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Tyranny From Ancient Greece To Renaissance France [1st Edition]
 3030431843, 9783030431846, 9783030431853

Table of contents :
Preface......Page 6
Contents......Page 10
Part I: Antique Understandings of Tyranny......Page 13
Chapter 1: The Athens of Plato, Aristotle, and Xenophon......Page 14
Brief Historical Contexts......Page 17
Chapter 2: Tyranny and Despotism in Plato’s Republic and Laws......Page 22
Tyranny and Despotism in Plato’s Laws......Page 24
Chapter 3: Aristotle on Tyranny in the Politics......Page 27
Tyranny in the Constitution of Athens......Page 31
Chapter 4: Xenophon on Tyranny in Hiero......Page 34
Chapter 5: Seneca the Younger on Tyranny in On Mercy......Page 39
Part II: Three Medieval Commentators on Tyranny......Page 45
Chapter 6: Mimetic Impulses and Early Receptions......Page 46
Chapter 7: John of Salisbury on Tyranny in Policraticus......Page 51
Chapter 8: Aquinas on Tyranny in the Regime of Princes and in the Summa Theologica......Page 54
Chapter 9: Giles of Rome on Tyranny in His Regime of Princes......Page 57
Part III: Recovering Plato and Aristotle on Tyranny in the Renaissance......Page 61
Chapter 10: Imminence of the Past......Page 62
The Recovery of Aristotle’s Politics......Page 63
The Recovery of Plato......Page 67
Christine de Pizan......Page 68
Mirrors of Princes......Page 69
Forms of Government Depicted in Siena......Page 71
Chapter 11: Machiavelli on Tyranny in the Prince and the Discourses......Page 73
Chapter 12: Seyssel on Tyranny in the Monarchy of France......Page 80
Chapter 13: Guillaume Budé on Tyranny in the Education of the Prince......Page 84
Chapter 14: Erasmus on Tyranny in the Education of a Christian Prince......Page 88
Chapter 15: Thomas More on Tyranny in the History of Richard III......Page 96
Part IV: A Time of Troubles in France, 1570–1605......Page 102
Chapter 16: The Valois Monarchy in Political Thought and Political Theology......Page 103
Chapter 17: Tyranny in Hotman’s Franco-Gallia......Page 108
Chapter 18: Étienne de la Boétie on Tyranny in Voluntary Servitude......Page 113
Chapter 19: Bèze on Tyranny in the Right of Magistrates......Page 120
Chapter 20: Bodin on Tyranny in the Six Books of the Republic......Page 124
Chapter 21: The Vindiciae contra tyrannos on Tyranny......Page 131
Chapter 22: Mariana on Tyranny......Page 139
Chapter 23: Jean Boucher on Tyranny in the True History of Henry de Valois......Page 145
La vie et Notables faits de Henry de Valois......Page 150
The Justa abdicatione......Page 154
Afterthoughts: An End to a Beginning......Page 157
Sources......Page 159
Works......Page 161
Index......Page 168

Citation preview

Tyranny from Ancient Greece to Renaissance France

Orest Ranum

Tyranny from Ancient Greece to Renaissance France

Orest Ranum

Tyranny from Ancient Greece to Renaissance France

Orest Ranum Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, MD, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-43184-6    ISBN 978-3-030-43185-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43185-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © Harvey Loake This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Patricia McGroder Ranum Muse, Inspired Critic, Typist, Friend, Wife

Preface

Many readers do not bother to read prefaces for various reasons, but the most typical reason is a lack of interest in the more personal professional experiences of the author. But interpreting texts is all about contexts, and the primary, primordial context of any writing is the author. What are some of my major experiences as a close reader of political thought? As an undergraduate at Macalester College in 1952, I enrolled in Professor G. Theodore Mitau’s course on reading excerpts from almost all the major political treatises, from antiquity to the present. Such a body of texts may be referred to as a “canon,” because, as a constituted whole, the absence of one or another text or author may be immediately noticed. Readers who move from Bodin to Locke are breaking the canon when they omit Hobbes. Mitau’s course centered on the close reading of texts, and on commentary, or to be more accurate, on “learning to comment.” During my first year in graduate school at the University of Minnesota, I enrolled in Professor Mulford Q.  Sibley’s course on the history of Western political thought. We read essentially the same texts I had read in Mitau’s course. My first paper for Sibley was an essay on W.F. Church’s Constitutional Thought in Sixteenth Century France (Cambridge, USA, 1941). Readers familiar with my educational trajectory may recall that I attended Professor Roland Mousnier’s seminar at the Sorbonne. We were still in social stratification and orders when I attended those seminars. The research on assassination would come later, and was so personal and intense that I am not sure he shared it with students. When my doctoral thesis, Richelieu and the Councillors of Louis XIII, appeared in 1963 at the Clarendon Press, the first review was by a political vii

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scientist writing for the Bombay Times. A second review by an anonymous critic (I later learned that it was Robert Darnton) appeared in the Times Literary Supplement. It summarized my argument about fidelity to the Cardinal versus administrative competence in selecting councilors. The critic’s implication was that the book lacked interest. The conclusion encouraged readers to go back to The Three Musketeers. The advertisements of the Clarendon Press listed the book under the heading “political science.” If my first published article was not about political thought, my second one, “Personality and Politics in the Persian Letters,” Political Science Quarterly, 84 (4), 1969, 606–622, certainly was. And when the History Department at Columbia University gave me the opportunity to develop my own undergraduate course, I worked up “French Government in Thought and Practice, 1515–1789.” Year after year in the 1960s, for four hours a week I also taught a course for the undergraduates of Columbia College called “Contemporary Civilization.” (It began with Plato!) This strengthened my already quite sharp familiarity with many of the canonical texts I had first read for Mitau. True, as I think about it now, very few works had been read in their entirety. The pedagogues of Port Royal insisted on reading and teaching entire works; the Jesuits carefully selected extracts. Invited by Father Lékai, Cistercian, to participate on a panel at a conference, I presented “The French Ritual of Tyrannicide,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 11 (1980), 63. The theme was how tyrannicide was collective in the murders of the Duke of Guise and his brother, the Cardinal, and in the murder of Concini, whereas in the murders of kings Henry III and Henry IV, individuals acted alone within a religiously grounded legitimation (Clément and Marillac). But let us move on to the present. Strange as it may seem, my control of the canon has become hazy. But I can tell when something is wrong-headed. In 2017 there seemed to be an increased use of the words “tyrant” and “tyranny” in the news media, notably about the Russian and Turkish heads of state, and others as well. This piqued my curiosity about the word as it is currently being used. So I bought T. Snyder’s On Tyranny (New York, 2017), a strong and engaging book that centered largely on recent political developments in Eastern Europe. After further research, I would like to say that Snyder’s warnings and exhortations are remarkably original and analytically strong. They are not commonplaces drawn from the venerable lists of commonplaces about tyranny that have appeared over the centuries

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and that are partly the subject of this book. Just what has happened to the concept of tranny since the rise of the social and political sciences in the late nineteenth century? It is one thing to ask a general question; it is quite another to have the energy and discipline required to answer it. There was a sense that the old concepts were simply not strong enough to characterize the horrors of the mid-twentieth century. What had occurred in Stalinist Russia and Hitlerian Germany seemed to go way beyond the tyrannical, as I thought about it. The word “dictator” seemed still to carry strength, but I was just speculating. At this point, questioning and humble about the complexities of an entire field of inquiry, I happened upon Mario Turchetti’s Tyrannie et tyrannicide de l’Antiquité à nos jours (Paris, 2013). It is a true monument of scholarly learning, of exemplary intellectual history. In 1044 pages of incisive and convincing contexts and close readings, Turchetti sets the concept of tyranny in its changing political-philosophical contexts. He confirmed my hunches about the fate of the concept “tyranny” after World War II, and he traces its more recent partial recovery (pp. 900–927). The concepts “totalitarianism,” “Fascism,” “autocracy,” and “dictatorship,” minted to interpret political horror and terror in World War II, have enabled scholars to grasp, if not always comprehend, happenings in the twentieth century. The strength and chronology of Turchetti’s thematic structure and chronology do not in any way obscure the significances of change and continuity. To the contrary. They permit the reader to perceive them more effectively. The decade after World War II witnessed a veritable transformation of the way power, human nature, and evil are understood. Though less intense, did something similar happen, albeit more slowly, after the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of August 1572? The borrowings back and forth between the major thinkers about tyranny and tyrannicide-regicide during the years 1572–1605 have interested scholars for many years, but the totality, or at least the proximate totality of their achievement is largely unknown to general readers. I thank my teachers and colleagues—Gérard Defaux (on Tolkien), Jacques Poujol (on De Gaulle), Nancy Struever (on Seneca), and Paul Saenger (on Bismarck)—for speaking and writing to me about politics with intensity and conviction. Charles Duff pointed out that there is more description of thought in the book than what historical tyrants in fact did. He is right. But I am reluctant to go farther down the pretty-familiar

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biographical road than is absolutely necessary. Exemplarity, that is, in this instance, the power of the evil or negative sign, also holds me back. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the professionalism, patience, and amiable support of the Palgrave Macmillan staff: Megan Laddusaw, Joseph Johnson, Tikoji Rao Mega Rao, Sudha Soundarrajan. My expression of gratitude toward Patricia McGroder Ranum is found in the Dedication. It has no bounds. Baltimore, MD, USA September 11, 2019

Orest Ranum

Contents

Part I Antique Understandings of Tyranny   1 1 The Athens of Plato, Aristotle, and Xenophon  3 2 Tyranny and Despotism in Plato’s Republic and Laws 11 3 Aristotle on Tyranny in the Politics 17 4 Xenophon on Tyranny in Hiero 25 5 Seneca the Younger on Tyranny in On Mercy 31 Part II Three Medieval Commentators on Tyranny  37 6 Mimetic Impulses and Early Receptions 39 7 John of Salisbury on Tyranny in Policraticus 45 8 Aquinas on Tyranny in the Regime of Princes and in the Summa Theologica 49

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9 Giles of Rome on Tyranny in His Regime of Princes 53 Part III Recovering Plato and Aristotle on Tyranny in the Renaissance  57 10 Imminence of the Past 59 11 Machiavelli on Tyranny in the Prince and the Discourses 71 12 Seyssel on Tyranny in the Monarchy of France 79 13 Guillaume Budé on Tyranny in the Education of the Prince 83 14 Erasmus on Tyranny in the Education of a Christian Prince 87 15 Thomas More on Tyranny in the History of Richard III 95 Part IV A Time of Troubles in France, 1570–1605 101 16 The Valois Monarchy in Political Thought and Political Theology103 17 Tyranny in Hotman’s Franco-Gallia109 18 Étienne de la Boétie on Tyranny in Voluntary Servitude115 19 Bèze on Tyranny in the Right of Magistrates123 20 Bodin on Tyranny in the Six Books of the Republic127 21 The Vindiciae contra tyrannos on Tyranny135

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22 Mariana on Tyranny143 23 Jean Boucher on Tyranny in the True History of Henry de Valois149 Afterthoughts: An End to a Beginning161 Bibliography163 Index173

PART I

Antique Understandings of Tyranny

CHAPTER 1

The Athens of Plato, Aristotle, and Xenophon

Abstract  Foundations of political culture in ancient Greece and Rome. Forms of government. Tyranny as usurpation and governing for personal interest. For the ancients, tyranny and despotism were not entirely corrupt or perverse types of government. Keywords  Tyranny • Political culture • ancient Greece and Rome • Forms of government • Tyranny as usurpation • Despotism • Perverse types of government • Traits of a tyrant The words “tyrant” and “despot”1 have changed little in meaning since their origins in ancient Greek. They had, and still have, a common significance: that is, they denote someone who rules with absolute power. While not as good ethically as “monarch,” for the Greeks of Antiquity the tyrant could be a governor who rules somewhat favorably, or on occasion quite favorably toward his citizen-subjects. “Tyranny” would become an entirely negative type of perverted government, when some of the major medieval commentators took up the term. The few exceptions were the readers of Aristotle’s lengthy passage on how tyrants can learn to stay in power. But 1  M. Richter, “Aristotle and the Classic Greek Concept of Despotism,” Journal of European Ideas, 12 (1990), 175–87. The outstanding, unique, learned synthesis about our theme is M.  Turchetti, Tyrannie et Tyrannicide (Paris, 2013). T.  Snyder, On Tyranny (New York, 2017), is particularly strong on twentieth-century tyrannies.

© The Author(s) 2020 O. Ranum, Tyranny from Ancient Greece to Renaissance France, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43185-3_1

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the ethical aspects of ruling or governing with absolute power frame the first common mark of tyranny (to use Bodin’s term). This book is about what tyrants do. It is about important boundaries that more often than not are vague in society, that may be drastically altered or destroyed by the politics of the tyrant, which is nothing but ruling for his immediate personal advantage. Specific tyrannical actions do not simply break laws, undermine institutions, intimidate or murder judges, and in one way or another empty the common public treasury into the tyrant’s own pockets. Tyrants above all destroy public discourse and foster a climate of fear. Our twenty-first-century mindsets balk at the very idea that the specific abuses of power and uses of violence would be so transhistorical as to be recognizable in Greece (Athens) under the sometime tyrant Pisistratus or his tyrannical sons, in Rome under Tiberius and Nero, in Sicily under Emperor Frederick II in the thirteenth century, in Milan under the Visconti and the Sforza, in Florence under Walter of Brienne, in England under Richard III, and in France under Louis XI and Henry III. The simple act of murdering one’s political opponent may, of course, have extenuating circumstances2; but if someone ordered the murder and if it occurred without a legal investigation or judgment, it is a crime, not an execution. According to his subjects in the Holy League, Henry III of France watched as the Duke of Guise and his brother the Cardinal of Guise were murdered. Indeed, by adding legal actions post-mortem Henry asserted that he had had them “executed.” For a public, one tyrannical act does not a tyrant make, unless it is very criminal. The degree of the tyrannical acts, their frequency, and their logical relations that constitute an attack on established laws and institutions gradually bring the charge of tyranny to the public mind. Here memory and history each play a part. Over the centuries, descriptions of tyrannical acts have often prompted readers to think of them as commonplace. And it is true that the entire vocabulary about heinous human political conduct is limited, is amazingly stable. Indeed, this vocabulary is often found in loci.3 That is, in  F. Ford, Political Murder (Cambridge MA, 1985).  A. Moss, Printed Commonplace Books (Oxford, 1996); F. Goyet, Le Sublime du “lieu commun” (Paris, 1996). 2 3

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commonplaces that are the bane of intellectuals who seek more contemporary social vocabularies. Still, thanks to the power of their imaginations, poets, playwrights, and artists have created works that interpret corruption and violence. The tyrannical act becomes encrusted with horror and beauty. Only in the late nineteenth century did there appear new social-scientific, psychological, and aesthetic vocabularies that enriched political culture across the world. And would-be tyrants were not above creating their own “wooden languages.” To think the word “tyrant” is one thing; to say it in the presence of others, or to write it, are escalations or strengthening of signification. Writing “tyrant” in a letter and writing it in a treatise on politics have very different valences of meaning. Orwell’s 1984 gave, and will always give, an immense shock to the routine discourses about abuse of power: discourse is suffocated and routine vocabulary is pared down to the essential words. Some of the most significant descriptive remarks about vocabulary and fear are, in fact, commonplaces. The context provided for interpreting the actions of tyrants will consist of brief biographies of the writers, some of whom constitute the canon of political philosophy. Some attention will be given to their political activism and to the persons to whom they addressed “their” writings. In addition to the lists of tyrannical acts that characterize one or another tyrant, there are numerous historical examples, drawn from the Bible, from ancient Greek and Roman history, and, in the cases of Bodin and Boucher, from more recent history. Some of these acts are included by commentators when it seems that there may be a contradiction between moral precepts and historical examples. In works from the later sixteenth century, most of these lists are found in texts of intense political engagement. Although Seyssel and Hotman have little to say about tyranny, their contribution to conceptions of power—as it has been preserved in their history-myth writing about the French past—accounts for their presence here. It will not surprise readers of the history of political thought to learn that Aristotle’s Politics looms over this entire project, down to its terminal reading by Jean Boucher, titled De Justa abdicatione,4 which contains the  Translation and commentary by Sir Ernest Barker (Oxford, 1946).

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longest list of the attributes of tyrannical misconduct yet found. All the readings predate 1590, with a concentration on works written in France during that great period of “troubles” known as the Wars of Religion. This is a book for non-specialist readers. Consequently, there will be the inevitable disappointment resulting from my misreadings, inaccuracies, and infelicities in this account of the reception of one or another edition of the Politics.5 With the exception of John of Salisbury and Erasmus, very little commentary has been found that, taking a human-nature perspective, argues that some people are born to be tyrannical.

Brief Historical Contexts The biographical and general historical contexts6 developed here are brief but illuminating for interpreting the texts. Plato had the famous tyrant Dionysius I of Syracuse and his son, called Dionysius II, very much on his mind when he wrote about tyranny. Several times Aristotle mentions Pisistratus, the Athenian tyrant who was not always tyrannical. Xenophon’s Hiero was a known historical figure. Seneca the Younger refers to Sulla the dictator, and later to Seneca’s pupil Nero. The medieval writers on tyranny—John of Salisbury (1115/1120–1180), Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), and Giles of Rome (1243–1316)—vary. There are specificities drawn from actual dedications to princes, and there are silences that prompt speculation. The humanist writers of the Renaissance—Machiavelli, Claude de Seyssel, Guillaume Budé, Erasmus, and Thomas More—are writing in what A.F. Pollard referred to as the Age of New Monarchy.7 Henry VIII of England, Francis I of France, and Charles I of Spain (also known as Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor), shared a monarchical political culture of beliefs in their absolute powers, manifest displays of magnanimity, luxury, and arbitrariness. Pollard’s thesis on new monarchy did not survive the scrutiny of his fellow historians, who delighted in proposing examples of what he characterized as “new” but that had already appeared in the 5  The paradigm known as political theory, or the history of political thought created by A.J. and R.W.  Carlyle, J.N.  Figgis, O. von Gierke, E.  Barker, B.  Russell, C.H.  McIlwain, G.  Sabine, P.  Mesnard, Q.  Skinner, Y.  Zarka, and R.  Flathman, contains little analysis of tyrannical actions. 6  J.H. Mundy, Europe in the High Middle Ages, 1150–1309 (New York, 1973). 7  A.F. Pollard, Factors in Modern History, first edition (New York, 1907), pb ed. (Boston, 1966), 52–72.

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lives of other kings. Such is often the fate of generalizations in history. But there are strong similarities when the question is approached from the angle of their princely education and the role played by learned advisors who were imbued with humanist learning and who cultivated political engagement (Erasmus being an exception).8 A particularly interesting remark by Pollard deserves mention, however: “The Renaissance, the revived study of Roman civil law, and the Reformation itself all contributed to the growth of royal absolutism.”9 The very nature of power, its sources, its ethical significance, and material fiscal and military reality would frame all reflection about tyrannical acts. Governance by any other form of government—democratic, republican, oligarchic—lacked defenders and legitimators (except for Venice and Switzerland) while Alexander, the ancient Greek-Macedonian, and Caesar and Caesar Augustus, the Romans, all three of them models of kingship, became increasingly influential. J.H.  Huizinga’s remark about “the historical ideals of life” reinforced and justified royal absolutism, particularly in regard to conquest and war.10 The new monarchs took greater risks than Henry VII or Louis XI. Erasmus and More rejected these absolutist political ideals and the policies they inspired. Charles V fought to repress heresy and to maintain or recover the immense inheritance he had received. Henry VIII found himself lacking funds to curb his sincere desire for a more aggressive military presence on the Continent. The reign of Francis I is riddled with military disasters and very few victories. He was not the first, nor the last, French king to be humiliated by the Hapsburgs. It is possible to be very brief about the political and religious context in France during the decades 1570–1590, because longer introductions to the period accompany my sketches of later authors. In other words, readers will find short biographies of François Hotman (1524–1590), Étienne de la Boétie (1530–1563), Théodore de Bèze (1519–1605), Jean Bodin (1529/1530–1596), “Anonymous” whose Vindiciae contra Tyrannos

8  The literature on this subject is vast and will appear in the separate biographies of each writer presented here. Here, however, are some classic studies: P. Saenger, “The Education of Burgundian Princes, 1435–1490,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1972; and D.M. Bell, L’Idéale éthique de la royauté en France au Moyen Age (Geneva, 1962). 9  Pollard, pb ed. 65. 10  Huizinga’s example was Charles the Bold, Men and Ideas, trans. J.S. Holmes and H. van Marle (New York, 1959), 77–96.

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(Defense of Liberty against Tyrants) published in 1579, and Jean Boucher (1551–1646). Almost despite the religious divisions, civil wars, and weakened monarchical power, the decades 1570–1590 were marked by the publication of Montaigne’s Essays (parts 1 and 2 in 1580 and parts 1 and 3 in 1588), Duplessis-Mornay’s Vérité de la religion chrestienne (1581), Fauchet’s Antiquités (1579), and d’Aubigné’s Tragiques (1577). In the 1540s Palissy began transforming clay into “rustic work,” complete with life-like salamanders and other small animals. This art form received its intellectual foundations in his Discours admirables of 1580. Henry III ordered the construction of the Pont Neuf of Paris in 1573. Visual depictions or portraits of the tyrant in action, and schematic presentation of Aristotle’s forms of government were undoubtedly more frequent in the sixteenth century but have not survived. These works often included images of a city, commissioned for display in the city hall, and more often than not depicting only the republican or the oligarchical political culture that had been specified by the city fathers. The Lorenzetti paintings in the Chamber of the Nine in Siena and Oresme’s translation of Aristotle’s Politics are exceptional because they contain illustrations of all the forms of government and their perversions. While there are several other ancient writers (mainly Polybius) who add, subtract, or nuance the Platonic and the Aristotelian forms of government (they are not the same), it is largely their formations that rest at the heart of the most pervasive and simple conceptual-analytical tool still used in politics today.11 Both the stability of meaning in the vocabulary and the inclusion of numbers have constituted a scientific foundation for understanding the political. What do historians mean when they refer to some period of time as a new “Age”? The heroic general and statesman Pericles is honored because he brought Athens more peaceful relations with her neighbors, and reformed the election rules in various ways so as to reduce risky political instability and promote economic prosperity. He not only undertook major public-works projects, but he also constructed Doric and Ionic

11  The present introduction is written solely for non-specialist readers. I am deeply indebted to many general studies, some so venerable as to have become classics, and some more recent and that build on new research.

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buildings (among them the Parthenon, c450 BC) and streets, walls, and quays. This strengthened the pride and unity of the citizens. But before mentioning other remarkable accomplishments of the Athenians who lived under Pericles’s rule, the presence of slavery, intermittent restrictions of citizen rights, and xenophobic responses to non-­ Athenians, including other Greeks, separated the social life of antique Athenians from our more modern attitudes about inclusiveness. We therefore should not put Athenian democracy on a pedestal, or view it as exemplary for the twenty-first century. Indeed, by contrast, the ancient Romans welcomed peoples from the corners of their Empire, and often granted them citizenship. But simply enjoying relative peace and success within its Empire was not enough. Nor would political reform and public works suffice to prompt awarding the accolade “Age of Pericles.” The remarkable brilliance of the artistic, literary, historical, and philosophical accomplishments of the Athenians who lived just before, or during, or just after Pericles justified the idea of an Age of Gold under Pericles. Indeed, this was a time when three great dramatists—Aeschylus (525–456  BC), Sophocles (485–405 BC), and Euripides (c480–c406 BC)—created theatrical tragedy as a genre to be performed in the semi-circular marble theaters in the round, many of which survive to this day. A bit later, Aristophanes (c448–385  BC) transformed venerable comic theatrical techniques into an art form. Though not born in Athens, Herodotus (484–c428 BC) wrote his historical albeit somewhat fantastic accounts of various peoples of the eastern Mediterranean, and became known as the “father of history.” Thucydides (471–c400 BC) worked out an exemplary history of politics, international relations, and military events in such strong, effective prose that reading him today still inspires awe. The philosophers Socrates (469–399 BC) and Plato (420–347 BC) followed somewhat later by Aristotle (384–321 BC) developed a paradigm of vocabularies about epistemology, ethics, nature, anatomy, politics, and the arts that became the foundations for Western thought.12 As Kitto puts it, “Athens from 480 to 380 was clearly the most civilized society that has yet existed.”13  G. Ryle, Plato’s Progress (Cambridge UK, 1966).  H.D.F.  Kitto, The Greeks (London, 1957) is a classic, very readable overview. N. Thompson, “Most Favored Status in Herodotus and Thucydides: Recasting the Athenian 12 13

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Was Pericles a tyrant? Some historians argue that, given his aristocratic background, his military abilities, and his awareness of the need to govern at least partially for the benefit of all Athenians, he was indeed a tyrant of the sixth-century type.14 Although he had opponents, he was an effective leader who was able to inspire his fellow citizens to pursue lofty goals (largely military). An Age of Pericles? The idea is only really a heuristic device to imply the existence of some mysterious or miraculous reasons, or causes, why things happen when they do.

