were traditional in method in that they argued from authorities, mostly in a scholastic manner. In the aftermath of the conflict, a fresh approach to questions of power and legitimate authority appeared in the works of Dante Alighieri. In his political thought, Dante was proposing solutions to a prolonged political crisis which had partly ruined his own life. His highly original approach was philosophical and can be seen as a largely normative and evaluative response to an empirical problem, with its conclusions mainly derived from first principles and confirmed by historical examples. Overall he made innovative contributions to political philosophy through his method and the questions he considered. Primarily a poet, he was an amateur but well-informed student of philosophy, anxious to display his knowledge of authorities, but highly creative in his use of them.

The problems which Dante confronted were the political turmoil and fragmentation of Italy in the first two decades of the fourteenth century. He witnessed the strife within cities and the conflicts between them and with signori. He himself had been the victim of internal faction-fighting in his native Florence, having been exiled in 1302 as a member of the White Guelph faction by the Black Guelphs, who were supported by Boniface VIII. Dante was in exile for the rest of his life – the fundamental fact underlying all his subsequent writings. In political and religious terms he was an exile from Florence and from heaven. He was not a disinterested observer of politics but was personally involved, whether he liked it or not. Dante blamed Boniface in particular and the papacy in general for much of the unruly political condition of Italy, a condition which in itself contributed to the papal reluctance to return to the peninsula and its lengthening sojourn at Avignon. Dante's solution to Italy's problems was on the face of it a traditional one: the establishment of a strong Roman emperor. He became converted to this view after his exile from Florence, which he came to see as an evil city corrupted by wealth and riven with faction. He put high hopes in Henry VII of Luxemburg's expedition to Italy between 1310 and 1313, supporting him as he became increasingly involved in conflicts with the developing alliance between the papacy under Clement V and King Robert of Naples. But if the notion of an emperor was in itself far from new, Dante's method of argument to reach this position certainly was.

The intention of this chapter is to consolidate a new interpretation of the political thought of Marsilius of Padua (c.1275/80–1343), by giving priority to his treatment of questions of power and legitimate authority. Marsilius, like Dante, also argued from first principles and was even more driven to write by his experience of contemporary politics. His prime concern was to uncover the sources of strife and to show how peace could be achieved. To this end he sought to demonstrate where legitimate authority lay and (above all) where it did not. These two interrelated questions are the key to unravelling his political thought and address his express reasons for writing.

Marsilius was the product of two intellectual milieux: those of Padua and the University of Paris, where he was rector in 1313. At Padua his professional training was in medicine and at Paris his institutional home was the Faculty of Arts. His main political work, Defensor pacis (Defender of Peace) (completed at Paris on 24 June 1324), was a massive undertaking – the modern critical edition of Richard Scholz, for instance, amounts to 613 pages. But he also wrote two short works: De translatione imperii (On the Translation of the Empire), composed at Paris, 1324–6(?), and the Defensor minor (Lesser Defender), produced at the court of Lewis IV of Bavaria at Munich between 1339 and 1341, together with two short tracts on whether the marriage between Margaret Maultasch, Countess of Tyrol and Carinthia, and the emperor's son would be legal, tracts which were incorporated as the final four chapters of the manuscript of the Defensor minor.

The disputes between King Philip IV of France and Pope Boniface VIII in the years 1296 to 1303 over who held legitimate power, that is, authority, provoked a debate which gave a new direction to political thought. This was a classic case of the development of political ideas in response to a crisis. It was a great paradox of medieval history that the church, originally instituted outside the governmental and legal structures of the Roman Empire, had itself over time become the prime developer of the language of power. Here was the crisis of this process, begun in the fifth century, revitalized in the papal reform of the eleventh and consolidated in the twelfth and thirteenth, whereby the church had developed as a legal and governmental institution under a papal monarchy with increasing jurisdictional pretensions. Papal claims to power were encapsulated in the concept of the pope's plenitude of power (plenitudo potestatis). The origin of this formulation lay with Pope Leo I (440–61), who used the phrase in a restricted manner to indicate how the delegated and therefore partial authority of a papal vicar, that is, legate, differed from the pope's, which was full in relation to it. The formulation was not used by Gregory VII, but emerged in the twelfth century as a way of expressing papal sovereignty, a usage which diverged from Leo I's original meaning, and was to be found frequently, and definitively, in Innocent III's decretals. The conflicting claims of the church and of secular rulers had now brought about a conflict with the French king, stimulating both defence and refutation of the papal position, together with profound discussion of the nature, exercise and location of authority in society. Indeed, this intellectual ferment produced a mass of pamphlets, tracts and treatises which amounted to a new genre devoted to ideas of power. There was a creative application of traditions of discourse to contribute to discussion of the issues involved in the crisis, with a variety of diverse results. Clear perceptions of questions of power and authority were elaborated.

