more numerous (or both) than the others. The Marsilian
“legislator” is usually too numerous to do more than
authorize the actual ruler (the pars principans), e.g., an
elective emperor, a hereditary king, apodestà, or a coun-
cil. In practice, all legislative, judicial, and executive
functions are delegated to this ruler, who can, however,
be deposed by the human legislator that appointed him.
Thus, Marsilio’s general theory of the state allows for
diverse constitutions—monarchical, aristocratic, and
even democratic. The main point, for his purpose, was
that the ruler has a monopoly on political power within
his state. A competing power independent of the ruler
would be contrary to nature.
The second discourse of Defensor pads defi nes the
proper place of the clergy, and especially the pope,
within this political framework. In general, the job of
the clergy is to preach the gospel and administer the
sacraments. Clergymen are chosen and supported by
the state, which administers all the worldly affairs of
the church. In effect, the Franciscan ideal of poverty
is extended to the whole clergy. Furthermore, Marsilio
regards bishops as priests to whom the ruler has del-
egated certain executive duties, and the bishop of Rome
is superior to the rest only insofar as he has been granted
a few broader powers. Marsilio elaborately rebuts the
papacy’s position that the pope is Peter’s successor as
vicar of Christ and denounces its claim to “plenitude
of power” (plenitudo potestatis) as the “singular cause
of strife or civil discord.” Thus, each state controls the
church within it. When questions of faith arise that affect
the church as a whole, the emperor can call an interna-
tional council, consisting of laymen as well as clergy, to
settle the matter. Enforcement of the council’s decisions,
however, is wholly up to the local rulers.
Marsilio completely reversed the dominant view
that church and state exercise coordinate jurisdictions
(“Gelasian dualism”). For more than three centuries, De-
fensor pacis was the arsenal of antipapalists, especially
in the age of conciliarism and the Reformation. Many
of its ideas were already current in university circles,
but Marsilio gave them coherent, scholarly, and passion-
ate expression. Moreover, his arguments appealed to a
broad audience trained in Aristotle’s logic and political
philosophy; no special knowledge of law or theology
was required. He moved beyond scholasticism in his use
of history to explain institutional development.
Marsilio’s theory of the state was not the main thrust
of his work, but many readers have been unduly im-
pressed by this theory because it appears to anticipate
such modern doctrines as popular sovereignty and the
social contract; they thus overlook the other, deeper
medieval roots of these ideas.
See also Albertino Mussato; Cangrande della Scala;
Ockham, William of
Further Reading
The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c. 350-
c. 1450, ed. J. H. Bams. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1988, p. 680. (Bibliography.)
Marsilius of Padua. The Defender of Peace, 2 vols., crans. and in-
tro. Alan Gewirth. Records of Civilization: Sources and Stud-
ies, 46. New York: Columbia University Press, 1951–1956.
Rubinstein, N. “Marsilius of Padua and Italian Political Thought
of His Time.” In Europe in the Late Middle Ages, ed. John
Hale et al. London: Faber and Faber, 1965 pp. 44–75.
Richard KayMARTÍ, RAMÓN (b. ca 1210/15)
The most erudite and accomplished Arabist and Hebraist
of his day, missionary to Muslims and fi erce polemicist
against Jews, Ramón Martí was born at Subirats near
Barcelona (ca. 1210/15). He joined the Dominican men-
dicants at Barcelona’s Santa Caterina priory by 1240,
and studied at Saint-Jacques College of the University of
Paris alongside Thomas Aquinas under Albert the Great
(Albertus Magnus). The order sent him in 1250 to help
found a missionary school of Arabic at Tunis. In 1264
King Jaime I commissioned him to censor rabbinic texts
at Barcelona (but probably he had no role or presence
at the Barcelona Disputations of 1263). Martí perhaps
worked at the Murcia Arabicum in 1266; in 1268 he was
again at Tunis. In 1269 he successfully visited Louis
IX of France to urge a North African crusade; while
there he probably commissioned Thomas Aquinas, for
the order’s master general, to write his masterwork the
Contra gentiles. Martí spent the 1270s and 1280s at
Barcelona, where he held the chair of Hebrew in 1281.
His contemporary Marsili titled him “Philosophus in
arabico,” and “beloved intimate” not only of Jaime I
and Louis IX but of “the good king of Tunis.” Martí’s
friend Ramon Llull has an anecdote about his nearly
converting that Muslim ruler. King Jaime mentions
him as a friend in his own autobiography, noting his
trip from Tunis to Montpellier. Arnau de Villanova was
one of his students.
Martí’s prolifi c writings are a key to the contemporary
anti-Talmudism and growing animosity toward Jews.
Until 1260 his main focus had been the conversion
of Muslims, beginning with his Explanatio symboli
apostolorum at Tunis in 1257. He is most probably the
author of the Vocabulista in arabico, an Arabic word list
of some 650 printed pages in Celestino Schiaparelli’s
edition, a missionarys’ dictionary of unrivaled impor-
tance today for studying the Arabic of eastern Spain. His
Islamic phase ended in 1260 with the now lost Summa
against the Qu‘ra ̄ n. In 1267 came his Capistrum iudeo-
rum, which Aquinas seems to have used for his own
Contra gentiles. Martí’s masterwork was Pugio fi dei
contra Mauros et iudeos (Dagger of Faith), fi nished in
1281, fi lling over a thousand pages in its printed ver-MARTÍ RAMÓN