Tyrannicides through Solon and Pericles,” in S. Salkever, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Thought (Cambridge UK, 2009), 65–95, brilliantly discerns relations between violent political actions and the creation of Athenian consciousness in history; see the effects of tyranny on everyday language, 90. I have not consulted B. Santillian and H. Aird, Pericles: Athenian Statesman and Patron of the Arts (New York, 2018). 14  Thompson, 90.

CHAPTER 2

Tyranny and Despotism in Plato’s Republic and Laws

Abstract  Plato on tyranny in the Republic and the Laws. Tyranny appears when moral-civic rectitude decays in democracies. Tyranny is the complete opposite of rational civic-centered politics. The tyrant is fearful and feared. The tyrant does whatever he desires. Plato sought, and failed, to modify the conduct of the Syracuse tyrant Dionysius I (432–367 BC). Keywords  Plato on tyranny • Dionysius I of Syracuse • Traits of a tyrant There are many instances where tyranny and despotism seem to be synonymous in recent translations of Plato’s works; but in general it is the despot who gains inordinate power, thanks to some electoral sleight of hand, or some legitimate decision in a democratic polis.1 Quite frequently these coups were a combination of an individual’s having gained power by an election, and fierce and violent rivalries (Plato refers to “factions”)2 that render the individual powerless by murder, exile, or prison.

 Plato, Republic, tr. F.M. Cornford (Oxford, 1941), 292.  M. Richter, “Aristotle and the Classic Greek Concept of Despotism,” Journal of European Ideas, 12 (1990), 175–187. 1 2

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The exemplary tyrant of Syracuse carried out a brutal campaign against his rivals before becoming known as Dionysius I (432–367  BC), “the Tyrant of Syracuse.” Plato visited him, in hopes of being able to play a role as counselor; but this proved impossible, given the atmosphere of intrigue and violence. In one of the longer definitions of a despot who had constructed an enhancing image of himself before the people, Plato narrates the story of a legendary despot in Arcadia whose assumption of power turned him into a wolf.3 For Plato, all living creatures have animal spirits or appetites that, given political conditions and an individual’s education, may be allowed to take over the person, thereby making him conspiratorial, violent, and shameless. At once full of fear and in control of the polis, the despot lives a life of luxury, gluttony, and money-grabbing by any means, legal or not. Fearing his fellow citizens, he creates an army of foreign mercenaries. Plato ingeniously brings together what the individual man or woman is, and how the institutional structures of the polis (Bildung) can shape their lives. Plato takes up the ideal conditions of living in a polis where justice is grounded on principles and institutions, schooling, and military service. Individual fulfillment would occur in the utopian polis where power is wielded for the common good by a philosopher-king. The tyrannical or despotic regime makes its appearance when moral-­ civic rectitude decays in democracies.4 It can occur in as short a time as two generations, as equality comes to prevail through the defeat of ruling oligarchs, that is, a few individuals (usually wealthy) who govern for their own interest. The frenzy increases as uncontrolled appetites strengthen.5 Discontent, effeminacy, breaches of friendship, and “unnecessary pleasures,” some of which are unlawful, come to prevail. The gentle soul becomes silent before the excessive emphasis on food, drink, and sex. The propertied are threatened by fraudulent practices and outright stealing, as the conditions of despotism flourish in the context of the pursuit of ever more wealth. The tyrant or despot is the sum of all these faults. He therefore is the complete opposite of the rational, civic-minded individual who, in his fulfillment, may reach for a civic goodness that is perhaps unattainable: the philosopher-king. The ideal polis is one where citizens (precisely defined)  Plato, Republic, 292.  Plato, Republic, 283ff. 5  Plato, Republic, 297. 3 4

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enjoy something that approaches privileges or liberties, and that permits self-fulfillment. The despot, having finally acquired power, does not possess happiness. He is fearful, and he is in fact enslaved by the political and material conditions that he himself has created. Animalistic appetites now dominate him; he has become less the lion (and not just metaphorically) and more the wolf.6

Tyranny and Despotism in Plato’s Laws What are the differences, nuances, elaborations, and historical examples involving the philosopher who wrote the Republic and the philosopher who wrote the Laws? Some thirty years had passed, during which Plato continued to teach and recover from his quite disastrous experiences in Sicily that resulted from a belief that his advice would bring about a just and wholesome political-moral life. The function of law in a society is not discussed in the Republic. There is no mention of Dionysius I, no mention of the so-called Dionysius II of Syracuse (397–343 BC), no mention of Dion of Syracuse (408–354 BC); and from his hair-raising visits to Sicily, Plato apparently learned nothing that he deemed worthy of recollection in the Laws. The deeply personal concetto about the trial and fate of Socrates that underlies the philosophy of justice in the Republic also seems attenuated in the Laws. Only a close reading with that sole issue in mind might yield some resonances. There is no reference to Socrates in the Laws. Or is he “the Athenian stranger”? Aristotle thought so, and he is an impressive authority.7 As we go through the text, reading for thoughts about tyranny, it may be possible also to discern the role of memory in tyrannical politics, but not in history. Once again, the presence of exemplarity may be of interest, especially since Plato had developed a “sophisticated” analysis of the relations between different types of rhetoric and forms of government in Gorgias.8 Does the example buttress an argument? Or does it merely attempt to edify? 6  There also is, however, attention to metaphorical beasts, Plato, Republic, 316. Would this passage inspire Erasmus, or is his monster a medieval one? 7  Plato, Laws, transl. and commented on by T.L. Pangler (New York, 1980), 511. 8  The dominant rhetorical mode under a tyrant is flattery. C.H.  Tarnopolsky, Prudes, Perverts, and Tyrants. Plato’s Gorgias and the Politics of Shame (Princeton, 2010), 41ff.

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At the beginning of the Laws, a tyrant is very briefly defined as one who has the power to do whatever he desires.9 At first thought, this might be interpreted as good or desirable; and indeed, such freedom may be good in a good tyrant. But the second reflection arrives quickly: what about obedience to the law? If there are laws, as there are in an already-founded polis, the tyrant has the power to break them. “To do what he wishes” implies education, law, customs, ways of living. As the discussion continues, the Athenian stranger says: “Give me a tyrannized city, and let the tyrant be young, possessed of an able memory, a good learner, courageous, and magnificent by nature.” Kleinias asks whether such a tyrant would be an effective city-founder. The Athenian stranger replies: “No, not at all.” Then Kleinias asks whether the Athenian stranger is asking if he means both roles, for founding a city requires both a law-giver and a tyrant.10 As it turns out, it is the law-giver who (with good luck) is required. Yet for the next few points, I am not certain that I have interpreted the text correctly: (1) the true law-giver shares the strength of those who are the most powerful in the city; (2) the Athenian stranger then remarks that a tyrant can change a city’s “habitual ways,” without great effort or length of time, be he virtuous or not; (3) all the tyrant has to do is to praise and honor those who conform, and to dishonor and blame those who do not; (4) the tyrant, by acting in accordance with these principles, can change a city more quickly than any other way. The shift is rapid from how a tyrant comes into power, to how he wields power, and it is almost entirely recounted by the Athenian stranger. The line between the law-giver and the tyrant remains, irrespective of whether or not governance aims for the triumph of virtue for the entire population, or merely for the tyrant’s own interests. One prominent feature remains to be discussed: the possibility “that a divine, erotic passion for moderate and just practices should arise in some of the great and all-powerful rulers,” whether it emerges from monarchy, from oligarchy, or from the fact that some individuals are moderate by nature, like Nestor, who is presented as divine and in mythic guise, and is depicted as so strong that this myth effortlessly assures virtuous government. The quite predictable shifts from one form of government to another (democracy to tranny and on to monarchy) may occur in a way 9

 Plato, Laws, 661.  Plato, Laws, 710a.

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that ends the empowerment of the good tyrant or king. Both were governing for the well-being of everyone in the polis. The Platonic king is not dynastic; he comes to power where the principles and conditions just listed have been followed. This view is stated quite specifically in regard to purging a city of corruption: “If the same man were a tyrant as well as a law-­ giver, he could employ the purges that are harsh and best.”11 Plato repeats that the tyrant exercises absolute authority,12 and that he does not differ from another individual by nature, but by liveliness. He also states categorically that tyrannies are not regimes, because political action in tyrannies does not conform to one of the good forms of government. The tyrant creates a faction and rules by oppression, murder, and the enslavement of his opposition.13 So, let us watch for the characteristics that Plato attributes to the tyrant—the man who does as he pleases.14 He makes himself rule outside the law, outside the institutions (regimes), and outside the local ways of doing things. He is rich, if not the richest man in the city. A climate of fear prevails, and the usual techniques of governance by distributing honors and public shame cease to function.

 Plato, Laws, 735d.  Plato, Laws, 777e. 13  Plato, Laws, 832c. 14  Plato, Laws, 661b. 11 12

CHAPTER 3

Aristotle on Tyranny in the Politics

Abstract  Aristotle on tyranny in the Politics. Very strong definitions of democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy, the three forms of government. Observations on tyrannical regimes. Pisistratus was called a tyrant, but was not. Keywords  Aristotle on tyranny • Forms of government • Pisistratus • Traits of a tyrant The Philosopher’s lengthy commentary on tyranny is found in the general presentation of the forms of government in the Politics.1 There are 1  It is very important to recall, at the beginning of each chapter, that this project on the acts of tyranny is prepared for the general reader and is not intended as a contribution to scholarship. Much recent research has strengthened the view that it was ancient Roman moral and political thought that attracted humanist writers about politics in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, particularly the thought of Cicero and Seneca. Q. Skinner, Visions of Politics (Cambridge, UK, 2002), II, 41–42, as cited by P.  Stacey, Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince (Cambridge, UK, 2007), 96. Was this true for the idea of tyranny? There is, of course, the issue of borrowing direct Aristotelian thought from multiple versions found in ancient Roman political thought. Do the Greek historical examples that support observations decline in favor of Roman ones? S. Salkever’s chapter “Reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics as a Single Course of Lectures. Rhetoric, Politics and Philosophy,” in Ancient Greek Thought, ed. S. Salkever (Cambridge, UK, 2009), 209–242, provides an excellent overview of the more general themes of the work. In the footnotes for the present chapter, the quotations and references are to Sir Ernest Barker’s translation of the Politics

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e­ ssentially three quite distinct types of statements: definitive or categorical statements of fact, historical examples, and very brief statements of fact that have virtually no specific context. An example of the latter is “It is a habit of tyrants never to like a man with a spirit of dignity and independence.”2 The first general definition of tyranny states that it is simply the opposite of the three good forms of government: monarchy, aristocracy, and politeia. There is an eagerness about going deeper into history than Plato. For example, there is at once attention to the internal dynamics of historical kingship and tyranny, both of which are mono-archies, that is, “one arch.” Aristotle offers much advice about how tyrannies may be modified in order to increase their chances of survival. Indeed, the policies and actions that a tyrant must do in order to survive take him toward kingship. The second general definition emphasizes the personal: “A tyrant should appear to his subjects not as a despot, but as a steward and king of his people. He should show himself a trustee for the public interest, not a man intent on his own; he should make moderation [the key principle of monarchy], and not harsh excess, the aim and end of his life; he should seek the society of the notables, and yet court the favor of the masses.”3 The result will be “a nobler and a more enviable rule: his subjects will be men of a better stamp.”4 Present in tyranny are the vices of both oligarchy and democracy, with the former aiming to amass wealth, and the latter showing a hostility toward nobles. Powerful threats to the tyrant’s power may come from external sources, namely neighboring powers who seek to undermine the tyrant by plotting or by war. The internal dangers are noble-inspired plots born of fear or contempt or a desire to be free from someone’s absolute authority. There are also attacks for sexual and homosexual reasons, the details of which E. Barker does not translate!

(Oxford, 1946), and K. von Fritz and E. Kapp, Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens (New York, 1964). Barker’s system shows the book, the chapter, and the paragraph where the statement can be found. That information is followed by a semicolon and parentheses that contain the appropriate “Bekker number,” a system worked out by A. I. Bekker in the late nineteenth century. 2  Aristotle, Politics, V, xi, § 3; (1314a). 3  Aristotle, Politics, V, xi, § 33; (1314a). 4  Aristotle, Politics, V, xi, § 34; (1315b).

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Among the historical examples mentioned are events affecting some people from Syracuse: the Gelo family and Dionysius the Younger. Since the fates of both Dionysius and Dion are mentioned so often in commentaries on tyranny, I shall include what Aristotle says about them.5 Dion, Dionysius’s relative, “led an expedition against him, succeeded in winning popular support, and expelled him—only to perish himself.”6 There is a comment to the effect that few men of “high spirit” are willing to risk their lives to bring down a tyrant; but in this instance, the men “must have in their hearts the resolve of Dion—a resolve to which only a few can rise—when he sailed on his expedition against Dionysius the Younger with his little band of followers.”7 What follows is a selection of some of Aristotle’s short observations on tyranny: • Hate and contempt are the two most frequent causes of attack. Hate is a passion all tyrants are bound to arouse; but contempt is often the cause by which tyrannies are actually overthrown.8 • Living luxurious lives, they make themselves contemptible, and offer their assistants plenty of opportunities.9 • Kings cease to be kings when their subjects cease to be willing subjects; though tyrants can continue to be tyrants whether their subjects are willing or not.10 As tending to the preservation of tyranny (so far as it can be preserved): it includes, for instance, the lopping off of outstanding men and the removal of men of spirit.11 • The forbidding of common meals, clubs, education; and anything of a like character.12

5  Plato recounts his experience with the Sicilians in his Seventh Epistle, published in Aristotle, Constitution, 220–224. 6  Aristotle, Politics, V, x, § 27; (1312a). 7  Aristotle, Politics, V, x, § 27; (1312a). 8  Aristotle, Politics, V, x, § 32; (1312b). 9  Aristotle, Politics, V, x, § 33; (1312b). 10  Aristotle, Politics, V, x, § 38; (1313a). 11  Aristotle, Politics, V, xi, § 5; (1313b). 12  Aristotle, Politics, V, xi, § 5; (1313b).

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• To prohibit societies for cultural purposes, and any gathering of a similar character: in a word, the adoption of every means for making every subject as much of a stranger as is possible to every other.13 • To require every resident in the city to be constantly appearing in public, and always hanging about the palace gates.14 • Endeavoring to get regular information about every man’s sayings and doings. This entails a secret police, like the female spies employed at Syracuse.15 • Still another line of policy is to sow mutual distrust and to foster discord between friend and friend; between people and notables, between one section of the rich and another.16 • A policy pursued by tyrants is that of impoverishing their subjects, partly to prevent them from having the means for maintaining a civic guard.17 The imposition of taxes produces a similar result.18 • The tyrant should always show a particular zeal in the cult of the gods. Men are less afraid of being treated unjustly by a ruler, when they think that he is god-fearing.19 In the Politics, Aristotle’s principal historical example of tyranny is Dionysius the Elder and Dion, as well as Dionysius the Younger of Syracuse. Kings are maintained and secured by their friends; tyrants, going on the principle “All men want my overthrow, but my friends have most power to effect it,” distrust them above all others. The methods applied in extreme democracies are thus all to be found in tyrannies. They both encourage feminine influence in the family, in the hope that wives will tell tales of their husbands; and for a similar reason they are both indulgent to slaves. Slaves and women are not likely to plot against tyrants: indeed, as they prosper under them, they are bound to favor their rule—as they will also favor democracies, where the people like to play the sovereign as much as any tyrant. This is the reason why courtiers attain a position of honor under both these forms of government. Democracies are fond of demagogues,  Aristotle, Politics, V, xi, § 5; (1313b).  Aristotle, Politics, V, xi, § 6; (1313b). 15  Aristotle, Politics, V, xi, § 7; (1313b). 16  Aristotle, Politics, V, xi, § 8; (1313b). 17  Aristotle, Politics, V, xi, § 8; (1313b). 18  Aristotle, Politics, V, xi, § 10; (1313b). 19  Aristotle, Politics, V, xi, § 25; (1314a). 13 14

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who may be called “the courtiers of democracy,” and tyrants like obsequious associates—which it is the business of courtiers to be. Tyranny is thus a system which chooses bad men or its friends. Tyrants love to be flattered, and nobody with the soul of a freeman can ever stoop to that; a good man may be a friend, but at any rate he will not be a flatterer.20

Tyranny in the Constitution of Athens The first part of the Constitution of Athens,21 which presented the period of monarchical government, is lost, and the rest is written as if it were a rough draft. Aristotle’s main theme is the change of regimes (constitutions), and the principal reasons for those changes. There is some anecdotal or story-telling material, but in general the aim is to confront theories about forms of government that are analyzed in the Politics, and the historical record of Athenian government, indeed governmental or regime instability. The narrative continues right down to the Philosopher’s own times, concluding with a count of just how many regime changes the Athenians had experienced since the end of the monarchy. There are minor references to tyranny before the rise of Pisistratus and his sons, but the aspect of tyranny that attracted Aristotle’s attention the most was the tyrant’s way of gaining power, losing it, regaining it, and losing it again. Somewhat earlier, Solon could have set himself up as a tyrant, given the political and social conditions of the city-state; but after being the great Athenian law-giver, he set off for Egypt, not to return for many years.  Aristotle, Politics, V, xi, §§ 10–12; (1313b).  Aristotle, Constitution of Athens. Barker, The Politics, sums up the material on tyranny in the Ethics and the Politics, 373. A brilliantly learned overview of the Constitution is by J. Frank and S. Sara Monoson, “Lived Excellence in Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens: Why the Encomium of Theramenes Matters,” in Salkever, 243–270. The remarks about how this text is interpreted by scholars from different disciplines may be extended to almost all “canonical” texts. Theramenes is exemplary in his non-perfection; he is a golden-mean individual (mediocre in the technical sense), not a philosopher-king. Has there been a lack of interest in the study of tyranny since World War II? G. H. Sabine, for example, has five sentences on tyranny in his History of Political Theory (New York, 2nd ed., 1950). The exception is Leo Strauss, Xenophon, on Tyranny., ed. V. Gourvitch and M. Roth (New York, 2013). It is evident that foreigners, barbarians, and otherness—to use contemporary terms—are never very far away in Aristotle’s mind when he writes about the social and the political, M. Richter, “Aristotle and the Classical Greek Concept of Despotism,” History of European Ideas, 12 (1990), 175–187. 20 21

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Not long after that, Pisistratus, a figure who is already familiar to us, became the champion of “the common people.” Before Solon’s departure, Pisistratus had requested a guard, but the request was refused. Not long after that, Pisistratus usurped power and was granted a guard. Aristotle characterized him as a tyrant, yet admitted that the man did not rule like one.22 Twelve years later, Lycurgus and Megacles joined to oust Pisistratus; but sometime later, Megacles sought an arranged marriage between his daughter and Pisistratus. This led to the latter’s return to power. Megacles first circulated a rumor that Athena was bringing Pisistratus back. A tall, beautiful young woman was dressed to look like Athena, and she and Pisistratus rode into the city together in a chariot. The citizens fell down in worship and received him in awe!23 Sensing the danger posed by parties who opposed him, in part because of his refusal to consummate his marriage to the daughter of Megacles, the tyrant fled. Soon he was raising money to hire a mercenary army that would secure his rule by confiscating “the weapons of the people.” To do this, he held a military review and began a long speech. The difficulty in hearing him, led to moving the event to the gateway of the Acropolis. During this lengthy speech, Pisistratus’s clients went through the city gathering weapons and locking them up. Despite this usurpation, Pisistratus continued to rule with moderation; he advanced money to the poor so that they could make a living by farming. “The majority of the nobles and the people were in his favor.”24 After thirty-three years of being in and out of power, Pisistratus died and his sons assumed power. Two of them were legitimate, two were not. The older legitimate son, Hippias, carried on his father’s moderate rule; his sibling spent his time on love affairs, poetry, and music. The two illegitimate sons eventually provoked disorder, harsh rule, and war with Sparta. The whole lot ruled for seventeen years with no clear rules of succession. The Pisistratus family failed to become a monarchy, despite the inheriting by sons. This partly confirmed the observation that sons of tyrants rule harshly. The shift from an interest in politics to a preoccupation with sex and culture is also associated with the sons of tyrants.

 Aristotle, Constitution, 81.  Aristotle, Constitution, 82. 24  Aristotle, Constitution, 85. 22 23

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The Athenian historical experience, as Aristotle analyzed it, is not confirmed by the theories about politics in the Politics. Tyrants govern with moderation and according to the laws—not unlike the tyrant who is “more of a steward than a tyrant.”25 Pisistratus came to power as a tyrant, but he governed with moderation.

 Aristotle, Politics, V, xi, § 20; (1314b).

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CHAPTER 4

Xenophon on Tyranny in Hiero

Abstract  Xenophon on tyranny in the Hiero. Profound observations about the psychological characteristics of the tyrant. It is a dialogue. Keywords  Xenophon on tyranny • Traits of a tyrant Born an Athenian in about 445 BC, Xenophon1 was an engaging, wealthy Greek for whom no city-state, nor all of Greece, sufficed for living with a sense of well-being. Exiled for a long period of time by his compatriots, he was a warrior and a general for Sparta, a pupil of Socrates but never a philosopher, a writer of not entirely successful histories. It is evident that his greatest originality manifested itself in lesser literary genres such as pedagogical biography, horsemanship and hunting, accounting, and household management. The Hiero, his brief dialogue on tyranny, may have been written as early as 388 BC or as late as 355 BC. It is often under-­appreciated by scholars. Xenophon’s death date is uncertain. Like Erasmus’s Education of the Christian Prince and La Boétie’s Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, the Hiero probes the wielding of power below the range of human experience that typically attracts the engagement of political philosophers.

1  See the brief biography by R.E. Doty, and his Introduction, in Hiero: A New Translation (Lewiston, 2003).

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Written in dialogue form, the Hiero is about a real tyrant of that name who ruled in Syracuse, 478–467 BC, and Simonides, a native of Samos who earned a considerable reputation as a lyric poet in Athens. Hiero protected literary figures, and it was as a poet that Simonides went to Syracuse in 447 BC at Hiero’s invitation, and stayed until his death. It was said that Simonides took money for his poems. In the dialogue, Hiero refers to Simonides as a “philosopher.” The tyrant does most of the talking, while Simonides asks leading questions, as a prosecutor might do in a court of law. The architecture of the dialogue is perfect, in the sense that the answers to the questions are often organized around the theme of the senses. A more reflective, confessional mood comes over the tyrant as a result of his admission that he is displeased with his life. The Greek language attributes to Hiero a status of “private person” (that is, a subject), since he was born under a tyrant. Of all the memories that Simonides manages to evoke, none is even partially a civic identity, even though Hiero lived a life of pleasurable experiences while being raised by his mother.2 Xenophon stacks the deck about the question of whether a tyrant is what he is by nature, or by his upbringing and his wielding of power. Hiero inherited his tyrannical powers from his mother; thus we learn that he recalls the pleasurable life he had enjoyed prior to his accession to power. Also, his brother, Gelon of Gela, had a reputation for moderation, but Xenophon lets his readers infer that Hiero is something less than moderate. Hiero and Simonides are certainly not friends, for reasons that become apparent. Nor are they intimate, for the tyrant never bristles or refuses to answer quite pointed questions. Simonides actually reveals nothing about himself, not even in his questions, which are commonplaces. The resonances from Plato are apparent, but Hiero stands on its own as an original work, thanks to the extended and quite deep exploration of a personality type. Simonides’s choice of the first theme is not insignificant: pleasure. The real possibility of being disgraced, or worse, being punished physically and sent back to Athens, may have loomed in the poet’s mind as he suggests that the senses should be the organizing principle for beginning the dialogue. Hearing, seeing, tasting, and sex are generally, albeit not 2

 Doty, 13.

