Marsilius of Padua: The Defender of the Peace

As we embark on what we propose, therefore, we wish first to make plain what constitutes the tranquillity and the intranquillity of a realm or city; and of these, first tranquillity: for if this is not clear we cannot know what constitutes intranquillity. And since both of these seem to be dispositions of a city or realm (as we suppose from Cassiodorus) we shall without further delay make plain what needs to be clarified, i.e. what a realm or city is and what it is for, so that the description of tranquillity and its opposite will also become clearer.

2

So, since we wish (following the order we have set down) to describe the tranquillity of a city or realm, we should be aware – so as to avoid any ambiguity that may arise from the multiplicity of terms – that this term ‘realm’ in one of its significations implies a plurality of cities or provinces contained under one regime. In this sense a realm does not differ from a city in terms of the form of polity, but rather in terms of size. On another understanding of the word, this term ‘realm’ signifies a particular type of polity or temperate regime, which Aristotle calls ‘temperate monarchy’. In this sense there can be a realm in a single city just as there can be in several – as was the case around the beginnings of civil communities, when in most cases there was one single king in each single city. The third signification of the term, and the most familiar, is a mixture of the first and the second. The fourth sense is something common to every type of temperate regime, whether in a single city or in several cities; Cassiodorus took it in this sense in the words we placed at the beginning of this book, and it is in this same sense that we too shall use the term in determining the answers to our questions.