78 Law and Morality Abroad (to ca. ad 1550)
been characterized as “the fi rst legal expression of the concept of territorial
sovereignty.”
Th e Aristotelian Challenge
Ideas of the in de pen dence of states received important reinforcement from
one of the most important intellectual events of the Middle Ages: the redis-
covery of the bulk of Aristotle’s writings. It will be recalled that he regarded
the state (i.e., the ancient Greek polis) as a natural entity, with self- rule as its
very essence. Th is was a very far cry from the standard medieval image of
the state as a necessary evil. Th e Aristotelian view, which was especially in-
fl uential in the Dominican Order of monks (which included Aquinas), was
fundamentally hostile to ideas of universal dominion and correspondingly
supportive of ideas of mutual in de pen dence of states— with implications of
nonintervention by states in the aff airs of one another. Aristotelianism, in
short, was a philosophy of pluralism that directly challenged the universal-
ist theses of empire and papacy.
An expression of this new Aristotelian outlook can be found in the writ-
ing of a Dominican named John of Paris (Jean Quidort), who wrote in the
late thirteenth century, in the generation aft er Aquinas. John was an avowed
pluralist, maintaining that, because of the complexity of po liti cal life and
secular power, it is not possible for universalism to reign in that sphere of
life, as it can (and should) in the religious one. Diff erent peoples have dif-
ferent modes of life, and there must therefore be diff erent governments to
accommodate them. Consequently, it is both necessary and desirable that
there be a multiplicity of kingdoms. “Th ere can be many diff erent ways
of living,” asserted John, “and diff erent kinds of state conforming to diff er-
ences in climate, language, and the conditions of men, with what is suitable
for one nation not so for another.” He concluded, expressly invoking the
authority of Aristotle, that “development of individual states and king-
doms is natural, [while] that of an empire or [universal] monarchy is not.”
A demonstration of how subversive the Aristotelian ideas could be, if
taken to their logical extreme, was provided by the fourteenth- century Ital-
ian writer Marsilius of Padua. Neither a lawyer nor a theologian, his profes-
sional training was in medicine. He supported Louis of Bavaria in his un-
successful claim to the Holy Roman emperorship. More memorably, he