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completely, discussed in that order; yet as early as Hiero’s first answer, it is evident that the tyrant receives no pleasure from any of the activities that humans typically find satisfying. The fact that Hiero had been born a subject (a subject of his brother), and is now a tyrant who accepts himself as such, is the conceit at work in Simonides’s aim to recover the memories of a happier time. Taking up the possibility that the tyrant is what he is by nature, Simonides talks first about the pleasures of the whole body, and how these pleasures can vary, for example during sleep. Hiero replies that there seems to be little difference between what he is now and the days before he was a tyrant. Hiero then begins to talk about vision, and comments that unlike others, tyrants dare not visit cities other than their own or attend entertainments or festivals for fear they will lose their power. And he notes that when a tyrant hires an entertainer and bids him to come near, the entertainer costs more than anywhere else. Simonides then asks whether hearing gives him greater pleasure, owing to all the praise he receives. At this point, an awareness of possible dissimulation surfaces in Hiero’s answer about the lack of pleasure coming from flattery. Hiero then recognizes that most people think that the tyrant enjoys seeing delicacies on his table that others lack; but he assures Simonides that it is in moderation that the most pleasure is to be found. All sorts of sauces are proposed by the cooks, in an effort to please the tyrant, but he is not pleased. Indeed, the aroma of perfumes pleases those around him more than it pleases the wearer. Simonides calls these delicacies “unnatural”; and in the end Hiero says: “Give him something he lacks and he is filled with joy.”3 Like the gastronomic delicacies that Simonides imagined would please Hiero, do not the fairest of women satisfy sexual desire? Hiero begins his answer by saying that typically persons marry someone above them or their equal; but he then points out that since no one is above him or is his equal, his only choice is to wed a foreigner. Having “liberal-minded women may be pleasant, as contrasted with the pleasures offered by slaves.” He adds that passion increases sexual pleasure: if sexual pleasure grows, it is owing to what is hoped for, rather than what is available.

3

 Hiero, 31.

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Daring to move toward a more intimate plane, Simonides then asserts that tyrants surely must desire boys; and he adds: “How is it then that that you love Dailochus, who is called ‘the Beautiful’?”4 Hiero admits to being attracted to the boy, but he adds that only if given respect, and not by force but “completely voluntarily, because force can injure.” Indeed, “the favors from willing boys are the sweetest … , but it is the fights and quarrels that arouse.”5 Sex with a boy who is unwilling is “more like robbery than love,” and since the tyrant can never be sure that he is loved, there is no chance for pleasure. Again, Hiero adds a commonplace: “The plots against tyrants come from none more than those who pretend to love them most.”6 As Xenophon turns away from possible pleasures through the senses, and begins to converse about more typical moral themes—friendship, wealth, war, and honor—he drops the Greek word for “private man” and begins to talk about the “citizen.” This change is significant as a boundary between private and public; but he has not been entirely consistent. Hiero has already mentioned relatives in his city, but of course he considers them to be subjects rather than citizens. As already noted, friendship is the relation between members of the same family. Beyond this, friendship, say among men of his own age, proves to be impossible, for they are unequal and suspicious of one another. In wealth and finances, the typical citizen is content with a small house, a few fields, and so forth, whereas the tyrant is never content. He fears crowds, he fears solitude, he fears being unguarded, and he likewise fears the guards. The more wealth and luxury he has, the more he wants. The citizen enjoys what he has and is proud to defend it, should enemies attack his city. Honor for Hiero involves the same dilemma as sex. Unless it is freely— and willingly—awarded by those held in esteem, it is meaningless. Nostalgic moments come over Hiero as he remembers the games he played when he was not yet a tyrant. Almost without prompting (Simonides is still present), the memory emerges of what life was like before he became a tyrant.

 Hiero, 37.  Hiero, 37. 6  Hiero, 39. 4 5

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The exhortation by Simonides that serves as a conclusion, is that you should enrich your friends before you enrich yourself, increase the size of the city, and make allies. Consider the citizens to be your comrades, your friends, your children, your own soul: and try to match all these things in doing good.7 Hiero does not say a word. We must remember that Xenophon was not a democrat. The Hiero contains what probably is the most complete taxonomy of all the personal marks of tyranny. Simonides recommends that Hiero avoid them all and rule as a paternalist monarch.

7

 Hiero, 109.

CHAPTER 5

Seneca the Younger on Tyranny in On Mercy

Abstract  Seneca the Younger on tyranny in On Mercy (Clemency). Advice on political morality addressed to his pupil, the future tyrant Nero. The tyrant unleashes an overpowering sense of fear among those whom he seeks to reduce to servitude. Apologist for the imperial regime, the principate. Keywords  Seneca the Younger on tyranny • Nero • Traits of a tyrant Cicero wrote De Officiis as advice for his son Marcus. It became one of his most-read works. Seneca wrote On Mercy (De Clementia) for his pupil and sovereign, the teenager, Nero.1 A well-to-do landowner and writer, the elder Seneca left his Spanish estates to be managed by his wife, so that he could supervise the education of their three sons in Rome. One of the most important aspects of Seneca’s education would turn out to be how to conduct himself at the imperial court. The role of tutor to the emperor depended entirely on the favor of the little circle and upon the prince, in this case his mother, who placed Seneca at her son’s side. Thanks to this 1  J.  M. Cooper and J.  F. Procopé, Seneca, Moral and Political Essays (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), introduction, edition, and translation. M.  T. Griffin, Seneca: a Philosopher in Politics (Oxford, 1976). M. Morford, Stoics and Neo-Stoics (Princeton, 1991). P.  Stacey, Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince (Cambridge UK, 2007). Panizza’s and Barrizza’s reliance on Seneca is particularly striking.

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opportunity of a lifetime, Seneca taught and wrote his work, a mirror of princes, in the presence of the prince. On Mercy lays out not only the principal themes of Stoic thought, but also Seneca’s particular version of it.2 The writing is clear, concise, and eloquent. Specialists may find reefs and barriers of philosophy in it; but for the non-specialist reader, the advice is direct and sometimes provides exceptionally violent examples of human action. Seneca supported his pupil’s decision to have his mother murdered, which at the least was unkind, since he owed her his post, and eventually his wealth. After the death of Burrus, another key figure in the little circle around Nero, and as his successor (a Sicilian) was gaining increased favor with Nero, Seneca withdrew. Tigellinus permitted the more dubious aspects of Nero’s personality to develop, and it would not be very long before Seneca received an order from his former pupil to commit suicide, which he did in 65.3 With his wife objecting, despite his unsuccessful efforts to convince her otherwise, Seneca died a Stoic. His wife survived. Seneca addresses his pupil about what he asserts to be one of the greatest of all virtues for a prince: mercy (clementia), which is especially appropriate because of the divine origins of his power. After some commonplace distinctions between kingship and tyranny, Seneca makes the case for kingship, which is a phenomenon (my word) in the human sphere that is above everything else. And mercy plays its role immediately, as the relations between peoples and kings: There is reason behind this unanimity of peoples and cities in their protection and love of kings, in their sacrifice of themselves and their own, whenever the safety of their Commander [the king] requires it.4

Love for the king and the resultant willingness to sacrifice one’s life. This king-people relation is grounded in reason, part of the Stoic Credo; but can it be inferred that tyrannical governance is the absence of reason? Seneca does not emphatically say so. “The king is the mind of the commonwealth.”5 The mercy he bestows is ontological. Being merciful increases the king’s freedom of action, just as pursuing what is equitable 2  M.C. Horowitz, “The Stoic Synthesis of the Idea of Natural Law in Man: Four Themes,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 35 (1974), 3–16, an overview. 3  Cooper and Procopé, Seneca, introduction. 4  Cooper and Procopé, Seneca, 132. 5  F.E. Kranz, Reorientations of Western Thought from Antiquity to the Renaissance, chap. IX.

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and good does. A king is not so much above the law, though he is that, as he is bound to the mortal that it contains. This coheres with the Oriental ideal of kingship.6 With divine status, the princeps could overrule laws or make new laws, irrespective of whether those laws were consistent with already accepted law.7 Kings have all the characteristics of other human beings—the virtues and the vices—but they are more intense and commanding, as absolute power builds and exaggerates whatever action they take. Kings should cultivate an image of, and a reality of, disinterestedness. So much attention falls on them, and so much is expected of them, that being king is a “noble servitude.”8 If the subject is willing to lose his life to defend the king (and the kingdom), the king is likewise willing to lose his life in a common military action. But what happens if an individual or group refuses to accept the king’s rule? There may be a plot to kill him. Mercy and pardon come to be about the same moral action in Seneca’s account of Caesar Augustus’s decision to pardon Cinna, the plotter who hated the imperial family from before he was born. The account of the pardon need not be given here, but it is necessary to point out the psychological consequences stirred in Cinna by the pardon: True mercy, Caesar, is what you have shown. It is something that starts with remorse or savagery—it means never having shed a citizen’s blood, it means supreme power exercised with the truest self-control, an embracing love for the human race as though for oneself, it means not being corrupted by greed or natural impetuosity or examples set by earlier princes into testing how far one can go against one’s fellow citizens; it means blunting the edge of one’s imperial power. You have given us, Caesar, a state unstained by blood.9

Writing from the heart for his teenage pupil, Seneca remains within the power arrangements, that is, a constitution mined by Caesar; but the Senate and the city of Rome live in an ambiguous regime that, in the mirror—and ideally—is the opposite of tyranny.10  Cooper and Procopé, Seneca, 15.  There are mentions of the late Republic, but no nostalgia. The Romanitas of the earlier centuries since the previous reigns of kings had been infused with Stoicism. 8  Cooper and Procopé, Seneca, 122. 9  Cooper and Procopé, Seneca, 142. 10  Cooper and Procopé, Seneca, 122. 6 7

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Fond of paradox, Seneca notes with evident satisfaction that though Dionysius I of Syracuse came to be known as a tyrant, there were princes— kings—who were far more tyrannical than he was, but who were never called tyrants. “A tyrant’s savagery comes from the heart,” but there are cases where the meanings of the words no longer signify, or never signified, the type of political regime being considered here. The tyrannical conduct of Lucius Sulla is brought up: he was a dictator who killed until he ran out of enemies, but he was not called a tyrant.11 Tyrants, it seems were typically given that title, if it can be called a title, by the populations of citizens or subjects who had been exploited rather than governed. Were not tyrants called that by a frightened public, perhaps in secret! The Syracusans referred to Dionysius as a tyrant, initially owing to his usurpation, but later as a legitimate choice. They were deceived. When Seneca points out the disjuncture between a regime and the word used to describe it, he is raising doubts about a publicly developed political language. The point becomes stronger when Sulla’s violence is mentioned, because it occurred as part of an attempt to restore the Roman Republic. True, Aristotle had used the word “tyrant” to characterize Pisistratus, but if he did so it was because, by holding power for so long, there was a period of tyranny and a period of non-tyranny.12 Here is where the context, rather than what is stated, becomes crucial for interpretation: Aristotle sought to create a typology of the various forms of government and their perversions. In the case of Seneca, doubt is left in the reader’s mind, not only about the meaning of the word “tyranny,” but about language in general. Master rhetorician that he was, Seneca’s account of Sulla’s violent regime follows right after the account of Augustus’s pardoning of crime—a success story of bringing over a former republican to a relation of fidelity between the pardoner and the pardoned. The parallels become very strong as a result of the choices made by prominent historical individuals in Roman history. Seneca delights in his parallel. Indeed, he cannot quite leave it. He argues that once again it is mercy (pardon) that characterizes kingship: a king who has an army is a bulwark for peace, while the tyrant’s army exists in order to repress hatred with fear.13  Cooper and Procopé, Seneca, 143.  Aristotle, Politics, 254, 1315b, “Tyrannies have generally been short-lived.” 13  Cooper and Procopé, Seneca, 145. 11 12

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In the general context of Stoic philosophy, with its emphasis on self-­ control, self-knowledge, and serenity, via the solemn invocation of reason, emotion, in this case fear, is to be measured and balanced by comprehending its causes, while always seeking greater poise and balance. Seneca says that the citizen-subject who lives under the tyrant’s coercive and violent uses of power will begin to hate him and his regime, and that, over time, this hatred changes uncontrollably (my word) into fear. Just as gentleness and mercy emanate from a good king and extend to people across the realm, the hatred and fear built up in the tyrant extend throughout his commonwealth. Contradictory motives drive him into self-contradiction. He is hated because he is feared, and being hated makes him want to be feared. He invokes that accursed verse which has sent many to their ruin. Let them hate, provided that they fear, in ignorance of the fear which arises when hatred grows beyond measure.14

In general, Seneca does not describe the public or the social-familial. His thought centers on the individual. There is little attention to how holding an office can change an individual’s outlook and action. True, he makes statements about collective actions: “They will trample down what scares them.” In moderation, fear does not inhibit the mind. But if it is continuous and intense, and if it threatens death, it arouses even the sluggish to boldness, inducing them to try anything: “Courage is at its keenest when forged by the threat of death.”15 The king has guards who will die to protect him; the tyrant has lackeys who resent him and who are “fierce and bloodthirsty.” Those who work the instruments of torture are not loyal to him. Nor can the tyrant change his ways: cruelty leads to more cruelty; the only protection against crime is more crime. The loyalty of his friends and children is in doubt: “Often fearing, yet more often longing for death, he is more hateful to himself than to those who are his slaves.”16

 Cooper and Procopé, Seneca, 144.  Cooper and Procopé, Seneca, 144. 16  Cooper and Procopé, Seneca, 145. 14 15

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With this reduction of all aspects of good, princely governance to mercy, and all tyrannical, violent, inhumane actions (not governance) being derived from fear, Seneca presents historical parallels: Augustus/Cinna/mercy/Sulla/violence and murder/tyranny. He strove to teach Nero an analytical frame that would enable him to characterize the individual and the political.

PART II

Three Medieval Commentators on Tyranny

CHAPTER 6

Mimetic Impulses and Early Receptions

Abstract  Medieval commentary on tyranny. The consequences of Emperor Frederick II’s (d. 1250) revival of Roman law and state administration resulted in a mimetic impulse toward tyrannical political culture, particularly in Sicily and Italy. Quarrels with the papacy led to developing theories of absolute power. Keywords  Tyranny, medieval commentary on • Frederick II • Political culture • Traits of a tyrant When we are confronted by the information that John of Salisbury (1115/1120–1180), Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), and Giles of Rome had in mind when they wrote about tyrannical acts, we can take Jacob Burckardt’s interpretation of Emperor Frederick as a general classic context.1 Burckhardt finds a powerful mimetic influence on the ideal of the 1  Burckhardt’s works laid the foundation for the post-World-War-II studies of classical republicanism: see especially his The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, An Essay, Part I, “The State as a Work of Art,” “The Age of Despots,” 3–50 (Modern Library edition, 1954). See also J.A. Symonds, The Renaissance in Italy; the Age of the Despots (New York, 1888); W. Velema and A Weststeijn, Ancient Models in the Early Modern Republican Imagination (Leiden, 2018), 1–19. In his The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton, 1957), E.  Kantorowicz offered an alternative view not only of Frederick’s policies but also of the origins of the modern state. Burckhardt does not appear in Kantorowicz’s Index, but his Orientalist argument is obliquely refuted, 97–142. Seneca’s influence on claims that the emperor had divine status

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reigning monarch in the life and brutal policies of Stupor Mundi. The following is the list of Frederick’s tyrannical acts according to Burckhardt: • the complete destruction of the feudal state; • the transformation of the people into a multitude destitute of will and of the means of resistance, but profitable to the exchequer; • centralized the whole judicial and political administration; • no office was filled by popular election; • penalty by devastation of the offending districts; • taxes, based on comprehensive assessments, were collected by the cruel and vexatious method of the Orientals; • marriage out of the country is forbidden without permission; • no circumstances permit study abroad; • the University restricted freedom of study. At this point, Burckhardt emphasizes the radical shift from a civic-­ political culture to absolute monarchy in Italy. The “people” had some say in their communities, but they lost it. The reference to Orientalist administrative practices has prompted learned refutations.2 Did Frederick’s claims to divinity go back to the Persians via the works and inspiration of Seneca? Throughout the later Middle Ages, the revival of Roman civil law is noted as the principal source for reforming the fiscal and judicial institutions under the watchful eyes of the Rex Imperator and his lawyer-ministers.3 Frederick’s violent quarrels with the papacy also shocked governing elites all across Europe, and in some cases they inspired local lords and kings to push back at the clergy, which was allegedly increasing and expanding the jurisdictions of ecclesiastical courts (Henry II of England)4; but more importantly, the imperial-papal conflict prompted an escalation in ever-higher, more absolute claims to governing authority.

are noted, 285. But was there not an Orientalist influence in Seneca’s ideal of the prince? R.  Lerner, Ernst Kantorowicz (Princeton, 2016); V.  Kahn, The Future of an Illusion (Chicago, 2014). 2  Kantorowicz, 116. 3  Kantorowicz, 102–105. 4  The quarrels between the Crown and the church in England is the context for the violent murder of Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, in his own cathedral.

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Would monarchs to the north and despots essentially in Italy fundamentally seek to carry out the same absolutist ideal of government? The centuries between 1200 and 1500 brought intense military activity all over Europe, and this expensive activity led to devising ways to raise money by taxes or by using means that often were violent. The usurper who becomes a tyrant is often successful at finding money for the next military campaign; and in some cases, for example among the Visconti and the Sforza in Milan, the use of power was legitimated by jurists and writers who drew upon the Bible and antique Greco-Roman sources. In Florence, by patronage and favor, the Medici dynasty sapped the republican oligarchy of its power. Still more despotic was the career of Walter of Brienne in 1342. In a study that compares “strongman politics” in medieval India and those in Renaissance Florence, Vasileios Syros5 constructs his analysis around that term: “strongman.” This is very suggestive of the possibilities of interpreting why the terms “despot” or “tyranny” are not used to describe the usurpation of all the powers in a state or a city-state. The reason may lie in a desire to avoid all the interpretive issues around Western European terms. When alluding to a rise to power in India, one may wish to avoid troublesome words such as “despot.” “Strongman,” is more neutral. Yet it appears that the principal source about Walter of Brienne’s rise to power, and then his fall in 1342, used neither “despot” nor “tyrant.” Bruni may reveal something deeper, something that is not explicit, about those who wrote the histories of tyrants but did not employ the term. There is no doubt that Bruni not only was familiar with the Western European terms. His translation of Aristotle’s Politics into sonorous, eloquent Latin capped a life of reading ancient histories and a life of civic activism. His History of Florence is a complement to the translation of Aristotle. It is therefore possible that the specific characteristics of tyranny that he translated in the Politics, enriched Bruni’s ability to perceive the social and political mechanisms present in the usurpation by Walter of Brienne and his eventual fall. 5  V.  Syros, “Evil Lords, Benign Historians: Strongman Politics in Medieval India and Renaissance Florence,” Intellectual History Review, 29 (2019), 1, 11–34. See also J. RolloKostor, “The Murder of Louis of Orléans” (1407), in B.  Koch and C.J.  Nederman, eds, Inventing Modernity in Medieval European Thought, ca.1100–ca.1550 (Kalamazoo, 2018), 193–211, about the influence of Bartolus of Sassoferrato and the vocabulary of tyranny during the Schism.

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We cannot know why Bruni did not use the term “tyrant” to describe Walter, but he was not exceptional in this regard. Agostino’s The Conjuration of the Count of Fieschi (1629) recounts the rapid rise and fall of an aristocratic usurper in mid-sixteenth-century Genoa, without employing the word “tyrant.” Similarly, Jacques-Auguste de Thou’s History of His Own Time, published in various parts during the early seventeenth century, does not use “tyrant” to describe the rise and fall of Henry, Duke of Guise, during the reign of King Henry III. As a result of not encountering a general term such as “tyranny,” were readers more inclined to read and remember the more consequential events in political action? Rhetoric and political activism were the sister and the brother for writing histories of tyrannical politics in the Renaissance. Until the mid-twentieth century, Bruni’s oeuvre would be largely unread. It was then recovered and became a foundation for classical republicanism.6 As is so often the case, Bruni reaches back to ancient exemplary texts to construct his narrative; but the tyrannical actions themselves, and the social-political dynamics that first favored Walter but eventually destroyed him, are of interest for us. Bruni sees tyrannical action as resulting from Walter’s applying social and political conditions in his native France.7 But to be brief, were the writings about the acts of tyrants merely scholarly commentaries on some ancient text? Or were they, if only in oblique ways, part of the political discourses about the nature of power and the observable changes in monarchical institutions that sought to reduce civic-communal governance, feudal institutions, and the relative autonomy of the church? To the north, as we shall note briefly, theories of absolute power would only become well-developed in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. But in France, after saintly King Louis IX (1226–1270, canonized in 1297) there would soon appear Philip IV the Fair (1285–1314), whose reign is a remarkable contrast to that of the saintly king. With lawyers 6  See Struever, The Language of History; F.  Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini (Princeton, 1965). For a trenchant account of Walter that is both sound and classical-republican, see F. Schevill, History of Florence (New York, 1936), 220–222. The remarkably high level of pertinent descriptive detail in Bruni’s account of Walter of Brienne’s rise and fall sheds light on the humanist project of writing civic history. 7  Syros, 14, from the History of the Florentine People, 1492. Bruni also provides the context in Italy when he emphasizes the struggles against monarchical-tyrannical governments in Milan and Naples.

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carrying out his nefarious policies, Philip turned “harsh, violent, and arbitrary … that dealt anguish and spoliation to the principal classes and … placed upon the mass of common men the weight of rough-hewn administration that had more cunning than strength.”8 There was sexual scandal at his court, and a violent quarrel with the papacy. Wars strained relations with the estates over paying for them.9

8  F.J.  Pegues, The Lawyers of the Last Capetians (Princeton, 1962), 12. See also C.V. Langlois, Histoire de France, III, part 2 (Paris, 1901). For evidence that it was Philip himself who ordered the arbitrary policies, not his lawyers, who ordered the arbitrary policies, J.  Strayer, “Philip the Fair, a Constitutional King,” American Historical Review, 62 (1956–57), 18–32. 9  Pegues, 36–60.

