the attractions of a political community (communitas politica), such as
he thought was commonly found in an Italian city, in which the people
elected their podestàand made laws for the good of everyone ‘accord-
ing to his state’ (secundum suum statum), yet experience showed a
collectionof cities and provinces to need a king if they were to enjoy
abundance and be free of dissension and war. Giles was made arch-
bishop of Bourges by Pope Boniface VIII and became a strong papalist;^32
Peter of Auvergne was made bishop of Clermont by Boniface but joined
with John of Paris, another university Thomist, in support of King
Philip. Peter, like Giles, believed in the need for a strong king able to
override the rigidity of legal norms, but also that he must rule under the
regulation of his will and reason, since every polity was governed
‘according to some regulation, which we call law’. And in changing the
law he should consult the multitude through his councillors, for it con-
tributes legitimacy and breadth of experience to government.^33 John of
Paris’s Treatise on Royal and Papal Powerof 1302 argued that each
power, monarchy and papacy, had regal authority in its own sphere, but
no right to interfere in the other’s. Each was instituted by the people,
who could ultimately depose it. The only difference was that there could
be only one head for the church, whereas there was no need for one
temporal ruler (as Dante argued in his De monarchia): the development
of individual kingdoms was a natural process, and they were more
peacefully ruled when a king did not strive to extend his jurisdiction
beyond the limits of his own territory.^34
John of Paris still argues a great political issue of his own day on the
authority of the bible, Aristotle, and the early fathers of the church, but
during the fourteenth century the pressures of war brought treatises on
government closer to the reality of contemporary rule. Around 1340,
soon after the beginning of the Hundred Years War, Walter Burley, an
Oxford- and Paris-trained logician and theologian with experience in
Edward III’s household and as the king’s envoy at the papal court,
wrote a commentary on Aristotle’s Politicswhich survives in a signifi-
cant number of manuscripts. Essentially it is the commentary of Thomas
Aquinas and Peter of Auvergne, but with one or two remarks reflecting
contemporary English politics. The advantages of rule by a multitude
262 Monarchical State of the Later Middle Ages
(^32) Aegidius Romanus, De regimine principum, 238–40, 267–9; T. Renna, ‘Aristotle and the
French Monarchy, 1260–1303’, Viator, 9 (1978), 312 ff.; Blythe, Ideal Government, chs. 4, 5,
8; Senellart, Les Arts de gouverner, 180–92; Krynen, L’Empire du roi(Paris, 1993), 101 (for
the conflict between royal and ecclesiastical government as ‘une argumentation Française’),
179 ff.
(^33) The Commentary of Peter of Auvergne on Aristotle’s Politics,ed. G. M. Grech (Toronto:
Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1967).
(^34) John of Paris on Royal and Papal Power, tr. A. P. Monahan (New York: Columbia UP,
1974), caps. 3, 13, 19, 21.