The most profound crisis of authority that arose in the late Middle Ages affected the papacy: the Great Schism which lasted from 1378 to 1417 was by far the worst problem which the medieval church had to face. This Schism served as a focus for the development of two sets of ideas concerning power and legitimate authority – both sets had their origins before it. These ideas were different in kind and both were potentially deadly threats to papal claims to plenitude of power: the theory of grace-founded dominium and the theories of the conciliar movement. The origins of both lay before the Schism, but their time in the sun came during it.

The Great Schism posed a worse threat to the papacy than any experienced during those other watershed crises, the Investiture Contest or the conflicts between Philip IV and Boniface VIII. What was at stake was nothing less than an institutional breakdown in the governing structure of the church. Gregory XI had brought the papacy back from Avignon to Rome in January 1377, but died in March 1378. On 8 April 1378 the Archbishop of Bari, Bartolomeo Prignano, was elected pope in Rome and took the name of Urban VI. He was initially accepted as pope by the cardinals, but they became increasingly convinced of his unsuitability, largely because of his behaviour towards them. The result was that the self-same college of cardinals which had elected Urban declared that he had been uncanonically elected and that therefore the papal throne was vacant. On 20 September 1378 at Fondi, the cardinals elected one of their number, Robert of Geneva, as pope, who took the name of Clement VII. Mutual excommunications between Urban and Clement followed. Clement returned to Avignon where the bulk of the papal curia had remained all along. There were thus now two claimants to the papacy, a Roman and an Avignonese one. There had been many schisms before in the medieval church, but what was new about this one was that the same college of cardinals had elected two popes within the space of a few months.

The fourteenth-century writers who were pre-eminently concerned with questions of power and legitimate authority were Roman and canon law jurists. For them, jurisprudence was concerned not just with explaining the content of the law but with accommodating it to the real world. These jurists were committed to applying the law to political and social reality – with putting ideas into practice. Law was concerned not just with abstract theorizing but with action. Jurists therefore illustrated the focus on political reality characteristic of fourteenth-century political thought particularly well.

How we understand political phenomena and the categories we use to describe them tend to be expressed in terms of acknowledged or unacknowledged pre-existing systems of thought or languages. In the fourteenth century a particularly important example of the problems involved in this process was provided by Italian jurists' attempts to adapt the ius commune (common law) system of Roman and canon law to include emerging city-republics, kingdoms and lordships – that is, to adapt that law to changing political realities. Two kinds of problem are involved. The first was for the jurists themselves, as it were: how successfully did they manage to achieve their aim within terms of the Roman and canon law? The second is of more general interest to political theorists: how valid is the metalanguage used by modern political theorists and historians to interpret the solutions of these fourteenth-century writers? How useful are standard concepts from western political theory when applied to elucidating their ideas? Two terms in particular take centre stage in any discussion of the location of legitimate authority. Modern interpreters of these jurists' political thought have been concerned with demonstrating that they produced notions of sovereignty and state: I would include C.N.S. Woolf and Quentin Skinner, for example, and indeed my own works. But might this not be to privilege concepts important from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries but now increasingly superseded in the twenty-first century, through globalization, the European Union, the influence of the United States as a superpower, and Islamic fundamentalism? The study of the fourteenth century forces one to step back and ask whether there are consistent operating concepts of political thought at all or whether one can use terms like sovereignty and state as tools of interpretation, so long as one realizes that there are bound to be subtle differences in any application of them in specific historical circumstances. This chapter is concerned firstly with asking the general question of how useful notions of sovereignty and state are for interpreting juristic ideas of legitimate authority, and secondly with addressing the unique test case of the status of papal temporal power in the papal states.