CHAPTER 7

John of Salisbury on Tyranny in Policraticus

Abstract  John of Salisbury on tyranny in the Policraticus. King Henry II’s quarrels with the church led to a recovery of Cicero’s and Orosius’s descriptions of tyranny. The result was a list of Nero’s tyrannical acts. Keywords  John of Salisbury on tyranny • Thomas Beckett • Cicero, recovery of • Orosius on tyranny • Traits of a tyrant Born in Old Sarum (near Salisbury), “John the Little,” as he refers to himself (late 1110s–1180), set off for the University of Paris in 1136. He would spend twelve years in that center of learning before returning to England to become a secretary to Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury. Living through the clash between the Crown and the church over legal jurisdictions, John wrote in defense of the church’s positions and defended those positions in person at various courts on the continent, and several times in Rome. Thomas Becket was part of this same circle of clerics until the king made him chancellor and, after Theobald’s death, archbishop of Canterbury. John was banished by the king in 1156–1157, years that turned out to be fruitful for writing several major works, and that very probably saw him beginning his Policraticus, finished in 1159. Archbishop Becket was murdered in his cathedral in 1170, and John, if not a bystander, knew about it immediately. This brutal act affected John profoundly: he would devote the rest of his life mainly to writing about © The Author(s) 2020 O. Ranum, Tyranny from Ancient Greece to Renaissance France, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43185-3_7

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the martyr, and to fostering a cult of Becket that would flourish all across Europe. From 1176 until his death in 1180, John was bishop at Chartres, one of the church’s most royal French establishments. The Policraticus is addressed to administrative clergy like him, and to courtiers. Departing from an organic-corporal theory of community, John recommended that minor offenses committed by a king be ignored; but if the welfare of the community-body is threatened, or if religious beliefs and practices are challenged, it is the duty of the entire corps of citizens to get rid of that king.1 Elsewhere, John refers to the tyrant as the servant of God, and that the tyrant-king will be subject to divine punishment, presumably after his death. But John does not turn to the usual vocabulary when he advises tyrannicide. I have not discovered any other philosopher-­ writer who describes the powers of a corps-community to act in the name of duty, in removing a tyrant, but it is of course logical because of the protection that God gives the corps-community. Writing prior to the reception of Aristotle’s Politics in Latin, John relies on Cicero and Augustine for his sense of human nature, and he makes moderation and mercy major underlying themes. For his list of tyrannical attributes, he relies on Orosius.2 After describing Caligula’s tyrannical acts, he turns to Nero: • He dressed in the motley attire of an actor and played on many stages. • His furious lust led him not to refrain, it is said, from his mother and sister. • He took a man for his wife. • He fished with golden nets and purple twine. • He bathed in hot and cold unguents. • Rome burned for six days and seven nights. • He used engines to break down houses, forcing residents to live in tombs and mansions of the dead. • His avarice was so violent that he carried off goods from the burned properties. • He commanded the Senate to confer ten million sesterces on him. 1  K. Bollerman and C. Nederman, “John of Salisbury,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2016), online; and C.  Nederman, “A Duty to Kill, John of Salisbury’s Theory of Tyrannicide,” Review of Politics, 50 (1988), 365–389. See Huizinga’s remarkably sensitive portrait in Men and Ideas, 159–177. 2  John of Salisbury, Policraticus, tr. J. Dickinson (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), Bk VIII, chap. 18.

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• He put to death the greater part of the Senate, and he almost annihilated the equestrian order. • He committed murder: his mother, his sister, his wife. • He showed a rash impiety against God. • He put the blessed apostle Peter to death.3 Other crimes follow: pestilence in Rome, military disasters, and (he says) other historians describe these cruelties in greater detail.

3

 Policraticus, 354–56.

CHAPTER 8

Aquinas on Tyranny in the Regime of Princes and in the Summa Theologica

Abstract  Aquinas on Tyranny in the Regime of Princes and in the Summa Theologica. Tyranny is a matter of degree; if it is not excessive, it should be tolerated. The tyrant who usurps power and fails to govern for the benefit of all, may be killed, and his killer will be honored. Keywords  Thomas Aquinas on tyranny • Tyranny as usurpation • Traits of a tyrant Aquino is a town in southern Italy, south of Rome and north of Naples, near the great Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino. Thomas’s father was count of Aquino. His mother was countess of Teano; her relatives would include Emperors Henry VI and Frederick II. Thomas (1225–1274) refused to follow in his parents’ footsteps, enjoying high rank and wielding power in a local setting.1 Instead, he joined the Dominican order and set off for Paris, where he began studies under Albertus Magnus, one of the major translators of Aristotle, working from Greek to Latin. With his teaching credentials, he spent eighteen years in Paris, Naples, Orvieto, Viterbo, and Rome, all the time addressing the principal questions of scholastic theology, ethics, and politics. His greatest work, the Summa

1

 R.W. Dyson, ed., Saint Thomas Aquinas, Political Writings (Cambridge, UK, 2002), xvii.

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Theologica, would not be finished at the time of his death in 1274, at forty-­ nine. (He would be canonized in 1323.) At the request of the Dominican order, in the mid-1260s Thomas undertook to write a mirror of princes addressed to the crusading king of Cyprus, a member of the noble Lusignan family from western France. His De Regimine principum is Aristotelian in its framework, but Thomas integrates a Christian perspective: for example, the tyrant “betrays God’s purpose,” and tyrannical acts are “wicked.”2 If a tyrant’s actions are not excessive, they should be tolerated, but in any event they are sins and will result in “eternal damnation” for the person who commits them.3 If, however, the tyrant is not excessive, it is more advantageous to tolerate a degree of tyranny for the time being than to take action against the tyrant and so incur many perils more grievous than the tyranny itself. For it may happen that those who take such action prove unable to prevail against the tyrant, and succeed in provoking the tyrant to greater savagery. Even when those who take action against the tyrant are able to overthrow him, this fact in itself gives rise to many grave dissensions in the populace, either during the rebellion against the tyrant or because, after the tyrant has been removed the community is divided into factions.4

Christians are required to obey secular powers, including tyrants.5 Living under secular power instead of spiritual power does not release or otherwise change the need for obedience. The justice that is meted out is, if not divine in origin, divinely sanctioned. Thus, if a tyrant has unjustly taken over lands that previously did not belong to him, he need not be obeyed.6 These examples of the secular (and temporal) differences, and the right that comes with previous possession of land, were both significant commentaries in an age of quarrels over spiritual versus temporal powers, and the conqueror’s (usurper’s) lack of rights to take possession of another’s property. Thomas concludes this section on obedience by two more general points: “Those who receive ruling power by violence are not truly rulers; hence, nor are their subjects bound to obey them.” And:  Dyson, ed., Summa Theologica, xxix.  Dyson, ed., De Regimine principum, 35. Thomas also apparently condemned Caesar’s assassination. He cites Cicero on this point, Dyson, 72–73. 4  Dyson, ed., De Regimine principum, 18. 5  Dyson, ed., Art 2, Scripta libros sentiarum, II, Dist. 44. 6  Dyson, ed., Summa Theologica, 72, part of a lengthy treatment of obedience. 2 3

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Cicero was speaking of a case where someone had seized dominion for himself by violence, either against the wishes of his subjects or by coercing them into consenting, and where they had no recourse to a superior by whom judgment might be passed on the invader. In such a case he who delivers his country by slaying a tyrant is to be praised and rewarded. There would seem to be no need to have some constituted authority decide in the murder of the usurper. It can be done by anyone, and he will be honored for his act.7

After a lengthy commentary on the advantages and disadvantages of the various forms of government, Thomas opts for the “mixed” government that Aristotle likewise chose; but as with the philosopher, the difficulty of actually establishing such a government, and then maintaining it, leads Thomas to a long comment on monarchy, and a preference for that form of governance.8 If governance ceases being done on behalf of the subjects, the monarch is deemed corrupt. A king may cease being just toward his subjects. When a king rules justly, his subjects provide him with what is needed; but unjust kings are “puffed up with pride, forsaken by God as the due reward of their sins, and spoiled by the adulation of men.”9

 Dyson, ed., Summa Theologica, 75.  Dyson, ed., Summa Theologica, 8–15; xxvii. 9  Dyson, ed., Summa Theologica, 35. 7 8

CHAPTER 9

Giles of Rome on Tyranny in His Regime of Princes

Abstract  Giles of Rome on tyranny in the Regime of Princes. The recovered Politics by Aristotle is the fabric of Giles’s comment on tyranny, as reduced to short phrases. Keywords  Giles of Rome on tyranny • Aristotle, recovery of • Traits of a tyrant Like that very aristocratic southern Italian Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome left his patrician family (the Colonnas) and eventually made his way to Paris for his education. He did it in an Augustinian’s habit, not a Dominican’s. There is no translation into modern English of Giles’s De Regimine principum, and the only Latin edition dates from 1607 (reprinted, Aalen, 1967). C.F. Briggs’s Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum (Cambridge, UK, 1999) is an exemplary work on the location and specificities of the manuscripts of one of the more popular works about politics in the Middle Ages. R.  Lambertini’s chapter on political thought in C.F.  Briggs and P.S. Eardley, A Companion to Giles of Rome (Leiden, 2016), has no commentary about tyranny. The introduction is useful but does not replace that by R.W. Dyson, Giles of Rome on Ecclesiastical Power (Woodbridge, UK, 1986), for our purposes. Although his leadership resulted from the brilliance of his writings, Giles had a way of making himself indispensable © The Author(s) 2020 O. Ranum, Tyranny from Ancient Greece to Renaissance France, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43185-3_9

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to the French political figures around young King Philip IV, for whom he wrote the De Regimine principum, a mirror of princes that owed a lot to the newly translated Politics of Aristotle, and also to the works of Aquinas. This work is more dependent on antique sources than is John of Salisbury’s Policraticus. After the educational treatise, Giles would confront the king again, this time in opposition to the intense quarrel with Pope Boniface VIII, which led to writings on the plenitude of power enjoyed by the papacy thanks to the Donation of Constantine (which later was found to be fraudulent). Giles frames his arguments about tyranny in the Aristotelian modality, which was the opposite of governance by a good king.1 What follows is a paraphrase of Giles’s commentary on Aristotle’s ten points on tyranny: • The verry2 busy king is most busy about the common profit, and profit for the community. While the tyrant feigns to do the same, all he does is spend on horses and strumpets, on flatterers and other unworthy persons. • That incomes [rents] should profit the community and the reign, while tyrants feign to do the same. • The king and prince should not show themselves to be dreadful and cruel, nor to be too homely, but they should seem sad and worshipful … a verry king is verry virtuous, and a tyrant is not virtuous. • A king should not despise any of his subjects and do no man wrong, rather with their wives, other persons do other things … the tyrant desires money, wrongs citizens and ruins wives and daughters. • The king and prince should not only love their own … and be homely and love gentle men and barons and others by which a good state of the reign may be saved; they should make their own wives homely

1  Giles of Rome, The Governance of King and Princes, John Trevisa’s Middle-English Translation ed. D.C. Fowler, C.F. Briggs, and P.G. Remley (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997), Bk 1 and 332–351. See a photo of a copy commissioned by the city fathers of Rouen, Creating French Culture, P.  Gifford and M.-H.  Tesnière, eds. (Paris and New Haven, 1995), 95. 2  In Middle English, verry means “true,” as does the French words “vrai” or vérité (the truth), and as does the English word “verily.” Having once introduced and explained the word verry, this paraphrase will henceforth use “verry,” without italicization and without putting words in his mouth, that is, changing “verry” to “true.”

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and goodly toward the aforesaid men … a tyrant is “misprout” of heart and despises others, and feigns otherwise. • A verry busy king should be moderate in mete and drynke, and in service of Venus [and the tyrant is the opposite.] Sobriety is valued and the intemperance of lecherie and glutonie despised. • A verry king should heighten and strengthen cities, castles, and towns, for the common profit, whereas a tyrant is busy about his own profit. • The verry king should worship wise men and goode and strangers, whereas the tyrant does not worship wise men and goode but destroyeth them. • A verry king should not be wrong and wrest by some other men lordships. A king who leaves his realm should be ashamed to leave a lass regne to his children, … none the less he left to them a greater reign and more enduring of time. • Kings should bear well in Goddes service for as the philosopher says from now on the people is subject to the full to a king that by truth worshipped God and has God to his friend. Ten points from the Politics follow, about how a tyrant may keep his lordships: • Slaying and destroying excellent men. • The tyrant destroys excellent men. [This brief presentation of a much longer commentary on tyranny by Giles is sufficient to illustrate the richness of premodern modalities of reception for an antique text. The trajectory has been from ancient Greek to thirteenth-century Latin, and then to Middle English penned by a scholar at Oxford who was chaplain to Thomas IV Lord Berkeley, who died in 1417. There is only one surviving copy.] • The tyrant does not allow studying. • The tyrant does not suffer friendship or gatherings. • The tyrant has spies and tries to know all the things that the citizens do. • The tyrant destroys friendship. • The tyrant impoverishes his subjects. • The tyrant procures war and sends fighting men to strange countries.

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• The tyrant is “warde” [guard] of his body by strangers. • The tyrant makes strife and parties [factions] who will destroy one another.3 Because Bartolus of Sassoferrato (1313–1357) wrote about tyranny, my plan was to include him and the work here as the last part of this brief excursion into High-Medieval writings about tyranny. But although he has the clarity and concision one expects from a great jurist, it turns out that Bartolus not only relied heavily on Aristotle, but that Giles also relied heavily on Aristotle! Bartolus’s work on the legal foundations of the Holy Roman Empire that he found in ancient Roman laws and other texts, as well as his major effort to construct legal foundations for both imperial and papal courts could remain strong, despite the rise of a usually transitory despot.4

3  Fowler, Briggs, and Remley, Preface. It is, of course, the bane of editors when a translation is paraphrased; but it has given me pleasure, in the following sentence, to go beyond paraphrase and to capture something of the appearance and sound of Giles in Middle English. This un-paraphrased Giles goes as follows: “Thanne a verrey kyng in dede bereth hym wel in Goddes service verreyliche, and a tyraunt is not suche oon but feyne on caas that he is suche on.” (The italicized “th” represents the “thorn,” which sounds like the letters th and was eventually replaced by them). Giles The Governance, 340. 4  S. Woolf, Bartolus of Sassaferrato, His Position in the History of Medieval Political Thought (Cambridge UK, 1913). The tyrant is discussed on almost strictly legal grounds. On the tyrant, see D.  Quaglioni, ed., Politica e diritto nel trecento italiano, il pensiero pollitico, Biblioteca 11 (Florence, 1983), 15.

PART III

Recovering Plato and Aristotle on Tyranny in the Renaissance

CHAPTER 10

Imminence of the Past

Abstract  Recovering Plato, Aristotle, and Xenophon on tyranny during the Renaissance. Though Aquinas and Giles had the Politics in translation, the text was still truncated and difficult to understand. Oresme rendered it into French under Charles V, King of France (1364–1389); and the Florentine humanist, Ficino, rendered Plato into Latin by 1475; it was printed by Aldus Manutius in 1500. Note that Aristotle’s works were available in Latin earlier than those of Plato. Xenophon’s Hiero was first published in 1516 by the Giunti family of Florence. The learned circle around King Charles V included the first major woman writing about political tyranny: Christine of Pizan. Keywords  Plato, recovery of • Aristotle, recovery of • Xenophon, recovery of • Oresme • Charles V king of France • Ficino • Aldus Manutius • Giunti family • Christine of Pizan Our first step in studying the acts of tyranny in the sixteenth century is to sketch briefly the reception or recovery of the ancient texts of Aristotle, Plato, and Xenophon about the forms of government. Moving past early-modern times, Barker mentions only Locke and Burke “for the measure of some affiliation.” On first reading, this “affiliation” seems much too brief, even cavalier; but on reflection, Barker offers an insight into the English political experience. © The Author(s) 2020 O. Ranum, Tyranny from Ancient Greece to Renaissance France, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43185-3_10

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And to be sure, through the church fathers, Plato and Aristotle remained present across the centuries, particularly through Augustine’s works. But as Elizabeth Eisenstein observed: “Any history of Western Philosophy must make some allowance for the migration of manuscripts (must place the works of Aristotle after those of Augustine, and certain dialogues of Plato after both, for instance) when accounting for the views of medieval school men.”1 The same is true for the great texts of political philosophy, and for the period down to 1475.2 The point is that since Plato’s works were recovered after Aristotle’s, they will be briefly presented after Aristotle’s.

The Recovery of Aristotle’s Politics My sketch of the stronger trend in reception, translation, and diffusion of the Politics, and the Ethics in the later Middle Ages must begin with Albertus Magnus (1206–1280),3 a learned and energetic Dominican who strove to assemble copies of Aristotle’s works wherever he could find them, including Arabic Spain. It would probably be his translation of the Politics that Thomas Aquinas would read in order to make his lengthy and influential commentary, including on tyranny. Albertus was not the only one who simply added endings to turn Greek words into Latin ones, but he forged ahead despite recognizing that he did not fully comprehend the text.4 His reliance on a translation by Avicinna is evident in the phrasing, but Albertus nonetheless provided a helpful tool for future translators and commentators. There has been some question about whether Thomas Aquinas already had Albertus’s translation at his disposal when he developed his oeuvre, or whether it was the other way around.5 1  E.  Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge, UK, 1979), vol. I, 199. 2  R. Bolgar puts the chronology of reception succinctly in The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries (Cambridge, UK, 1958), 285. See also J.E.  Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, UK, 1921); and F.E.  Kranz, Reorientation of Western Thought from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Aldershot, 2006), xi, 359–61, on Moerbeke. 3  S.M.  Babbit, “Oresme’s Livre de Politiques and the France of Charles V,” American Philosophical Society, Transactions, vol. 75, part 1, 1985, chap. 2. 4  Babbit, 18. 5  Babbit, 15. There is excellent material on the commentators that Oresme would use. Nearly all translators would write commentary, a fact that strengthens the case for using the word “reception” rather than “recovery.”

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In Moerbeke, near Ghent, a scholar named William completed a translation of the Ethics and the Politics by around 1270. Copies seem to have circulated widely among learned-elite groups, as did a translation by Robert Grossteste. In what came to be the capital of humanist learning, Florence, Leonardo Bruni translated the same texts between 1416 and 1437.6 Finally, there was an Aristotle on politics in Latin that was not only remarkably faithful to the text but eloquent as well. Bruni’s comments on his work are particularly revealing about the importance of rhetoric in recovering meaning. Thus the best translator devotes himself in his translation with his whole mind and soul and will to the original author, and consciously tries to duplicate his figures, colors, and rhythms, all the features of his speech.7

To the north, what could be called a second Carolingian Renaissance took place during the reign of the French king Charles V, “the Wise” (1364–1389).8 Well-educated as princes went, and himself a reader at a time when most princes were being read to, Charles V commissioned several translations into the vernacular, “in order that his counselors and others might read them.” He had the Moerbeke Latin translation to read, but it was difficult. To the king, horsemanship or devotional books seemed insufficient if he was to be a good ruler. Augustine’s City of God, John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, and Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics therefore were translated into French, with Nicole Oresme translating the Aristotle. A great illustrated presentation copy survives: it shows the king reading, seated in a monumental reading-seat surrounded by books and wearing a crown and a robe with fleurs-de-lis.9 As part of the context for this study of the acts of tyranny, the personal/ individual history of relations with princes will be noted. Oresme was a secrétaire du roi, not a very high post in the royal administration but certainly honorable. Charles V also made him dean of the cathedral chapter of Rouen, and then wrote the canons to inform them that Oresme would be residing principally in Paris while working on translations. As a royal servant, Oresme supported the king and would do just about any  N. Struever, The Language of History in the Renaissance (Princeton, 1970).  Struever, 69. 8  C.R. Sherman, “Representations of Charles V of France as a Wise Ruler,” Medievalia et Humanistica, new series, 2 (1971), 83–96. 9  Creating French Culture, ed. M.H. Tesnière and P. Gifford (New Haven, 1995), ill. 26. 6 7

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intellectual labor that needed doing. Charles sent him to Avignon in 1363 to preach to the pope, an indication that Oresme not only knew the ancient rhetorical texts about translation, but also could speak before a public that was used to hearing eloquent sermons. Finances and currency puzzled the king, so Oresme wrote a pioneering work on the value of precious metals. The king seemed intrigued by astrology, so Oresme researched and wrote about the movements of the stars. The translations of the Ethics and the Politics from Latin into French took Oresme about four years (1370–74). Instead of simply mentioning Cicero on the problems of translation, Oresme quoted him to the effect that “weighty works are most agreeable when written in the language of one’s country.”10 Patriotic sentiment had grown during the Hundred Years’ War, and Oresme stands on the frontier of pride about the French language, a “language noble et commun à genz de grand engin et de bonne prudence.”11 Susan Babbit characterizes Oresme’s translation of Aristotle as a translation, not a paraphrase: “It is one of remarkable unity and precision of expression.” Instead of dressing up Greek words when he could not express the thought in French, Oresme created new French words that often were quite easily understood thanks to their contexts. Estimates range from 450 to 1000 new words added to French in this way, and it seems that most of these neologisms have survived. True, the structure of many sentences remained that of Latin periods, but these sentences capture the correct meaning.12 Oresme made an index of what he called the “fors mos de Politique qui ne sont pas en commun parler.”13 I find it particularly intriguing that he would consider his new words, moving from Latin into French, to be somehow stronger than well-known words. All this was for the “common good,” an Aristotelian tag! The word tyran had come into French long before. Oresme kept revising his translation, perhaps even as artists and calligraphers arrived on the scene and created magnificent folio copies of his work. Charles would decree that the high office of chancellor was to be elective, not appointive, a remarkable indication of the immediate  Babbit, 9.  Babbit, 9. 12  Babbit, 10. 13  Babbit, 10. 10 11

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consequences of Oresme’s translation. Did Charles conclude, after reading the Politics, that he had too much power and was bordering on tyranny? All the power in the hands of one, was, of course, tyranny, not kingship. He had his royal councilors, and he of course had great powers and wealth in the church, so there would seem to be little risk of his becoming tyrannical. The illustration (or illumination) brings us back to the one, the few, and the many. Claire Richter Sherman’s analysis of them reveals quite a profound interpretation-depiction of the Politics. One wonders whether Oresme played a role in configuring the illustrations. The illustrations of tyranny in the great illustrated manuscripts of Oresme’s translation of the Politics depict a king in the center. He is labeled: “Tyrant.” To his right, someone is being beheaded; someone else is having his breast pierced by hot pinchers. An assistant wields a bellows to intensify the heat of the fire. The tyrant bears a sword, and a bag of money is slung over his arm. The principal artist was Jean de Sy.14 In addition to commentaries on his texts, Oresme wrote what he calls “instructions.” In one, he captures Aristotle’s distinction between kingship and a non-royal individual who wielded powers and ruled in pursuit of the common good. Community belongs to those who live in it, not to the king; and any attempt to take everything or to tax excessively is tyrannical. Furthermore, “that the taking of profit from alteration of the coinage injures the whole royal succession.”15 The alteration of the coinage must be in the interest of all who live in the kingdom, not at all like the natural increase from harvesting grain. And making a profit from altering the coinage is an “unnatural act,” an injustice. As we shall soon discover, it will not be the works in the mirror-of-­ princes genre that contain the most detailed and profound commentary on tyranny. Oresme, in his treatise De Moneta, frequently employs the term “tyranny” to describe political actions, a shift or an extension from the person as tyrant to actions that are tyrannical, be they, or be they not ordered by a tyrant. After beginning with the “difference between

14  C.R.  Sherman, Imaging Aristotle: Verbal and Visual Representation in FourteenthCentury France (Berkeley, 1995), especially fig. 47. 15  Nicole Oresme, De Moneta (On Money), trans. C. Johnson (London, 2009), para. 165.

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kingship and tyranny, is that a tyrant loves and pursues his own good rather than the common advantage of his subjects.”16 For Oresme, the money circulating in a kingdom is like grain sown in a field: as Ovid says, both are part of Nature. Indeed, (referring to Aristotle), he asserts that tyranny does not last long, because it is “unnatural”17—an Aristotelian tag.18

The Recovery of Xenophon Xenophon’s Hiero was first published in 1516 by the Giunti family of Florence.

