While awaiting the perfection of Christ’s rule, the commonwealth
(respublica) had continued to grow ‘on the example of the ancient
Romans’, but tended by emperors who had come to accept the pope as
the vicar of Christ and the papacy’s ‘fullness of power’ as exercised for
the sake of ‘the good state of the universal church’. The fortunes of the
empire and its obedience to the Church are traced by Ptolemy through
Charlemagne to the reign of Otto III, and book 3 ends with the obser-
vation that imperial rule is political as well as regal, in that the emperor
is not hereditary but elected to an office; and with a survey of the lords
found under both kings and emperors who rule with ‘some state of
dignity’: counts, dukes, margraves (a name alleged to derive from the
severity of their justice), barons and castellans, and other majores statu
like the magistrates of the French king’s court (caps. 12, 20–2). In his
final book Ptolemy turns to a fuller analysis of political rule and its
difference from ‘the principality of a kingdom’. Some provinces were
naturally servile and fit just for despotic kingship: people of strong
minds, brave hearts, and confident intelligence could be ruled only
principatu politico, which was usually aristocratic in nature. The perfect
polity and felicitas politicawas achieved when a diversity of offices was
spread among citizens according to merit, as among the ancient
Romans; when the rectores politicitook counsel (as the pope did from
the cardinals) and exercised justice within the letter of a written law
made by a senate; and when the ‘parts’ of the polity—the farmers,
warriors, and officials—were arranged to work in harmony, like the
heart, brain, and other organs of the body, or the voices of a choir. As
a building was stable when its parts were well-set, so a polity had ‘last-
ing strength of state’ (perpetua firmitas status), when everyone kept to
his estate or degree and performed his public duty as rector, official, or
subject (bk. 4, caps. 1, 23–8).^28
Other Italian schoolmen made use of the Aristotelian discussion of
regimes from different political viewpoints, naturally coming to
different conclusions as to which form of government was best, but all
of them seeing that any successful rule required political transactions
between status-groups. In 1324 Marsilius of Padua, a partisan of the
emperor Lewis of Bavaria in his conflict with the papacy, completed his
Defensor Pacis (‘Defender of the Peace’), a work which has been
described as ‘reverberating down the centuries’, because it blamed ‘the
civil discord and intranquillity in certain kingdoms and communities’ on
the pursuit by ‘the bishop of Rome and his clerical coterie’ of plenitude
of power and temporal wealth, and for the first time argued for the
subjection of churchmen to temporal government. (Marsilius finds a
260 Monarchical State of the Later Middle Ages
(^28) Cf. Blythe, Ideal Government, 97, 111–15.