The Recovery of Plato The reception or recovery of Platonic texts took place largely in Florence, under the aegis of the Medicis. Greeks, some of them learned and some of them not, were recruited to teach whatever Greek they knew. A particularly bright and sensitive eighteen-year-old named Marcilio Ficino received support and favor as he tackled a translation of Plato into Latin. He completed this task in 1477, and various parts of the work were printed before 1500. As early as 1494, the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius published his first work with Greek characters. Erasmus worked for some time in Aldus’s atelier between 1506 and 1509. Easy to read, aesthetically elegant, and monumental in size, Aristotle’s works appeared between 1495 and 1498. Then in 1513, the works of Plato were published in two folio volumes of 502 and 439 pages.19 They were dedicated to Pope Leon X.20 The sorting-­ out of the Platonic from the neo-Platonic texts does not concern us here.21 16  Oresme, De Moneta, 133; J.  Parsons, Making Money in Sixteenth-Century France (Ithaca, 2014), 117; see chap. 3 for an overview of the development of monetary theory. 17  Oresme, De Moneta, para. 127. 18  Aristotle, Politics, 1315b; Barker, 250. 19  See the classic accounts by J.A. Symonds, Renaissance in Italy, the Revival of Learning (New York, 1888), 324 pp. In 1911, Symonds found the Ficino translation to be still the best! Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed. (New York, 1910) “Ficino.” I have not consulted E. Garin, “Ricerche sulla traduzioni di Platone nella prima meta del sec. XV,” in Medioevo e Rinasciamento: Studi in onore di Bruno Nardi (Florence, 1955), I, 339–374. 20  Symonds, 379. 21  See the remarkable studies and bibliographies of P.O. Kristeller; and see, for a brief and authoritative illustrated synthesis of Aldus’s great achievement H.J. Martin, La Naissance du livre moderne (Paris, 2000), 301–306.

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The number of specific references to Plato’s works varies among our authors of the five mirrors of princes. Seyssel has none in his Grand’ Monarchie de France, nor does Machiavelli in the Prince or Budé in his Institution; but Budé’s editor finds Platonic resonances when it comes to Budé’s concept of absolutism.22 The very close intellectual relations between More and Erasmus centered at least in part on their interest in Plato. Erasmus cites him several times in his Education of the Christian Prince, while the author of the Republic is present even in the framing by the author of Utopia.

Christine de Pizan Before leaving Charles V’s learned circle, we must mention the most brilliant and truly literary writer of all: Christine de Pizan (1364–c1430), poet, writer of romances, and moral and political philosopher. Born in Venice but raised in Paris, Christine took up, or, to be more accurate, created, what can only be called the role of the woman professional writer. Left with two children after her husband’s death, and having access to courtly circles, she wrote several very well-received works that were copied out in magnificent folio-sized manuscripts,23 for which she received gratifications.24 The Book of the Body Politic (1404–1407) presents an organic society not unlike John of Salisbury’s, with a king (head) who rules for the welfare of all and who is divinely sanctioned. Is the body politic endowed with the duty to act to eliminate the tyrant, as in John of Salisbury? Only specialists in Christine’s entire oeuvre can answer this question. There are many Aristotelian resonances: for example, tyrannies are of short duration. But there is also originality, an important example being God’s punishment of tyrants while they are still in power. The tyrant will have “bitter ailments of the inner parts” of his body 22  C. Bontems, L.-P. Raybaud, and J.-P. Brancourt, Le Prince dans la France des XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Paris, 1968), 21. Perhaps, but the fact that Budé is so precise in his references to his many ancient sources, but does not refer to Plato, makes it doubtful that he had read Plato. It is amusing to note that after stating “For a thousand years the Republic had no history: for a thousand years it simply disappeared,” E. Barker, Greek Political Theory (London, 1919), 445, finds many resonances in both Roman and Medieval thought. 23  S.H.  Rigby, “The Body Politic in the Social and Political Thought of Christine de Pizan,” Journal of Medieval and Humanistic Studies, Open Edition, 2013, on line 27–30. 24  For an illustration of Christine writing one of her illuminated works, see Creating French Culture, Treasures from the Bibliothèque Nationale, P. Gifford, ed., no. 30.

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and “stinking worm-filled sores.”25 Cruel and unjust, tyrants inflict punishment on themselves. Christine deplores the deposition of King Richard II of England. It is the subjects’ love for their king that makes him stronger than any fortress he might build.26 In Christina’s work there is an astute observer of the political, and this might well be the case, because she was living through a period of wars between England and France, and at a time of popular uprisings in France (the revolt of the Cabochiens).

Mirrors of Princes Writing about Erasmus’s Education of a Christian Prince, J.H.  Hexter remarked that it is a “work whose literary flair alone distinguishes it from the wretched and dreary norm of the species, De Regimine principum, of which it is a member.”27 Written for the education of princes (less frequently for princesses), Fürstenspiegels have many characteristics in common, notably a discussion of childhood health, a review of morals, and, sometimes, historical examples. Their authors draw on the collective wisdom that is found in commonplaces, not on original thought, though in later centuries there are counsels about the natural sciences, mathematics, and governance.28 An answer to Hexter’s critique is that, like many other types of texts, reading the mirrors of princes requires special techniques. Francis Goyet’s introduction to his Sublime du “lieu commun” (Paris, 1996) is highly recommended. Put briefly, the more one knows about commonplaces, the more interesting they are to read. What is not included in a list of virtues or arguments can be as revealing as the commonplaces that are carefully  There is a statue of a richly dressed male on the façade of Strasbourg cathedral: his back is covered with vermin and what appear to be toads. 26  Rigby, 16. Rigby (p. 31) “may have” found a shift toward accepting tyrannicide, but only after repeating (Livre de paix) her very categorical statements about obedience. 27  J.H. Hexter, More’s Utopia (Princeton, 1952), 103. Among the classics on the genre are D.M. Bell, L’idéal éthique de la royauté en France au moyen âge (Geneva, 1961); P. Saenger, “The Education of Burgundian Princes, 1435–1490,”: Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1972; J. Krynen, Idéal du prince et pouvoir royal en France à la fin du Moyen Âge, 1380–1440 (Paris, 1981); Les princes et l’histoire du XIVe au XVIIIe siècle, ed. by C. Grell, W. Paravicini, and J. Voss (Bonn, 1998); W. Berges, Die Fürstenspiegel des hohen und späten Mittelalten, Monumenta Germaniæ, II (Leipzig, 1938), 66–71. For an overview of the high politics of Europe, J.D. Tracy, Emperor Charles V, Impresario of War (Cambridge, UK, 2002). 28  I. Flandrois, L’Institution du prince (Paris, 1992). 25

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selected and contextualized by the author. Noting absences and presences within the text, and outside it, can be a particularly rewarding experience for the cultural historian. Typically written just prior to setting up the household of an infant prince, the mirrors often are a bid for appointment as tutor to the prince, an appointment usually made by the infant’s governor with some consulting of the royal parents. The mirrors are often written out with extreme care on parchment or illuminated pages. On one of the first pages there often is a portrait of the author, kneeling before the king, who is seated in majesty, that is, under a canopy. Many of these presentation copies have survived; it will be noted where the presentation copies pointed out here are to be found. A second harvest of mirrors of princes usually appeared about the time of the prince’s majority, a time when his reign might begin. The authors also kept their eyes on others in the immediate household, for example the confessor, the physician, and the fencing instructor, any of whom might have a say in the prince’s education and therefore might blackball a candidate for the office of tutor. Being appointed to a princely household provided an opportunity to benefit from intimacy, or at least from what appeared to be intimacy with the prince, and, it was to be hoped, with the councilors who determined policy. After all, prior to serving (and influencing) the tyrant Dionysius of Sicily, and being on intimate terms with him, Plato was disgraced. Aristotle tutored Alexander. Seneca had held a similar office (service) at Nero’s court. The key word is “service,” not “servitude,” that is, the descent into slavery. A native of Savoy, Seyssel enjoyed high rank, first in the state as the high administrative officer in a conquered country, Milan, and later as a bishop. He lost none of his connections at the court of Francis I, with its numerous Savoyards. Budé’s frame of mind was that of a Parisian parlementaire. His interest in scholarship did not impede him from conveying a certain elite presence as a scholar who was charged with the task of keeping the royal library in order and secure. Were borrowers of high rank already a threat to the collection? Yes. They could borrow at will and not return books or manuscripts. Budé pressed hard for the founding of a new school centered on the teaching of ancient languages. It would become the Collège de France. Erasmus accepted an appointment as councilor to the future Charles I of Spain, later elected Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. Charles was merely duke of Burgundy; but the post was more honorable (and

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somewhat more remunerative) than powerful. Never possessing much money, he would accept a teaching post for a while, and then would travel onward. Henry VIII first pressed Thomas More to accept a minor royal office, which More eventually did; and rather shortly afterward the king appointed him chancellor, a very high-ranking post with real power, not only over policy but over the royal administration in general. Henry’s separation from the Roman Catholic Church, and the rise of the indelicate Thomas Cromwell, would bring about More’s trial and execution for treason. More’s life might have turned out otherwise, as a tutor to a royal child for a considerable period of time, if he had been a mere tutor to a royal child. Machiavelli’s career as a diplomat and administrator for the Florentine government did not continue, owing to clashes between a young city republic, which Machiavelli supported, and the returning Medicis, who forced him into disgrace. He first thought of dedicating the Prince (the real title is On Principalities) to Guiliano, the Medici prince who died, and whose demise caused Machiavelli to appeal for intimacy and influence with Lorenzo de Medici, not the great Lorenzo but a minor one who died in 1519 and who, during the life of Pope Leo X (d. 1521), never controlled the vast Medici networks of “friends” and relations.

Forms of Government Depicted in Siena While the more direct of the immediate sources seem obscure, there is an arresting depiction of tyranny on the walls of the Sala dei Nove in the town hall of Siena. It dates from 1338–1340. Seated in majesty, Nimrod (?) holds a mysterious mace. Horns protrude from the tyrant’s cowl; and Tyranny has long canine teeth. Tyranny’s eyes, if not crossed, are not well focused. He holds a sheep with a scorpion’s tail. At his feet is a black, long-­ horned animal who looks up at him. His attendants depict armor-making (for war), assault, murder, cruelty, treason, fraud, furor, division. Erasmus provides a word-picture of a monster in his Education of the Christian Prince, which will be compared with the Siena painting later.29 29  R. Starn and L. Partridge, Arts of Power, Three Halls of State in Italy (Berkeley, 1992), 11–80. Without dipping into the stormy waters of interpretation that have developed about the forms of government depicted in these paintings by Lorenzetti, it is interesting to note that only the forms of government that might depict political powers in Siena at the time: polity and tyranny. Aristocracy is not depicted, except as part of polity?

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A reading of Machiavelli’s Prince, Claude de Seyssel’s Grand’ Monarchie de France, Budé’s Institut du Prince, and Thomas More’s Utopia will be our first general aim. Of this group, Machiavelli is the only one who could not read ancient Greek. Thus it would be possible, with great effort, to analyze errors of transcription, ancient and contemporary, and to determine just which manuscript stem or which early printed editions of Plato and Aristotle each man read. However, to do so exceeds the time that remains for this elderly scholar. With the arrival of printing, just what was included in editions titled “opera omnia”? With tongue in cheek, Sir Ernest Barker proposed that the Aristotelian legacy could be summed up in one word: “Constitutionalism.” This is followed by an assertion that “Aristotle taught St. Thomas: through St. Thomas he also taught Richard Hooker…”30

Ser Brunetto is cited as centering on the three forms of government derived from Aristotle: monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic. The last of these is translated from the Italian: le commune. Lorenzetti’s depiction of good government would seem to be representing polity, not democracy; Lorenzetti therefore had a source other than Brunetto. For monarchy, Lorenzetti depicts an emperor with aristocracy (knights) and pike-men on the left, and a handful of worthies who are identifiable portraits. To the right he portrayed the city-dwellers or people, including some clergy. This is a visualization of a “mixed constitution.” Research into the political crisis at Siena in the fourteenth century ought to permit a specialist to propose a sound historical interpretation of these paintings—unless it has already been done by N.  Rubenstein, Q.  Skinner, et  al. See Starn and Partridge, Arts of Power, 313; and E. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton, 1957), 112–14. A tyrant may be executed by an emperor. 30  Barker, ed., lxii. While the theme of what tyrants do is in many films, I shall mention only two: Keeper of the Flame, 1942, directed by George Cukor, and Orchestra Rehearsal (Prova d’orchestra), 1979, directed by Federico Fellini.

CHAPTER 11

Machiavelli on Tyranny in the Prince and the Discourses

Abstract  Machiavelli on tyranny in the Prince and the Discourses. The prince in the Prince is the new prince who seeks power. In the literature about tyranny, the new prince is often referred to as a usurper. The new prince may employ tyrannical techniques to gain power. If he seeks to remain in power, he must adapt to govern in some conformity with his subjects (people). In the Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy, Machiavelli presents the principal characteristics of tyrannical conduct and deplores them. Keywords  Machiavelli on tyranny • Livy • Usurpation • New prince and tyranny • Traits of a tyrant Niccolò Machiavelli’s mirror-of-princes book, titled On Principalities but better known as the Prince,1 is also what is typically described as a “how-­to” book, a genre that first came into its own in the sixteenth century and that still flourishes. All the arts, from architecture to 1  Machiavelli, Prince, tr. P.  Sonnino (Atlantic Highlands, 1996); Discourses, tr. C.E.  Detmaold (New York, 1940). Particularly useful works for this project have been: F. Gilbert, “The Humanist Concept of the Prince and the ‘Prince’ of Machiavelli,” Journal of Modern History 11 (1939), 449–83; F. Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini (Princeton, 1965); Q. Skinner, Machiavelli (Oxford, 1981); J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, 1975); P. Stacey, Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince (Cambridge, UK, 2007); S. de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell (Princeton, 1989).

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cooking, clock-making, or medicine—often emphasizing information and formulas that are deemed secret—appeared in many, little books, usually cheap ones. The tone of these works is usually optimistic and engaging. Readers are encouraged to try the art that is being described, and they often find wild assurances of success. In the Prince, the titles of Machiavelli’s chapters take on the characteristics of a how-to book; they are inspiring, clear, and immediately comprehensible. The emphasis is on technique, not philosophical understanding. For example, how do you go about usurping power in your city or state? Addressing the new prince, Machiavelli includes a quite large segment of the elite, wealthier Italian males, some of whom are already princes by rank; but he also includes many other would-­ be princes. What strategies—they are described in a paradigmatic verbal, almost spatial scheme—are successful? Which ones fail? Often commonplace, the principles are supported by argument and by historical fact in the form of examples. As Machiavelli moves along, chapters become less grounded in technique and historical examples, and more grounded in moral-philosophical obiter dicta. The overarching theme is the pursuit of success, the rise to absolute power by any means necessary. Machiavelli’s Prince and his Discourses will be our only sources for this outline of the Florentine’s thinking about tyranny. There are many reasons to read the two works separately,2 but there is a major reason to interpret them together: the remarkable presence or absence of our key term, “tyrant,” which is found in one of the texts but not in the other. Indeed, Peter Stacey has noted that “tyrant” does not appear in the Prince, but that it is frequently present in the Discourses.3 In other words, only the specific contexts establish and differentiate the new prince in the Prince from the prince in the Discourses. The new (would-be) prince seeks absolute power over a city or a population, by whatever means are necessary. That is, and I repeat, absolute power by absolute means; but the prince in the Discourses, that is, the prince who already wields absolute power, may have to use absolute means to keep it. The individualist, social, political, and cultural aspects, join with fortuna to determine success or failure. 2  For a recent learned discussion of the relation (and non-relation) of the two works, C. Celenza, Machiavelli (Cambridge, 2015), 65–133. 3  Stacey, Roman Monarchy, 272.

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In the would-be tyrant—the new prince in the Prince—is Machiavelli’s primary focus. If the new prince has a higher aim than exercising absolute power, and if he believes he has absolute power and fortuna, it is Machiavelli’s passionate hope that a new prince—tyrant—will come forth, somehow, somewhere, to unite Italy under his absolute power (which becomes authority by conquest). The new prince, by reason of his success, becomes the legitimate prince. He might then be able to join the great founders of new states and cities in Machiavelli’s non-globalized world view: Moses (with divine help), Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus. Each led his citizen-subjects for the common good, and in that highly principled accounting, the prince is no longer a tyrant. A remarkable clue that confirms these characterizations can be found in what Machiavelli says about Nabis,4 prince of Sparta, a tyrant discussed in the Discourses, and what he says about a new prince who figures in the Prince. We cannot know whether Machiavelli wrote this as a sort of clue to elucidating the specific meaning of the words “tyrant” and “new prince.” There are historians who argue that Machiavelli is not particularly precise in his use of concepts.5 My view is that he wrote what he meant. But what are the would-be tyrant’s actions? First, the new prince must analyze the social and political-cultural conditions in the city (state) that he wishes to dominate. The implication is that the new prince should be a part of the entity that he seeks to rule. Thus there would be familiarity with the leading families and their past political-cultural action. Perhaps he is already part of a faction by reason of his own family’s traditions, as public actors. Specific techniques are required to usurp power in a monarchy, an aristocracy, a republic (popular, democratic).6 If the population of a republic is in opposition to its government, it may, by election, choose a citizen and endow him with power, because there is public agreement that he is the wisest and the most just of all the citizens in the city (or country), not the strongest or bravest. As long as he governs for the common good, especially if he has created a new militia and commands it, and has made a new set of friends, he will be successful. If he starts to govern in his own  Machiavelli, Prince, intro., 18, chap. IX; and Discourses, III, chap. 6.  See the review of this question by F. Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, 326–30. 6  Machiavelli, Discourses, I, chap. 2. 4 5

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i­nterests, the population will oppose him and exile or murder him, as a tyrant.7 He may be wealthy, may have grandeur of soul and courage; but the despot-­tyrant (in effect, a prince who is elected) cannot survive in the climate of discord, fear, and repression that might be unleashed if he governs for his own benefit. In the Discourses, Machiavelli presents the forms of government far more completely and mechanistically than in the Prince; but when he discusses stability in political cultures, he has a way of associating specific political dynamics about each that are categorical or formulaic. While hereditary monarchy is characteristically the most stable, and therefore is a good above all others, later on it becomes evident that Machiavelli considers the population ruled by a king to be living in servitude.8 While the power of the elected despot-tyrant may be effectively legitimate, it is probable that his children will not grow up to be upright citizens. For a time, the government established as an aristocracy respects landed society, but it eventually descends into oligarchy, a government by a few nobles who are the wealthiest in the city-country and who govern in their own interest, or are perhaps governed by a single wealthy oligarch who is favored by fortuna. In short, a new person has become a prince. We need not present the entire scheme of the forms of government to realize that in Machiavelli the new prince has a remarkable range of government, in which and through which he may usurp power. Governing in the interest of the whole is different from the way an oligarchical prince controls the creation of honors. These honors must conform to the customs, laws, and religion of the city-state. Machiavelli emphasizes the possible short duration of most governments in city-states. Ancient Rome and modern Venice are the exceptions: not only do they assimilate peoples, they expand by creating colonies, they create good laws and institutions, and their nobles have ceased being arrogant.9 The Tarquins were driven out and, by electing consuls, the Senate provided for the creation of a government with strong executive power. The Senate itself consisted of nobles and popular individuals who came together as a “mixed

 Machiavelli, Discourses, I, chap. 2.  Stacey, Roman Monarchy, 296ff, notes the elaboration of the definition. 9  Machiavelli, Discourses, I, chap. 3, referring to Rome; but would this not be the case for the Venetian nobility? 7 8

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constitution,” the source of stability. Faced with popular opposition, Caesar would simply usurp power.10 In Athens, the popular government founded by Solon did not survive Pisistratus’s tyranny; indeed, it would end before Solon’s death. The Athenians regained the liberties they had lost thirty years earlier. Two historical examples will be presented at this point, to strengthen the personal image of the new prince. The first example is Appius, who became popular because of his manners: he changed from being a “cruel persecutor of the people” to being someone who has assumed a “new nature and spirit.” Having favored changing the law, so that it would be more favorable to the people, Appius put himself forward in order to procure one of the new honors of recent creation. Appius became so “urbane” that some people in the government became suspicious of him, “for they could not possibly believe that there could be such a spontaneous affability … with so much arrogance and pride.”11 It was not long before Appius dropped “… his assumed character and began to display his natural arrogance.”12 His popular supporters turned away from him. Indeed, they sensed that he was their enemy. His downfall occurred soon after that. Machiavelli relies on his readers to sense deeply that it is the egalitarian dynamic in a popularly governed city that caught up Appius. Machiavelli had met Cesare Borgia (and counseled him?). According to Machiavelli, this new prince, a would-be tyrant, employed all the proper techniques for carving out a state that he could govern as a prince. Protected by his father, Pope Alexander VI, the prince combined seduction, diplomacy, and military repression. Support from a French army boded well for success. The petty lords of the Romagna, with their ties to the Orsini and the Colonna families, were toppled, defeated, or killed. Borgia introduced “improved government” conforming somewhat to the advice about how to rule a captured people; but fortuna abandoned him when his father died and the French troops withdrew. Machiavelli admired Borgia, perhaps more for what he tried to do at the last fatal moment than for his early conquest. As the debacle became obvious, Borgia:

 Machiavelli, Discourses, I, chap. 2.  Machiavelli, Discourses, I, chap. 39. 12  Machiavelli, Discourses, I, chap. 39. 10 11

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• destroyed everyone who was of the same blood as the previous governing families; • acquired new friends among the Roman nobles; • obtained as much influence as he could in the College of Cardinals; and • raced to acquire as much power as possible before the demise of his father the pope. Machiavelli adds that Borgia had almost carried out the first three objectives, mainly by murdering as many petty lords as he could. There is nothing ironic about the Borgia historical example. However, dramatic changes in manners can be acceptable for only so long. The would-be new prince-tyrant may have had trouble maintaining his new persona, as he gained power; but the people had not forgotten the old Appius. The austere public life-style of Cosimo de Medici comes to mind. As is quite frequently the case, the inferences that Machiavelli wants his readers to make are in the title of the chapter that follows: “It is imprudent and unprofitable suddenly to change from humility to pride and from gentleness to cruelty.”13 Even with fortuna’s help, the new prince would have to call upon every possible technique in order to succeed at conquering and uniting all of Italy under his legitimate powers. In this mirror of princes that celebrates the political art as success, Machiavelli reverses himself and shows eagerness for a tutorial relationship with the new prince, the tyrant. In the Prince, and also in the Discourses, there is an emphasis on social and moral-civic conditions of which the Borgia example is the most extreme in its detail; but in fact, this great example, from the Prince, of the misfortunes that befell a new prince prefigures the fate of conspirators that are described in the Discourses. The same intensity of thought and action appears in a person who conspires as a result of a personal offense, such as an attack on personal dignity, on one’s wife, or on property that inspires the noble aim of restoring a non-tyrannical government by killing the tyrant.14 There are madmen who conspire and murder, but Machiavelli is not really interested in them. To be successful, the plotter ought to be of high social rank and should join with others to change a government, either  Machiavelli, Discourses, I, chap. 41.  Machiavelli, Discourses, I, chap. 2, the principal chapter where he presents the forms of government and the individual’s relation to each. 13 14

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individually or collectively. The individual (the favorite) who has received many gifts from the person or the persons in power is dangerous, because the more he receives, the more he wants, and he will conspire. In somewhat corrupt republics, a conspiracy may entail less physical violence, owing to the very conditions that prompt intrigues and conspiracies. Republics are slow to be aroused. The analytical construct that is the new prince is not brought up formally in Machiavelli’s study of conspiracies, yet some historical examples conform to the new prince’s tendency to be conspiratorial. And Machiavelli points out that simply emphasizing deceit and cunning may not suffice. Caesar, Agathocles, and Cleomenes had armies to strengthen their plotting. As the historical exemplarity diminishes in the Prince, moral-­ philosophical issues come to the fore. The argument of necessity becomes the answer to almost all the choices which Machiavelli frames as being between good and bad. Machiavelli casuistically defends how bad actions can produce good results, and vice versa, and he asserts that being feared is better than being loved, or being miserly is better than being generous, even though they are not specifically linked to tyranny. The association between fear and the presence of tyranny is often noted by Machiavelli,15 but he does not suggest an Orwellian public climate. Other strong emotions come into play in conspiracies.16 In the mind of the bad ruler, however, “they are in constant fear lest others conspire to inflict upon them the punishment which they are conscious of deserving.”17 Rare it is to find Machiavelli writing about something because someone whom he is reading writes about it. Unless, that is, he himself is interested. His creation and elaboration of the new prince, without referring to him as a tyrant, altered understandings about how his four forms of government evolve into tyranny. In the Prince, he strove to encourage and to instruct an intensely individualized form of political action.

 Machiavelli, Discourses, I, chap. 33.  Machiavelli, Discourses, III, chap. 6. 17  Machiavelli, Discourses, III, chap. 6. 15 16

CHAPTER 12

Seyssel on Tyranny in the Monarchy of France

Abstract  Seyssel on tyranny. While French kings may have absolute power, it is in fact restrained by the powers of religion, good laws (justice), and polity, that is, Aristotle’s notion of “mixed government,” or shared powers in all three forms of government. The tyrant or “bad prince” is dull, witless, and corruptly depraved. Keywords  Seyssel on tyranny • Forms of government, mixed • Traits of a tyrant The illegitimate son of an ancient Savoyard family, Claude de Seyssel was born in about 1450. In mid-career as an administrator, ambassador, advisor to the dukes of Savoy, and to several French monarchs as well, circa 1515, he left his office in the Paris Parlement1 to assume his duties as bishop of Marseille. This career change coincided more or less with the accession to the French throne of Francis I, above all. Indeed, it was during these years that Seyssel wrote the Grand’ Monarchie de France.2 1  Seyssel wrote several louanges addressed to Louis XII. They are interesting because he senses that he is living in a “new age.” In 1504 he presented his translation of Xenophon’s Cyropedia as a work of advice literature. C. Brucker, Traduction et adaptation en France à la fin du Money Âge (Paris, 1997). 2  Seyssel, la Grand’ Monarchie de France, ed. J.  Poujol (Paris, 1961), 56. See the superb translation by J.H.  Hexter and D.R.  Kelley (New Haven, 1980). J.H.  Hexter, The Vision of Politics on the Eve of the Reformation (New York, 1973); and R.A. Boone,

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Francis was no longer a youth; he no longer needed a tutor. Thus Seyssel’s aim was to instruct the prince at a non-memorizing level. His main themes are the institutional powers of the monarchy, and the dangers of waging war and administering conquered territories. The latter subject was of great importance for Seyssel, who formerly had been the viceroy of the Milanese territories that had repeatedly been conquered, lost, and re-­ conquered under Charles VIII and Louis XII. Seyssel’s religious faith and his perception of the need for reform in the church carried him more toward religious reformism, rather than toward continued political action; but he continued to translate and to comment on ancient texts, particularly religious ones. The first edition of the Grand’ Monarchie de France3 appeared in 1519, a truly ground-breaking text. Seyssel died in 1520. How is a bad prince described? “Hébété et despravé”: those are Seyssel’s words. Hébété can be translated as “slow-witted,” “dull,” “witless.” Despravé means “corrupt, depraved, vitiated.”4 Did Seyssel add the term frein, “bit and bridle,” to the Western European political vocabulary? Freins are used to keep horses disciplined (they were not brakes), so by extension a frein both directed and regulated royal governing. These freins are: (1) religious faith and the rules by which Christian rulers must, or ought to, live; (2) justice, royal in its source as incarnated in laws, in courts, and in the persons in royal service who carry out kingly decisions; (3) police, that is, the rules and regulations that are accepted at every level of French society, that is, the established practices that are carried out by royal officials, high and low.5 The dangers to the French Monarchy, says Seyssel, come more from the ambitious, that is, the despravé, than from rulers who are imbeciles or who are minors. He believes that French kings have la puissance absolue, War, Domination, and the Monarchy of France: Claude de Seyssel and the Language of Politics (Leiden, 2007), should not be overlooked. 3  All references here are to the Poujol edition. Poujol and Ranum became lifelong friends in 1961, while teaching at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Only after his retirement as a civil servant did he mention his role in the Resistance and his Cévenol Huguenot heritage. 4  For despravé, Poujol observes that it is about the prince “qui brise ses entraves, outrepasse les limites rationelles de son pouvoir, concept emménement politique.” 5  Seyssel, La Monarchie, 122.

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“absolute power”; but it is the freins, the “bit and bridle,” that keep him from acting absolutely. As the following quotation suggests, for Seyssel a chef, a “head,” is synonymous with “monarch.” This quotation is surprisingly silent about thaumaturgy and other sacred aspects of French kingship, which in principle set the monarch apart from everyone else who wields power. Note the order in which these freins are listed; and note that one is “religion,” not the “church.” There is a sense that politics is a dynamic situation that has no end in the Aristotelian sense, other than that the well-­being of the monarchy is involved: Thus, with respect to the disorders which may result from the imperfections of monarchs,6 there are several remedies to check their absolute authority if they are unrestrained and willful, and more still to check those who have the custody of the realm if the monarch is entirely incapacitated by youth or otherwise. Yet the royal dignity and authority remains always entire, not totally absolute nor yet too much restrained, but regulated and bridled by good laws, ordonnances, and customs established in such a way that they can scarcely be broken or reduced to nothing, even though in some times and places some violence is done in them. Of these bridles by which the absolute power of the king of France is regulated I deem that there are three main ones. The first is religion, the second justice, the third the polity.7

There is an atmosphere of serenity, confidence, and openness, without fear or headiness resulting from the psychological effects of power—an anachronistic remark, yet an interesting one because it confirms the vaunted sense of stability that Machiavelli attributes to the French Monarchy. There are no references to Syracusan tyranny, or to tyranny as a form of government. But if we think of the reader who would peruse Seyssel’s Monarchie later in the sixteenth century, his remark about kings, who will be hated if they are not religious,8 might strike readers in the reign of Henry III as prescient:

 The present translation into English is that of Hexter and Kelley, 51. Here, Hexter and Kelley merges Seyssel’s “chefs et monarques” (“chiefs and monarchs”) into “monarchs.” 7  Seyssel, La Monarchie, 115. 8  Seyssel, La Monarchie, 116. 6

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Now, if the king lives according to the law and the Christian religion, he cannot do anything tyrannical.9

The implication is that tyranny is a political state or condition that has skewed the dynamics established by the freins. Still, in general Seyssel’s project may be thought of as responding, perhaps not even consciously, to increased powers wielded by kings, and to the rising tide of absolutist theory. For Seyssel, France was very far from having a tyrant in power; but by noting the importance of religion for her kings, he implies that he would agree with Plato, who asserted that corrupt or perverse monarchies end in tyrannies and democracies.

9

 Seyssel, La Monarchie, 116.

CHAPTER 13

Guillaume Budé on Tyranny in the Education of the Prince

Abstract  Budé on tyranny in the Institution du Prince. Humanist readings of Plutarch, Quintus Curtius, Cicero, and Lucan yield a patchwork of observations about government and the moral conduct of persons in power. He is critical of Alexander the Great, with the exception of his conquests; and he is negative about Dionysius I of Syracuse. He grasps Caesar’s shift in Rome from a republic to a principate, and notes that Sulla finally gave up his dictatorial powers, thereby creating an implicit parallel between Caesar murdered and Sulla in retirement. Keywords  Budé on tyranny • Alexander the Great • Dionysius I of Syracuse • Caesar • Traits of a tyrant Written between 1515 and 1522, the Institution du Prince1 by Guillaume Budé (1467–1540) embodies many of the characteristics of the mirror-of-­princes genre. Yet it has interesting and unique features,

 Guillaume Budé, L’Institution du Prince, in Le Prince dans la France des XVIe and XVIIe siècles, C. Bontems, L.-P. Raybaud, and J.-P. Brancourt, eds. (Paris, 1965), 143, henceforth called “Budé, Institution.” See also M. Foisil, “Guillaume Budé,” in R. Mousnier, ed., Le Conseil du roi (Paris, 1970), 277–92; and D.O. McNeil, Guillaume Budé (Geneva, 1975). The presentation copy has a double image showing Budé writing, sustained by Mercury and Philology. The second image shows Budé presenting his book to the king. Creating French Culture, ed. P. Gifford (Paris and New Haven, 1995), 191. 1

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the most important of which is a quite extensive knowledge of the ancient Roman constitution. The genre usually contains more moral philosophy than biographical exemplary history; but the “flowers” with which Budé filled his work in hopes of pleasing Francis I, include quite extensive summaries drawn from several ancient sources. Plutarch’s Lives provides a sense of dramatic excitement and personal engagement in Budé’s reading. Although a jurist by family background and training, Budé makes a case for taking rhetoric, literature, and eloquence seriously. His special interest is numismatics: not the aesthetic aspects of coins but their monetary value and how those values might compare with the coins of his day. He remarks that his book De Asse is not yet finished. In the money of Budé’s time Virgil’s pension, in sesterces, would amount to 250,000 écus,2 certainly an error in calculation. While he mentions tyrants, one of his primary interests is the career of Dionysius I of Syracuse, a usurper who became king “by force” and who remained violent and arbitrary, even though he had learned and eloquent men at his court.3 Budé does not give his source at this point, as he usually does throughout the Institution. There are quite long portraits of Pompey and Cato, derived from Lucan; but there is scant concern for chronology or thematic structure. Budé turns to Alexander the Great, whom he depicts as surrounded by mignons (“favorites”) and compagnons (“companions”) who lead voluptuous lives. From time to time Budé peppers his text with Greek words. Take, for example, “dyonisiocolaces,” that is, the adulators of the Sicilian tyrant, Dionysius I. This name served as a model for the name being given to Alexander’s mignons and companions: “alexandrocolaces.” This reminds Budé of Syracuse, for the Dionysian tyrant too had his adulators, that is, the quality of divinity. Merely by mentioning Alexander’s ire furieuse (his “furious wrath”), and by alluding to his habits of sleeping more than the others, and of overeating and then fasting, Budé deplores the great man’s conduct. He also tells of the violent end of Cleitus (or Clitus) the Black, one of the “grand captains” whom Alexander kills, before “killing himself” with the same lance. Budé recounts this without even wondering (at least not in written form) whether 2 3

 Budé, Institution, 87.  Budé, Institution, 102.

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these events ought to be narrated to a young prince. After this negative exemplarity, Budé quotes Quintus Curtius on how great a conqueror Alexander was—as if, for him, this highly moral value of conquest transcended all the negative remarks about him. Budé then adds that Alexander “put great emphasis on receiving praise and glory in good earnest, is to say, true glory, without mockery and vain show.”4 Although conquest expunged Alexander’s vices, Budé does not simply drop the subject. He moves on to Pompey’s “glory … in a serenity of fame that was not clouded by shame and reproach.”5 Apparently none of the things that Alexander was said to have done brought the word “tyrant” to Budé’s mind. As Budé neared the conclusion, he once more brought up Syracuse. Dionysius I became king “by force, not by uprightness and the good will of his subjects.” There is a strong sense that procedures and customs were being violated, for droiture, “uprightness,” denotes a feeling of things being right. Usurpation does not convey legitimacy like the transmission of power from a father to a son (or a daughter) does. Budé then focuses on the young Dionysius, sometimes called the “second” Dionysius. He has raped a girl from a “good house.” The father reprimands the son, who asserts that he is the son of a king, but when the father was young, he was nothing but a private person, with no principality, and no lordship. The father replies that this may be true, but “if you do not punish yourself for such outrageous conduct, your children will be neither kings nor tyrants.”6 This idea that the consequences of evil actions will fall upon a tyrant’s children is found in Plato, and very probably in numerous other antique texts about tyranny. As mentioned earlier, thanks to his reading of Cicero, Lucan, Plutarch, and Pliny, Budé developed quite an impressive understanding of the Roman constitution. Here are two illustrations. Julius Caesar “changed the government of Rome into a monarchy.”7 Budé narrates several consular actions and notes that while a dictator’s powers were supposed to last for only six months, Sulla held that office for 120 [sic] years.8  Budé, Institution, 131.  Budé, Institution, 130. 6  Budé, Institution, 135. Despite Plato’s advice, the son continued to govern as his tyrannical father had. The Syracusans rose up and expelled him from their city. 7  Budé, Institution, 110. 8  Budé Institution, 121–22. Budé’s chronology amazes: Sulla was dictator from late 82 BC to late 79 BC, roughly three years. 4 5

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Relying on Plutarch and Appian for his account of Sulla, Budé begins with Sulla’s military career. This fearless victor “pillaged and destroyed a large number of the best houses in Rome.” And having been “either the author or the cause of so many murders of great personages, he became tired, displeased, and troubled by tyranny.” He gave up the dictatorship, fired the guards, and quit the life-style of a prince to make himself simply a Roman citizen and senator, to the astonishment of the Roman people. He loved to hunt, until he fell into a very miserable malady, as small vermin came out of his body. Placing himself under the protection of Rome, he was referred to as Sulla Felix, and was honorably buried in the Martian Fields.9

9

 Budé, Institution, 123.

CHAPTER 14

Erasmus on Tyranny in the Education of a Christian Prince

Abstract  Erasmus on tyranny in the Education of a Christian Prince. Writing advice for the future Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, Erasmus begins by characterizing the prince who governs in accord with Christian principles, especially avoiding war. Tyrants are monsters who lose their humanity. Erasmus remarks that a boy who displays bullying behavior must be given special attention to bring him around to gentle social conduct, lest he grow up to be a tyrant. Keywords  Erasmus on tyranny • Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor • Traits of a tyrant Erasmus was about forty-eight or forty-nine years old1 when, in distant Basel, he wrote The Education of a Prince for sixteen-year-old Charles Hapsburg, Prince and Duke of Burgundy, the soon-to-be Charles I of Spain and Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. Very familiar with elite court 1  The Education of a Christian Prince, trans. N. Cheshire and M. Heat (Toronto, 1974), vol. 27 of Erasmus, Collected Works, 199–288, reprinted by Cambridge University Press, 1997. I cite the latter edition because it is readily available as a paperback. There is also a very useful introduction by Lisa Jardine, but she does not situate the work in the context of Erasmus’s religious thought. The emphasis on Christian teachings enables Erasmus to propose what all Christians must believe and do is more so for the Christian prince. Apart from a rare mention of the clergy, there is no reference to the institutions of the Roman Catholic Church.

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life in Brussels, Paris (less so), and England,2 but probably uncomfortable with it (most of a courtier’s time was spent standing around), Erasmus had all the necessary connections for participating in the active life as a counselor, a counselor to a counselor, an ambassador, or a learned writer who supported whomever he accepted as a protector. Erasmus needed an income; but for him to be really satisfied, he had to hold a position with no duties to perform or no intense religious or political controversy around him. Nor did a university professorship prove to be to his liking, probably owing to the rules and regulations characteristic of faculty life. His writings made him a public figure for his learning and his strong anti-­ war opinions. In Basel, the printer-publisher Froben welcomed Erasmus’s help in editing not only Erasmus’s own work but also the current scholarly works of others. Everything seemed to be going well until, in 1520, the Protestants took over the city, making Erasmus very uncomfortable. He moved to nearby Catholic Freiburg, but some six years later he returned to Basel, where he spent the rest of his life, working mainly, or so it seems, on the education of children. The work on manners (don’t look behind you when you are sitting in church!) would have enormous influence throughout Western culture, and eventually around the world. Erasmus died on July 12, 1536, in Basel. Erasmus’s oeuvre is varied and immense. In Education he refers to himself as a theologian, which he certainly was; but in his In Praise of Folly alone, he brilliantly worked out new ideas and restated existing ideas about human nature in a non-theological framework, and individual life in society. His work as a textual critic fundamentally altered the comprehension of the New Testament. The Christian prince is good, because God is good. Throughout Education Erasmus contrasts the good prince and the tyrant. Since at least the days of Plato and Aristotle, there has been a binary inclination in writing about tyrants; but in Education the comparisons are often true opposites; and unlike Aristotle, Erasmus never finds a tyrant who ruled with the interests of the people as his policy. Erasmus does not try 2  For biography, C. Augustijn, Erasmus: His Life, Works and Influence, (Toronto, 1992); L.  Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters (Princeton, 1993); J.  D. Tracy, Erasmus, (Berkeley, 1996); J.  D. Tracy, The Politics of Erasmus (Toronto, 1978); and J.  D. Tracy, Emperor Charles V.

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to pull himself into an imagined Hapsburg mind. With power comes responsibility. Education is the most profoundly learned, psychologically astute, and extensive work on tyranny well down into the late eighteenth century. But was it the most read or the most influential one? Perhaps not. There often is a play or a disjuncture between truly remarkable thought and the works favored by readers. Erasmus’s emphasis on the religious foundations of moral politics probably did not endear him to Enlightenment thinkers, although, as Peter Gay argued, they are indebted to him.3 “If, as boys, they did nothing but play at tyrants, what (I ask you) are they to work as adults except tyranny?”4 Although Erasmus does not specify the ages of these boys, he adds: “even at this age, it is possible to recognize by certain signs whether he is more prone to arrogance and fits of temper, or to ambition and a thirst for fame, or to pleasures of the flesh, gambling, and the pursuit of wealth, or to revenge and war, or to impulsiveness and tyranny.”5 Throughout Education, the religiously upright prince is described in considerable detail, before the very detailed characterization of the tyrant. The tutor must not despair, should a child begin to show tyrannical behavior. Human powers over human nature are such that, through education as with wild and fierce animals, the violent and obstinate boy can be brought to act with the interests of his vassals, his subject, his people in mind. This is not to say, however, that a successful education should inculcate popular opinions. Were some readers already mature princes? Erasmus’s ethical standards of governance were not being followed by any of the rulers of the day, although they professed themselves to be Christian.6

 P. Gay, The Bridge of Criticism (New York, 1970).  Erasmus, Education, 9. 5  Erasmus, Education, 10. Here Erasmus stresses what the good prince is and does, using considerable material from Seneca; but he does not refer to the good prince as being in fact divine, as if he were a Roman princeps. P.  Stacey, Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince (Cambridge UK, 2007), 196–204. The extra leap to divinity would be taken by late League writers in France, W.F. Church, Constitutional Thought in Sixteenth-Century France (Cambridge US, 1941), 308–320. For Europe in general, E. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton, 1957), 42–86. 6  Erasmus, Education, 11. 3 4

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For Erasmus there was almost something divine about the truly Christian prince.7 It follows that “the evil plague of a prince presents the image of the devil, who combines great power with the greatest malevolence.”8 The tyrannical Roman emperors Nero, Caligula, and Heliogabalus serve as historical examples. Erasmus refers to them as plagues that might infect you, causing your death or making you stay in hell for eternity. The three attributes of God, that is, “total power, total wisdom, and total goodness,”9 are absent in the tyrant, who rules to suit himself and assesses everything by how it affects his own convenience. No case can be made for him. For Erasmus, Aristotle is not the only major critic of tyranny: he noted a few successful tyrants who governed in the interest of the people. Tyrants nonetheless undermine civic identities and raise taxes.10 Because Erasmus took the issue so seriously, we must always bear in mind that he was writing for someone who no longer was a child, but who was not yet a man, and that he was writing for a youth and his advisors and councilors. This helps us understand why he compares tyrants to dragons, wolves, vipers, bears, and a monster that is a composite of them all, a monster that devours human entrails and has hundreds of eyes. Since at least Plato and Herodotus, frightful monsters have been part of the canon of metaphors and analogies that are the essence of evil, and in this case, of tyranny. Erasmus concedes that it is virtually impossible to rid the world of such monsters, because they have the support of armed forces and wealth.11 Here are the features of the tyrant-monster that Erasmus calls to mind. They all merit being listed: • The monster is “the picture of a tyrant, unless something more hateful can be depicted.”12 • A tyrant’s aim is to follow whatever takes his fancy; a king’s, on the other hand, is to follow what is right and honorable.  Erasmus, Education, paraphrasing Plutarch.  Erasmus, Education, 22; but he does not accept so-called “Orientalist” ideas of kingship. 9  Erasmus, Education, 22. 10  Another list of historical tyrants is given. 11  Erasmus, Education, 27. M.-M. Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge MA, 1993). 12  Erasmus, Education, 27. C.G.  Dubois, L’Imaginaire de la Renaissance (Paris, 1985). This is Erasmus’s version of the Argus Panoptes, the monster with one hundred eyes. I owe this identification to J.G.A Pocock. See also A. Duc, “Persistance d’une figure; le monstre au XVIIe siècle,” XVIIe Siècle, 196 (1997), 549–65. 7 8

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• For a tyrant, reward is wealth; to a king, it is honor which follows from virtue.13 • A tyrant governs by fear, deceit, and evil cunning; a king through wisdom, integrity, and goodwill. • The tyrant wields his power for himself; the king for the state. • The tyrant guards his security with a group of foreign attendants and with hired brigands. • Those citizens who are distinguished for their moral quality, judgment, and prestige are held in suspicion and distrust by the tyrant. • The tyrant is pleased either with fools on whom he imposes or with wicked men whom he puts to evil use. • A tyrant acts in such a way as to get the wealth of his subjects into the hands of a few. • The tyrant brings it about that everyone is under his thumb. • The tyrant strives to be feared; the king to be loved. • The tyrant is suspicious of cooperation between good men and cities. • Tyrants are happy to stir up party conflicts. • When a tyrant sees that affairs of state are flourishing, he stirs up a war. • The tyrant either sets up laws, constitutions, edicts, treaties, and all things sacred and profane for his own personal protection or else he twists them to that end.14 In most of this work, Erasmus’s subject is the prince and his education; but in the above list of tyrannical characteristics, he refers to kings. In contrast with the tyrant’s actions, the kings are legitimate: “they allow everything that will be conducive to continuous peace in his country”: another way of stating the commonplace that good princes govern in the interests of their subjects. Erasmus’s next move is to summarize Aristotle on tyranny. He reduces this to three points, which he paraphrases: (1) the tyrant treats his subjects as if they were slaves; (2) he stirs up dissension and mutual hatred among his subjects; and (3) he seeks to reduce the wealth and prestige of his subjects. The overarching point is ontological: human beings, especially those with a noble, confident spirit, “do not tolerate despotism with grace.”15

 Erasmus, Education, 27.  This list is found in Erasmus, Education, 27–29. 15  Erasmus, Education, 29. 13 14

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Next come arguments from nature. For example, the king has the largest room in the beehive. His appearance is distinctive, for his body has a sheen.16 The analogy between bees and kingship would, of course, collapse when scientific observers found that hives were governed by queen bees! The specific animals whose behavior most resembles the behavior of tyrants are lions, bears, wolves, and eagles, for they are rapacious, they “mutilate and plunder.” But the tyrant, as a man, directs his animal ferocity against man; and although he himself is a citizen, against citizens.17 There follows a series of quotations from the Bible, beginning with 1 Samuel 8:11–18, where a king puts his sons and daughters at risk by forcing them to do dangerous or menial tasks.18 Crying out to the Lord about this king will do no good, “since the title of ‘king’ was in the past no less hated than that of ‘tyrant.’” A passage from Ezekiel is quoted to confirm the analogy: “There are princes in her midst, like wolves savaging their prey to the shedding of blood.”19 Plato returns here briefly, with his well-­ known metaphor about princes being the guardians of the state, what sheep dogs are to the flock; but Erasmus adds: what if the sheep dogs turn into wolves? And Saint Paul, equating Nero with a lion, says: “I was set free from the mouth of a lion.”20 After citing passages from Proverbs, Isaiah, and Matthew, Erasmus returns to a quotation from Seneca about a tyrant. Two passages from Aristotle are then quoted, before Erasmus presents the idea that kings are fathers to their subjects.21 But going deeper into the paternalist analogy, he adds that there may be dire consequences: for just as there are tyrannical kings, there are tyrannical fathers. The list of the characteristics of a tyrant is not an excoriation in the strict sense of the term. Indeed, in this instance, a full quotation from Julius Pollux’s Onamasticon functions as an excoriation. “Tyrants are despotic, cruel, savage, violent, grasping what is not theirs, money-grubber, or in Plato’s phrase, greedy for wealth, rapacious, and as Homer said, 16  Erasmus, Education, 29. F. Rigolot, “Désamorcer la peur des monstres: de Rabelais à Montaigne,” Travaux de Littérature, ed. M. Bertaud (Geneva, 2004) 2:135–45. 17  Erasmus, Education, 30. J. Céard, La Nature et les prodigies (Geneva, 1977); K. Thomas, Man and the Natural World (New York, 1983). 18  Erasmus, Education, 30. 19  Erasmus, Education, 31. 20  Erasmus, Education, 32. 21  Erasmus, Education, 34. For his analytical strategies, see J.  Chomarat, Grammaire et rhétorique chez Erasme (Paris, 1981).

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consuming his subjects, haughty, proud, unapproachable, bad-tempered, unpleasant to meet, unbending in company, uncongenial to talk to, irritable, frightening, stormy, a slave to his desires, intemperate, unrestrained, tactless, unkind, unjust, thoughtless, unfair, immoral, stupid, shallow, fickle, easily taken in, disagreeable, callous, ruled by his feelings, intolerant of criticism, abusive, warmonger, oppressive, troublesome, intractable, unbearable.”22 After that sort of excoriation, Erasmus generally turns to other themes. As if she were researching a still harsher criticism of the tyrant, Lisa Jardine points out in a note that the quotation from Pollux is given first in Greek and then rendered in Latin. Erasmus’s final authorities and historical examples come from Roman history. He is surprisingly brief, because many of them had become familiar through the mirror-of-princes genre. He had, of course, already dismissed Alexander the Great, owing to his emphasis on war and conquest; but he does not attack full tilt the hero of so many romances and later warriors. Nor is his first remark about Octavian particularly exemplary. Noting the constant plots around him and against him, the young Caesar observed that with so much blood spilled, the people must hate him.23 For Erasmus, ancient history shows that “No tyrant was so well defended that he stayed in power very long.”24 He had read Aristotle’s Politics, and he had quoted from it; but he seems unwilling or uninterested to reflect sufficiently and to discover the Philosopher’s statement that says the same thing. Yet he did not feel obliged to mention the tyrant who had ruled Athens for decades: Pisistratus, the tyrant who sometimes ruled in the interests of the people.25 Erasmus again goes back to Octavian, having discussed the prince and various types of authority. The implication is that the princeps understood “master” in the social context of relations between slaves (as property) and masters. Erasmus’s interest seems to have been caught by Octavian, who was reluctant to let himself be addressed or referred to as “master.” For Erasmus, slavery never could be compatible with Christianity. “And yet you can never have more control over pigs and donkeys than you can over 22  Erasmus, Education, 35–36. Julius Pollux was a second-century Greek grammarian who lived in Egypt. 23  Erasmus, Education, 36. 24  Erasmus, Education, 36. 25  Erasmus, Education, 36; see also Aristotle, Politics, 1315b.

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men, for you can drive them where you please or divide them up or even slaughter them. Consequently, he who turns free citizens into slaves will have devalued his empire. The more prestigious that which is subject to your rule is, the more magnificent and glorious is your reign.”26 Like slavery, tyranny is incompatible with the order of nature, or with Christianity as Erasmus defined it and lived it.27 The parallel between Octavian and Charles of Hapsburg is not based solely on rank and age. Indeed, it involves the anticipation of the higher rank and greater power that the two men will possess when they are Caesar Augustus and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Having described all types of authority, Erasmus then takes up the question of what it is to reign. “He who turns free citizens into slaves will have devalued his empire, … he who protects the freedom and dignity of [his] subjects, contributes to royal grandeur.”28 Indeed, “the honor bestowed upon a tyrant is not really honor, it is flattery.”29 In the section on laws, Caesar Augustus, “not normally included among good princes,” did not have recourse to the laws of lèse-majesté (treason); and when Caesar pardoned Cinna, his “majesty was both more glorious and more secure.”30 As Erasmus turns away from describing tyrants and offers general advice about governance, a lightness and a serenity come over his prose, especially when he discusses activities a prince might pursue rather than go off to war. His chief activity ought to be making his subjects prosperous, which is, of course, the opposite of what a tyrant would do.31 My emphasis on a single aspect of Erasmus’s thought has inevitably distorted the whole Erasmian message. The issue of fairness and integrity in regard to this great Christian humanist’s thought is humbling. While it is still possible that other works about the acts of tyrants written in the sixteenth century may have the profundity and the intense engagement that characterizes the Education of a Christian Prince, for the earlier periods I have found none that equals it.

 Erasmus, Education, 41.  There are instances where nature can triumph over the tutor: “Nero’s nature was so corrupt that even the saintly teacher Seneca could not prevent him from becoming a most pestilential ruler,” Education, 46. 28  Erasmus, Education, 41. 29  Erasmus, Education, 43. 30  Erasmus, Education, 89. 31  Erasmus, Education, 101. 26 27

CHAPTER 15

Thomas More on Tyranny in the History of Richard III

Abstract  Thomas More on tyranny in the History of Richard III. While Erasmus avoided the active political life, his English friend, More, accepted it and held high office (to his peril). More’s portrait of Richard III shows a man who betrays, murders, and corrupts (an “election” in London), before being killed at the Battle of Bosworth Fields. Keywords  Thomas More on tyranny • Richard III, king • Traits of a tyrant Is it surprising to find that Thomas More wrote in Latin verse some of the saintly knight’s most categorical and laconic observations on tyranny: his Epigrammata, published in 1518?1 Which passages are loci from an ancient Greek anthology, and which are closer to More’s own thought need not concern us. The fact is that More includes numerous poems on tyranny, an individual choice made from a deep personal opposition to “amoral statecraft.”2 1  Richard S. Sylvester, ed., The History of Richard III and Selections from the English and Latin Poems (New Haven, 1976), xxi–xxii. The excellent Introductions to the two editions cited below have been very helpful. 2  The phrase is by G. M. Logan, ed., The History of Richard III (Bloomington, 2005), xx, as a principal concern in Utopia. This might be said of many of his other works. I have not found a study of More’s choices of commonplaces, but see A. Moss, Printed Commonplace Books (Oxford, 1969); and J. Hutton, The Greek Anthology in France and the Netherlands

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Laconic and categorical, More’s poems convey strong messages in their titles: “The Tyrant’s Life is Troubled”; “Death Unassisted Kills Tyrants”; and “The Difference Between a King and a Tyrant,” where “it is the king who respects the law whereas a tyrant thinks of his subjects as slaves. A king thinks of them as his own children,”3 beneficent paternalism being a theme in several of the poems. A good example of how tyranny can be defined by its opposite is found in “A King is Protected, Not by a Corps of Guards but by his Own Good Qualities,” where More begins: “Not fear (accompanied as it is by hatred), not towering palaces, not wealth wrung from a plundered people protects a king.”4 Both Erasmus and More read, translated, published, and commented on Lucian’s satirical works,5 but it was More who translated his Downward Journey, or On the Tyrant.6 Briefly, Megapenthes, the captured and defeated tyrant, does not wish to board Charon’s ship for the voyage to death. He has buried treasure, and a partially constructed house that will go to his enemy, Cousin Megacles, if Megapenthes does not accept a bribe to gain his freedom. Megapenthes has killed to become rich, as he seeks to build a monument that will have his accomplishments carved upon it.7 Megapenthes had joined the boldest men to form a bodyguard, had put to death 10,000 people, had practiced savagery and high-handedness, had ravished maidens and corrupted boys; nor did he spare his closest kin. As with all our other early-sixteenth-century learned and politically engaged writers, in their specific monarchical cultures, More wrote for the young princes. His On the Coronation Day of Henry VIII is a work in the panegyric genre.8 A new king means a new start for all as “tears [are] to 1800 (Ithaca, 1946), and F. Goyet, Le Sublime du lieu commun (Paris, 1996), a work that does not, however, take up either More or the idea of tyranny. For a general historical context, G.R. Elton, Policy and Police (Cambridge, UK, 1972). 3  Sylvester, ed., 137–141. 4  Sylvester, ed., 142. 5  Logan, ed., xxxv. 6  Sylvester, ed., refers to both a translation and an original declamation on tyrannicide as a result of More’s engagement with Lucian, xv. Sylvester has published only a selection of More’s Latin poems. There may be others in the complete edition. 7  Lucian, The Downward Journey, or the Tyrant, trans. A. M. Harmon, Loeb (Cambridge, MA, 1915), 7–51. The dialogue purports to be a trial. 8  As an example for comparison, see Claude de Seyssel’s encomia addressed to Louis XII, in Jacques Poujol, ed., La Monarchie en France et deux autres fragments politiques (Paris, 1961), for example “Le Prohème de messier Claude de Seyssel … en la translation [sic] de l’Histoire d’Appian…” 77–88.

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wiped from every eye and put joy in the place of our long distress.” More describes the changes for nobles and merchants, but what he writes about the people is most profound about Henry’s reign: The people gather together, every age, both sexes, and all ranks. There is no reason why they should lurk in their homes and not take part while the king, after completion of the proper ceremonies, undertakes, amid happy auspices, the rule of Britain. Wherever he goes, the dense crowd in their desire to look upon him leaves a narrow lane for passage. The houses are filled to overflowing, the rooftops strain to support the weight of spectators. On all sides there arises a shout of new good will.9

On the question of war or peace, and consistent with the genre of praise, More asserts that possible enemies will be too fearful of England’s power to start a war, and that since Henry VIII has the blood of both sides in the quarrel, there will be no civil war.10 The History of Richard III was written circa 1513, when More was about thirty-five. Henry VIII had come to the throne in 1509, when he was almost eighteen. Virtually simultaneously, More wrote two versions of Richard III, one in Latin and one in English. There are minor differences, but none, it seems, involved characterizing tyranny by writing an exemplary narrative addressed to Henry. The Latin version was destined for the learned readers who were serving all over Europe as ambassadors and councilors; the English version was written for the English people, including all those who could be read to. More never finished either version, very probably because there were still families with great influence who had supported Richard and, more importantly there was literary and political decorum. It was simply too harshly critical of English monarchical culture. More pays special attention to introducing all the major “players” at Richard’s court, and the marriage connections that had moved them largely from non-public politics to exceedingly intense and bitterly violent factional politics during the Wars of the Roses.11 The members of the aristocracy and the gentry, habitually elected to the House of Commons, would already have been familiar with much of this material; so More very  Sylvester, ed., 130–136.  Sylvester, ed., 134. 11  Logan, ed., Richard the Third. 9

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probably included it with a view of consolidating a historically civic awareness among those who had listened to stories at funerals and at inns.12 The eulogy of Edward IV (1442–83) prepares the reader to be struck dumb by Gloucester’s (that is, Richard’s) plotting and murderous acts. He wanted to be king, and in a hurry; so merely being the protector of the late king’s sons did not satisfy him. His claim to the crown had been refused by Parliament, although it was very strong. Here is More’s portrait of Richard: “… little of stature, ill featured of limbs, crook-backed, his left shoulder much higher than the right, hard-­ favored of visage, and such as is in states called warly…. He was malicious, wrathful, envious, and, from afore his birth, ever forward.”13 Richard made “large gifts” in hopes of winning “unsteadfast friendship”; he was “close and secret, a deep dissimuler: lowly of countenance, arrogant of heart, outwardly companable where he inwardly hated, not letting to kiss whom he thought to kill.”14 This portrait will become Shakespeare’s, and eventually the portrait that the English will have of Richard III. It will not be necessary to inventory here everything the protector does; but in the light of what have become familiar features of the tyrant’s deeds, it is interesting to note some of the characteristics that are missing. For example, Richard is not charged with any lascivious acts, nor does he spend huge amounts of money on palaces. He does, however, seek to “increase his estate.”15 The pursuit of wealth is frequently mentioned in descriptions of tyrants. More has Richard kill Henry VI with his own hands in the Tower. True, the prince who would become Edward IV had had Henry arrested and conducted to the Tower; but More affirms that it was Richard who killed Henry, that is, did not simply have him killed. The crime that Richard was about to commit would be less dangerous to him with Henry out of the way. Is it anachronistic to assert that when you ask someone to kill a person for you, (and that someone is not a public executioner), that person has some persuasive power over you, the asker? Did Richard wish to avoid being beholden to anyone? Richard certainly had guards or followers who  This sense of reaching down is speculation on my part.  Logan, ed. Richard the Third, 9–10 14  Logan, ed., Richard the Third, 11–12. 15  Logan, ed., Richard the Third, 10. 12 13

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would kill for him, as he had at Pomfret when he ordered Earl Rivers, Sir Richard Grey, and Sir Thomas Vaughan killed. But did he, as protector, have powers to give orders to the officers in charge of the Tower? The “killing with his own hands” occurs early in Richard’s rise. Or did he take pleasure in the heinous act? The most poignant moment in the entire narrative is when Richard seeks to convince the widowed queen to grant him custody of the rest of her children. Elizabeth Woodville, whom Edward had married despite her very good, but not high, aristocratic blood, rushed to the Sanctuary of Westminster in search of safety as soon as the news broke that Richard had arrested householders who in principle were her protectors. Richard arrived, in effect, to kidnap her children—with the excuse that their older brother was lonely and would benefit from their presence. Their argument becomes shrill and nasty, until Elizabeth finally gives in, having realized that she has no protection whatsoever, and that the Westminster Sanctuary would not be enough to save the children’s lives. The Protector challenges the late King Edward’s legitimacy, and the legitimacy of his and Elizabeth’s marriage as well. In addition, he accuses her of witchcraft. The Duke of Buckingham has been taken into Richard’s confidence, and the two men mount a coup by acclamation before the mayor and alderman of London. Successful by a “great shout,” Richard went to the court of the King’s Bench in Westminster, took the crown, and put it on his own head. Buckingham began to conspire against Richard who, unsuspecting, allowed the duke to depart from his presence “with great gifts and high behests,” that is, promises. More sums up Richard’s mental state at the end of his three-year reign, specifically at the Battle of Bosworth Field (1485). More used the words tyranny/tyrant only three times in Richard III. The first reference is about how More learned about the “traitorous tyranny” that was the murder of the two little princes in the Tower.16 The second is likewise a reflection about the Duke of Buckingham that interrupts the narrative: “in what peril the duke stood if he fell once in suspicion of the tyrant.” In other words, Richard would have killed him.17 The third reference is a supplement to the narrative that clarifies Bishop Morton’s loyalty in establishing  Sylvester, ed., 89.  Sylvester, ed., 92.

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the future Henry VII after Edward IV’s death. This led to his being arrested by “the tyrant,” and he was eventually sent into exile until Henry VII recalled him.18 More’s Richard III is not strictly a mirror of princes; it is a mirror of historicized hatred, violence, and tyranny that is so powerful that More did not dare to hold it up before Henry VIII and his court. His Richard III helped assure the psychological and political power that history plays— not only those of Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights, but also those of the writers of succeeding generations and centuries—would have: monumental depictions of cruel and lurid political-cultural transhistoricity. As a result of his refusal to accept Henry VIII’s break of the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church, More was disgraced, tried for treason, and beheaded in 1535.

18  Sylvester, ed., 93. Morton became a cardinal. More had been in his household as a young humanist. Though very different not only in themes but also in scholarly approaches, each of these books is a classic overview of More and his world. A. F. Pollard, “The making of Sir Thomas More’s Richard III,” Historical Essays in Honor of James Tait (Manchester, 1933) 223–238, and S. I. Camporeale, O. P., “Da Lorenzo Valla a Tommaso Moro: le statuto umanistico della teologice,” Memorie Domenicane, 4, (new series 1973), 9–105.

PART IV

A Time of Troubles in France, 1570–1605

CHAPTER 16

The Valois Monarchy in Political Thought and Political Theology

Abstract  The civil wars in France, known as the Wars of Religion (1560s–1590s), unleashed analysis and research about tyrannical conduct as no other major historical event has since the Roman revolution from a republic to a principate. The royal initiatives in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (August 25, 1572) posed the question of whether a monarch could order or condone the mass murder of his subjects. The act was certainly tyrannical. There are comments on whether a king who murders can be deposed, forced to abdicate, or be killed. The question engaged the learned, the devout, and the members of the radical Parisian League. Until shortly before the end of World War II, the writings presented in Chaps. 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, and 23 constituted the most original and extensive commentary on what tyrants do. Keywords  Wars of Religion in France • St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre • League, Parisian • Traits of a tyrant On August 23, 1572, the royal council ordered the assassination of the Huguenot leader Admiral Coligny, his companions in arms, and other Protestant leaders.1 Before dawn of the following day, the Duke of Guise’s 1  A.  Jouanna, The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, tr. J.  Bergin (Manchester 2012); J.H.M.  Salmon, Society in Crisis (London, 1975); M.  Holt, The French Wars of Religion (Cambridge UK, 1995).

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guards had carried out the order. Coligny’s castrated body would be dragged through the streets in popular celebrations. Later that morning, Huguenot nobles whom the king had invited to stay in the Louvre were dragged outside and assassinated. As rumors flew about the city, men began to affix white crosses on their hats and on the doors of their houses, a well-known sign used by crusaders warring against heretics.2 It will not be necessary to recount the terrible collective massacres that occurred not only in Paris but also in many cities across the realm; but it is very important to establish who had given the orders for the massacre at its very beginning. By various royal declarations, Charles IX accepted the responsibility for giving the order to murder Coligny.3 As justifications he cited plotting against his royal person and the state. Indeed, the king believed that the Huguenots had secretly broken the most recent effort toward peace: the royal word given at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. The more general massacres would be carried out by persons who believed that the king had ordered them to do this. Efforts to disabuse militia members and zealots, to get them to stop the killing, were not quickly successful. Zealots regretted that all the Protestants had not been killed. This created an undercurrent, an outlook: “Let’s finish the job.” As early as August 28, a solemn procession was organized by the clergy in order to give thanks to God. There would be another procession on September 4, this time ordered by the king. In addition, the relics of Saint Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris, were brought from the church and became the focal point for veneration and gratitude. Medals were struck to celebrate a victory over heresy. When news of the massacre reached Rome, it was greeted with festivities and thanksgiving. The idea that all of this was a Huguenot plot opened possibilities for excusing the monarch. Faced with so much violence, many Parisians found themselves ready to believe almost anything. One of the most learned and politically astute judges in royal service, Guy du Faur de Pibrac, undertook to write a justification and apology for the decision: killing Coligny, he argued, was a preemptive strike against the conspirators.4 Charles IX died in May 1574. His brother Henry, who had recently been elected king of Poland, took his time returning to France. He would never really comprehend what his French subjects had gone  Jouanna, citing Pasquier, 125.  Jouanna, Declaration, Aug. 26, 1572, 140. 4  Jouanna, 167–168. 2 3

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through on St. Bartholomew’s Day. At twenty-three, Henry relied on his mother, Catherine de Médicis, and her advisors to rule for him; but in only a few years his inexperience, his inconstancy, and his distorted priorities would cause him to be perceived as incompetent, evil, and a tyrant. A king has a subject, a lofty duke (Guise), murdered without a trial: that is what tyrants do. A king who is a priest—an archbishop-cardinal (Guise) at that—murdered without a trial: he is not merely a tyrant, he is also a heretic. As much by subtle deference as by actually holding offices, these high officials, the Guise brothers, were allowed to slip away from Henry III’s power. The king’s army was no longer the king’s. Indeed, thanks to the duke’s clients, thanks to the support of the people of Paris and the clergy, and thanks to the subsidies coming to the duke from Spain, Henry was king in name only. But the duke was king in almost every way save the title. Henry could think of no way to save his crown. In the end, he ordered the Guise brothers to be stabbed to death. Some writers, among them Pierre de Belloy and Louis Dorléans, buckled down and defended efforts to repress heresy by force, often with assertions and questions about the sources of royal authority.5 The anointing of French kings with holy oil from the ampulla, the Eucharist at the coronation, involving not only the body-bread but also the blood-wine, consecrated the kings of France as priest-kings.6 Like moderate Catholic writers, and like their fellow Huguenot writers, new meanings were given to old words: l’État, “the state,” being a key example,7 something that was distinct from the royal body. The Roman law of necessity, and the tag “What pleases the prince has the force of

5  W.F.  Church, Constitutional Thought in Sixteenth Century France (Cambridge, MA, 1941); F. Baumgartner, Radical Reactionaries, The Political Thought of the French Catholic League (Geneva, 1974); W. Gundesheimer, The Life and Works of Louis Le Roy (Geneva, 1966). 6  E.  Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton, 1957); R.A.  Jackson, Vive le Roi (Chapel Hill, 1984). 7  The most interesting of these developments for the future would be the definitions of the state. See the works on the state by the Sienese jurist Matteo Zampini: initially published in Italian in 1578, they would quickly be translated into French as Des Estats … in four editions that spanned the seventeenth century. See L.P. Raybaud, “La royauté d’après M. Zampini,” in Le Prince en France des XVIe et XVIIe siècles, ed. C.  Bontems, L.P.  Raybaud, and J.P. Brancourt (Paris 1965), 155–204, ed. in Latin, 1575.

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law,” were elaborated upon to enrich argument. Somewhat later, medical terms such as “tolerance” acquired a new meaning.8 For the clergy, in its various collective corps, especially the Faculty of Theology, also known as the Sorbonne, there seemed no better choice of action than fasting more intensely and marching in processions, thereby imploring God to alter the impure life that had been provoked in France by the presence of heretics. Boucher, the learned preacher, curate, and vice-regent of the University, and also a member of both the militia and the Sixteen, called a general assembly and consecrated all his efforts to recover religious Catholic conformity in the realm. He would look to the House of Lorraine and its head, the Duke of Guise, as incarnate savior in the crisis, owing to Guise’s willingness, even eagerness, to go to war and to obliterate Huguenot arms and carry out executions and coercive conversions. By the mid-1580s it seemed that God would not give a child to Henry III and his queen, despite their frequent visits to holy sanctuaries such as Chartres and Our Lady of Loreto. Not knowing the identity of Henry’s successor was troubling, even though the king was not all that old. Boucher (an energetic Sorbonne theologian) could accept the aging and celibate Cardinal of Bourbon, or perhaps one of the daughters of the king of Spain (despite the Salic Law), but the idea was anathema that the biological heir, Henry of Navarre, a heretic, might one day be permitted to mount the French throne. As if memories of massacres and civil wars, pollution of Catholic holy sites, and royal impotence and luxury were not enough, the king turned to dissimulation in order to assassinate the Duke of Guise and his brother, the cardinal. Calls to depose or assassinate the king had scarcely been heard prior to his role as murderer. As paroxysm reigned, Boucher would shift from blaming evil counselors (such as Épernon), to pressing for deposing the king, and finally to having him assassinated. The king had been stripped of his royalty by papal decree as well as by a decree of the Sorbonne, a move that, in the minds of the Leaguers, changed his status from king to tyrant. Protestant commentators would put forth their own idea of a perfected state within a reformed church. Which side would the God of war support? As it turned out, the leaders of the League would adopt some of the 8  W.H.  Huseman, “The Expression of the Idea of Toleration in French During the Sixteenth Century,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 15 (1984), 293–310.

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views put forth by their Huguenot enemies, not only about tyranny, but also about governance. How to recreate the spiritual and the political commonwealth of the early church? In the late 1580s there was hope that the League was strong enough to create a pure Roman Catholic commonwealth and state; but the presence of heretics was the greatest impediment to creating this New Jerusalem. A corporate political governance led by the clergy adopted many of the features of a true state found in a legally grounded institution.

CHAPTER 17

Tyranny in Hotman’s Franco-Gallia

Abstract  Tyranny in Hotman’s Franco-Gallia (1573). As French jurists turned away from efforts to create laws and institutions inspired by Rome, they gradually turned to their own Gallic customs and history. Hotman wrote a part-historical, part-mythical vision of an early France where the people held power and elected their own kings. If a king lacks the ability to be a leader, he is deposed. Hotman’s ideal was a government of shared powers. The king who rules against the will of his subjects is a tyrant, and he has foreign body guards. Keywords  Hotman on tyranny • Traits of a tyrant Thomas More’s Utopia presented a vision of an ideal community in the future, surrounded by bonheur (happiness) that would inspire moral and political reflection down to the present. François Hotman’s FrancoGallia (1573) is a vision of the French past that is at once historical and mythical, and that would inspire immediate revolutionary actions.1 1  François Hotman, De la Gaule françoise (Cologne, 1574), trans. S.  Goulart (Paris, 1991). The title in French accords with Hotman’s patriotism, the geographic modified by the adjective françoise, “French.” The edition and translation by R. Giesey and J.H.M. Salmon of Hotman’s Franco-Gallia (Cambridge, UK, 1972) has been frequently consulted, and when I quote from Hotman, it is their edition. J.  H. Franklin, Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1969); D.  R. Kelley, François Hotman, a Revolutionary’s ordeal (Princeton, 1973); R. Giesey, “The Juristic Basis of Dynastic Right to

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Hotman believed that the institutions of the past had been corrupted at the expense of the natural goodness “of the people.” The FrancoGallia is a call to grant powers back to the people through their meetings and estates. History was of greater consequence owing to these efforts to mobilize past attitudes, beliefs, and institutions, mythical or not.2 Hotman’s reading of Tacitus on the early German tribes would shape an idealized popular political culture. In his early chapters Hotman’s comments on tyranny are scarcely integrated into a vision of elective kingship, remarkably strong fighting powers, and love of peace. If a king lacks the qualities of a leader, he is deposed. There are occasions when it was good for sons to succeed to the crown worn by their long-haired fathers, but for Hotman dynastic claims are suspect and may lead to tyranny. There had been bloody tyrants among Roman kings; and according to Gregory of Tours, the Frankish King Childeric “became licentious through too much luxury while he was reigning over the Francs and was beginning to seduce their daughters.”3 Aware of a plot against him, he fled to Thuringia. In another instance, according to the abbot of Ursperg, “Aegidius [Giles] … proved a great tyrant who put several nobles cruelly to death.”4 Though he had debauched daughters of the people, he was not killed: he was merely driven out. Hotman’s harsh critical judgments about earlier kings, if not quite all of them, must have shocked readers of the more vulgaire popular histories by Paul Émile and Gaguin, who generally heroicize kings and who recognized the potential for violence between kings and the people. Yet there was little instability, because the people generally would intervene to set things right. For this reason, Hotman favors the presence of an aristocracy, a form of government that separated kings from commoners, thereby constituting an Aristotelian “mixed constitution” of divided powers.5 Kings simply did not have “une the French Throne,” American Philosophical Society, Transactions, new series, 51/5 (1961); P. Mesnard, L’Essor de la Philosophie politique (Paris, 1977); G. Weill, Les Théories sur le pouvoir royal en France pendant les guerres de religion (Paris, 1891). 2  J. H. M. Salmon, “Clovis and Constantine. The Uses of History in Sixteenth-Century Gallicanism,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 44/4, (1990), 584–605. 3  Hotman, Franco-Gallia, 237. 4  Hotman, Franco-Gallia, 237. 5  Hotman, Franco-Gallia, 292–296.

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personne infinie et absolute.” In a strongly patriotic tone, Hotman says that the French have governed there, and have been governed there, for twelve hundred years. When he treats tyranny more formally, Hotman mentions Aristotle on the subject. The marks of tyranny that he lists do not include the actions deemed tyrannical that were done by the early Frankish kings: • A king rules over his subjects against their will. • The existence of a foreign body guard. • The third mark of tyranny occurs when all matters are judged by the comfort and will of him who governs, rather than by the ease and desire of the commonwealth and the subjects.6 Following the presentation of the marks, Hotman asks whether France has been subjected to tyrannical governance. The focus is on the roles played by councils and estates in potentially curbing royal power.7 (He borrows from Seyssel.) “Let the welfare of the people be the law” becomes anathema, as Hotman shifts from a general description of institutions to two specific instances in which royal power becomes too strong. In the War of the Common Weal (1465), the magnates united (temporarily) to force Louis XI to be more consultative and to stop raising revenues without taking into account the views of his subjects.8 Hotman recounts the War of the Common Weal as a successful use of force to maintain the balance between the powers of the people, those of the aristocracy, and those of the king. Hotman’s second example is how calling a great council can mobilize subjects effectively, in this case, in order to annul an excommunication of the king and all his subjects that had been promulgated by the schismatic 6  Hotman, Franco-Gallia, 290–91. The turn to Aristotle seems almost to be a move toward scholarly decorum. After presenting influences of how life-style activities influenced the deposition of kings, these same life-style activities are not listed among the marks of tyranny. There is similar material in Aristotle’s Politics, material so lascivious that Ernest Barker declined to translate it. 7  A.  Bakos, Images of Kingship in Early Modern France: Louis XI in Political Thought 1560–1789 (London, 1997). 8  Hotman, Franco-Gallia. For the context, J. Favier, Louis XI (Paris, 2001), chap. XVI; and P.  Saenger, “The Earliest French Resistance Theories: The Role of the Burgundian Court,” Journal of Modern History, 51/4 (1979), D 1225–49.

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pope, Benedict XIII. In an attempt to resolve the schism, many secular authorities across Europe had intervened. Once the news had begun to circulate across the realm, King Charles VI, faced with excommunication, called a public council. The council decreed that Benedict was a schismatic and did not have to be obeyed, and that the papal bull would be annulled “and torn to pieces before the eyes of the people.”9 After the deliberations, the rector of the University of Paris rose, took the bull, “and with the king looking on, … tore it asunder with his own hands.”10 Dressed in robes bearing the papal insignia, the papal nuncio and his assistants were flogged and “exposed to the mockery and derision of all, and provided a public spectacle for the amusement of the Parisians.”11 Hotman’s aim is to call attention to how the public council was used successfully, not only under very early kings, but in recent times as well. Similarly, if a king is defeated and captured, the realm remains.12 Here and there throughout the later chapters, Hotman notes that the Franks had been the guardians of liberty, “abhorring all tyranny, especially the domination of any Turkish tyrant,” who would force them to live like cattle.13 Essentially the same point is made about life under Louis XI.14 Still more colorful and trenchant is his depiction of the Egyptians: their tyrannical kings forced them to build pyramids.15 Not unlike Erasmus, Hotman demonstrates a very firm belief in his knowledge (savoir) of the past, and a remarkably serene outlook for the future. The disciplines that framed their research and their analysis would be fundamentally altered by their own writings. Hotman may have lacked the requisite patience to let his researches deepen to the point of accepting an atticist belief that the antique word could be understood, despite some changes of meaning. His history may not have been as close an ancestor of scientific history as Fauchet’s, but he pioneered in writing history that was written with an explicit argument, an argument that was akin to a legal

 Hotman, Franco-Gallia, 455.  Hotman, Franco-Gallia, 455. 11  Hotman, Franco-Gallia, 457. 12  Hotman, Franco-Gallia, 138. 13  Hotman, Franco-Gallia, 348. 14  Hotman, Franco-Gallia, 441. 15  Hotman, Franco-Gallia., 498. 9

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brief.16 Legal training had made possible the elucidation of a single theme, or a congeries of themes, without bringing up commonplace religious and ethical questions that pervaded works by authors untouched by legal humanism. While monarchies may slide into tyrannies, Hotman does not seem to fear that this sort of thing will occur in the France of the Valois. The strong, frequently repeated concepts are “people,” “estates,” and “councils”—but not “tyranny.” If there is such a thing as a charismatic word in Hotman’s Franco-Gallia, the word would be “people.”

16  Kelley, Hotman (Princeton, 1973); and also by D.  Kelley, Foundations of Modern Scholarship (New York, 1970).

CHAPTER 18

Étienne de la Boétie on Tyranny in Voluntary Servitude

Abstract  La Boétie on tyranny in Voluntary Servitude. The elaboration of a concept of humanity in the sixteenth century entailed not only a critique of slavery (Aristotle) but also of servitude. Masters, kings, and other wielders of power coerce, seduce, or somehow attract individuals to accept inequality. The people fall into a deep forgetfulness of freedom. The king rules for his own benefit, not for the common weal. Keywords  La Boétie on tyranny • Slavery • Servitude • Traits of a tyrant There has been learned controversy1 over the authorship of the Discours sur la Servitude volontaire (Discourse on Voluntary Servitude), but its audacious message, its intensity, and its limited use of quotations lead me to conclude that Étienne de la Boétie, not Michel de Montaigne, was the author. Although at one time there may have been places where that quite small text could be integrated into the Essays, that integration did not happen. Very little is known for certain about La Boétie.

1  M. de Montaigne and É. de la Boétie, Freedom over Servitude: Montaigne, La Boétie; and La Boétie, On Voluntary Servitude, ed. and trans. by D.  L. Schaefer (Westport, 1998). Unless otherwise noted, all quotations come from the Schaefer translation.

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Born in Sarlat, a picturesque small town in Périgord, on November 1, 1530, La Boétie was raised by an uncle who sent him at quite an early age to study law at Orléans. In October 1553, Étienne received letters patent permitting him to be a conseiller in a court of law. He would be mobilized as a member of the elite to head a militia force to defend Bergerac from Huguenot attack. Learned in ancient Greek, La Boétie, like so many other young and learned men of that generation, translated some of Xenophon’s and Plutarch’s works. He met Montaigne in 1557, and they quickly became intimate friends. Sustained by his friend, La Boétie died in 1563. A small book with a minimum of scholarly references and stylistic conventions, the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude is just that, a discourse written forcefully, to convince an audience or readership. Montaigne had read it prior to meeting La Boétie; he would publish it in 1576, along with some of La Boétie’s other works, including his poems. The intensity of the work immediately makes readers want to know more about the author. One certitude is that despite their familiarity with Protestants and, no doubt, despite the Huguenots’ flourishing theological and political-protest literature, La Boétie remained a Catholic, and so did Montaigne. There were, of course, lawyers and jurists who converted to Jean Calvin’s doctrines; but in the main, men who were members of a corps such as a parlement or a local court would remain Catholic. The mysteries surrounding the author of the Discourse in no way diminish the clarity and audacity of its meaning, its intellectual brilliance, and the persuasive power that it achieves by its almost intimate authorial presence. With a mere six transhistorical concepts—servitude, master, lord, monarchy, tyranny, and liberty—La Boétie opens up a virtually unknown field of political inquiry by asking one question: How does it come to pass that all but a handful of men live in servitude? They have lost, or never possessed, the liberty in which they were born. In effect, La Boétie argues that everyone but the king who lives in France is in some degree a slave to the monarch. How could this happen? La Boétie takes a cue from that great anti-­ monarchist, Cicero, who in his Offices, addressed to his son, argues that individual liberty and monarchy are completely incompatible.2 Taking the

2

 P. Stacey, Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince (Cambridge, UK, 2007).

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same cue in the Prince, Machiavelli argues that in fact the prince or king and the tyrant-despot are one and the same.3 A person can have many lords over him. La Boétie identifies domestic subjection, seigneurial subjection, and feudal subjection. All Europeans— save the Venetians and the Swiss!—lack the liberty that citizens enjoy. A prince of the blood is a subject who must kneel before the king, and so are the cobbler and the peasant. There is no public space in towns, because only subjects, not citizens, reside there. La Boétie offers few extensive or lurid accounts of life under a tyrant. He says that the floors in the dwelling of the ancient Roman tyrant were as bloody as the floor in a butcher’s shop. He prefers to emphasize those who killed tyrants in order to recover their liberty, rather than list those who enjoy “sales et vilains plaisirs” (dirty, nasty pleasures).4 He finds three types of tyrants. The first group includes those who obtain kingdoms by popular election; the second, by force of arms; and the third by succession of their lineage.5 Differences are noted, but the results are fundamentally the same: the tyrant-king rules for his own benefit, not for the common weal. La Boétie gives numerous examples of tyrannies, notably that of Pisistratus who, although a tyrant, ruled with consideration for the Athenians (Aristotle), and Dionysius I of Syracuse who, although elected to defend the city, set himself up as a tyrant-king.6 La Boétie comments: “It is incredible how suddenly the people, as soon as they are subjected, fall into such a deep forgetfulness of freedom that it is impossible for them to wake up.”7 After exploring whether liberty is, or is not, natural to the genus “man,” La Boétie begins a lengthy discussion about popular political action. Unlike Hotman, he seems not to believe that “corporations,” that is, estates and councils, can curb monarchical-tyrannical power:

3  It may never be possible to elucidate whether La Boétie is more indebted to Cicero or to Machiavelli in his immediate formulations. He calls Cicero “that great champion of the public good if ever there was one,” La Boétie, On Voluntary Servitude, 205. 4  É. de la Boétie, Discours sur la Servitude Volontaire, ed. P. Léonard (Paris, 1978), 116. This remarkable edition has a preface by M. Abensour and M. Grancher that explores possible social and political contexts for the work. There is also a brief but illuminating essay by S. Weil (1937). 5  La Boétie, On Voluntary Servitude, 199. 6  La Boétie, On Voluntary Servitude, 201. 7  La Boétie, On Voluntary Servitude, 201.

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Poor and miserable, senseless peoples, nations obstinately given to your own ill and blind to your good. You allow the finest and brightest share of your revenue to be taken before your eyes, your fields to be pillaged, your houses to be robbed and stripped of ancient and paternal furnishings. You live in such a way that you cannot boast that anything belongs to you, and it seems as if you would be very fortunate to be able to pay rent for the enjoyment of your belongings, your family, and your lives. And all this havoc, this misfortune, this ruin comes to you not from enemies, but yes indeed from the enemy, and from the one that you make as great as he is, for whom you go so courageously to war, for whose greatness you do not refuse to offer your persons to death. That one who dominates you so much has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, and has nothing beyond what the merest human being has, among [the citizens of] the great and infinite number of your cities, except for the advantage that you give him so that he can destroy you. From where has he taken so many eyes with which he spies on you, unless you give them to him? How does he have so many hands with which to strike you, unless he takes them from you? The feet with which he tramples your cities, where does he get them from, if they are not yours? How does he have any power over you, except through you? How would he dare to come after you, unless he had information from you? What could he do to you, if you weren’t acting as fences of the thief who steals from you, accomplices of the murderer who kills you, and traitors to yourselves? You sow your crops so that he may devastate them. You furnish and fill your houses [with belongings] in order to provide for his pillages. You rear your daughters so that he may have something with which to sate his lust. You rear your sons so that the best thing he can do to them is to take them into his wars, so as to lead them to be slaughtered, and turn them into the agents of his lusts and the executors of his revenges. You break your backs so that he can enjoy his delights and wallow in dirty and villainous pleasure. You weaken yourselves in order to make him stronger and more apt to keep you on a tight leash.8

It is not surprising to find classical-republican ideas about defense and war. Citizens are courageous fighters; subjects are always half-hearted, and mercenaries “effeminate.”9 La Boétie tallies the potential fighters against tyranny, but as Nannerl Keohane has concluded, there is really no

8  La Boétie, On Voluntary Servitude, 196. Note that, early in the second paragraph, the translator proposes “citizens” within square brackets. Would “inhabitants” be better? 9  La Boétie, On Voluntary Servitude, 192 ff.

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program, no call for citizen armies to overthrow or assassinate tyrants,10 although he commends the killers of tyrants. There is, however, a remarkable call for individual resistance: … you can deliver yourself if you try, not by acting so as to deliver yourselves from them, but simply by willing to do it. Be resolved, no longer to serve, and you will find yourselves free. I do not want you to push or to shake him, but only to no longer support him, and you will see him, like a great colossus of which the base has been removed, collapse of his own weight and break.11

Jacques Poujol suggests that what La Boétie is doing is transferring a familiar religious exhortation about casting off sin and sinful acts, in order to enjoy a new relation with God.12 When La Boétie comes to assess French kings, he first scoffs at beliefs about the divine powers of the oriflamme, the ampulla, toads, and fleurs-de-lis.13 He then asserts that “we have always had such good kings in peace and courageous in war—not made as others by nature, but chosen by all-powerful God.”14 Although the great deeds of Clovis and of the ancient French, sung about and praised by living poets, are eminently desirable,15 they obviously are mythical. Although patriotic like Montaigne, La Boétie lets this come to mind as an afterthought. But at this point, La Boétie does not choose to end his discourse with a peroration centered on the divine and on Frenchness. Instead, he offers an interpretation of how tyranny extends across realms and the world. It is original, brilliant, and implausible. Noting that while it is generally believed that sentry posts and guards with halberds protect the tyrant from assassination, that is not correct. Roman emperors were as often killed by their guards as protected by them. Instead, there are always four or five men who have the tyrant’s ear. Through them, an entire people may be subjected. These men are the 10  N. Keohane, “The Radical Humanism of Étienne de la Boétie,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 38/1 (1977), 119–30. 11  La Boétie, On Voluntary Servitude, 196–97. 12  J. Poujol, Appendice, “L’évolution et l’influence de l’idée absolutist en France de 1498 à 1559,” a copy of which is available at the Bibliothèque du protestantisme français, 54 rue des Saints-Pères, 75007 Paris. 13  Poujol notes that the power to cure scrofula is absent! 14  La Boétie, On Voluntary Servitude, 213. 15  La Boétie, On Voluntary Servitude, 213.

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“accomplices of his cruelties, the companions of his pleasures, the pimps of his lust, and [they] share in the loot of his pillages.”16 Each of the six has a hundred who benefit from their relation; these six hundred have six thousand whose standing they have raised.17 For Roland Mousnier these fidèles were the fidèles des fidèles! The total number of royal officials in the early sixteenth century was about 400018 royal servants who, like everyone else, were in one or another degree of servitude. La Boétie does not, in conclusion, call for an uprising and the killing of every tyrant. Instead, he suggests that everyone look toward heaven and be content to have some degree of liberty. Appeals to the divine may often be little more than a rhetorical peroration; or it may be a sincere and emotional cry for help and understanding: As for me, I indeed think, and I am not mistaken, since there is nothing so contrary to God, who is all-giving and all good, as tyranny, that He reserves a place down below to give some special place to tyrants and their accomplices.19

Defining God as all good, rather than all-powerful, may indicate a step away from the conventional, but it does not bring to mind a person in despair, a person who fears for his soul. The lack of an appeal to action seems less important when it is brought to the fore and is viewed from an ontological perspective rather than from a political one. The shift back and forth from the collective human to the individual is particularly important if we seek to interpret La Boétie’s more general meaning and, of course, its relation to the thought of Montaigne, his friend. La Boétie stresses the will. What would happen if the people simply stopped doing what they, as subjects, were supposed to do?

 La Boétie, On Voluntary Servitude, 215.  La Boétie, On Voluntary Servitude, 215. Keohane uses the word “client” to characterize this relation. “Dependent” might be a better term. See the literature on deference, M.E.  James, English Politics and the Concept of Honour, 1485–1642 (Oxford, 1976); E. Goffman, Asylums (New York, 1961). 18  R.  Mousnier, Le Conseil du roi de Louis XII à la Révolution (Paris, 1970), 18. For a general discussion of the issues around fidelity versus interest among servants, see S. Kettering, Patronage in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century France (Aldershot, 2002). 19  La Boétie, On Voluntary Servitude, 222. 16 17

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La Boétie continues, alluding to the pervasive “will to serve.” After exploring human nature about human differences, and thanks to having speech, we can learn to think alike and “make a communion of our wills.”20 Reading La Boétie’s program for overcoming tyranny stirs many resonances that rise and become audible; but examining them would take us away from our theme.

 La Boétie, On Voluntary Servitude, 198.

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CHAPTER 19

Bèze on Tyranny in the Right of Magistrates

Abstract  Bèze on tyranny in the Right of Magistrates. Approximately two years after the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, Bèze produced a work that describes (somewhat veiled by his vocabulary) social and political conditions in France. His aim was to recommend that the superior magistrates have the power to depose a tyrannical king. An individual or a lower magistrate cannot commit regicide; but a constituted body of high-­ranking nobles and officials may depose a king. Caesar merited being assassinated, because he usurped power. Keywords  Bèze on tyranny • St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre • Magistrates • Caesar as a usurper • Traits of a tyrant Born in Vézelay in 1516, the son of a royal bailli, Théodore de Bèze became a brilliant student in a very strong school in Orléans that led to his reputation as a reader of ancient Greek. In 1534 he also completed a law degree at the University of Orléans.1 1  For this chapter, I have relied on the following works: R. M. Kingdon, Myths about the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 150–160; Bèze, Du droit des magistrats, ed. R. M. Kingdon (Geneva, 1971); A. Jouanna, The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, trans. J. Bergin (Manchester, 2013); J. H. Franklin, Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1969), 30–39; 100–135; P. Mesnard, L’Essor de la philosophie politique au XVIe siècle (Paris, 3rd ed., 1969), 296–326; M.  Turchetti, Tyrannie et Tyrannicide de l’Antiquité à nos jours (Paris, 2001), 424–431; S.  M. Manetsch, Theodore

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After moving to Paris and marrying clandestinely, Bèze came down with a life-threatening sickness that led to a profound religious conversion that left him eager to spend his life fostering the Protestant faith in virtually every way possible. He moved to Geneva, the epicenter of the French Protestant Church, where he was engaged to teach Greek; but soon he became a collaborator of Jean Calvin. His life work would be teaching, writing, and leading the spiritual-political community that had sprung up in numerous areas of France, as well as elsewhere in Europe. He is to be admired for his leadership in a community where matters of doctrine were not beyond question by young, intense students who were studying to be pastors all across France. When the French government sought the possibilities for compromise and reconciliation between Protestants and Catholics, it was Bèze who came to represent the “new” religion at Poissy in 1551. The historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou comments that Bèze did not do well when he presented and defended Calvin and his views on crucial matters of faith, against the arguments made by his opponent, the Cardinal of Guise. It is not certain that either Bèze or the cardinal really sought reconciliation.2 Bèze may never really have abandoned the hope that all of France would be converted to Protestantism. Like Hotman, with whom Bèze collaborated, and like many other highly intelligent religious activists, Bèze took up the challenge to the religious, moral, and political crisis prompted by the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. His Right of Magistrates first appeared anonymously in 1574  in Heidelberg, after the Genevan religious government had refused to let him publish it in their city.3 Analytic terms such as “will,” “rights,” “duty,” “necessity,” and “legitimate” are found throughout Bèze’s works, in a very insightful and coherent philosophical prose. He has a strong sense of the available political-social vocabulary, and he is less vague than most of the writers of his day. The distinctions he draws between public life and private life make for a balance between the religious and the civil that is very understandable to readers. He notes Beza and the Quest for Peace in France,1572–1598 (Leiden, 2000), particularly strong on Bèze’s political activism, notably as Condé’s chaplain and drafter of texts, e.g., 84–91. 2  H.  O. Evennett, The Cardinal of Lorraine and the Council of Trent (Cambridge, UK, 1930). 3  In 1560, Bèze had published Le Traité de l’authorité du Magistrat en la punition des hérétiques, so the treatise called Right of Magistrates builds on a vocabulary developed prior to the massacre. Mesnard, L’Essor, 308–26.

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that some persons may be called by God (Max Weber!) to carry out specific divine missions, but that this fact in no way raises them above the law or gives them a special rank in the Huguenot churches. Like Hotman, Bèze adopts the two-bodies distinction, the person of the king being one body, and the kingship (or the office of monarch) the other. For Bèze, the origin of all legitimate power is divine, and it is perpetually held by the people.4 Things are made by the people, not the other way around. What is a magistrate? “The magistrate is the one who with the consent of the citizens is ordered protector of the peace and public tranquility.”5 The magistrate also has the duty to foster desirable living conditions for everyone in the city or republic. Indeed, a king is only an individual—in effect, a magistrate with the greatest amount of (sovereign) power. Bèze takes up the question of defining what is meant by “people,” and by what rights magistrates may act against a tyrant. Ancient Roman institutions and customs become the background for Bèze’s definitions supplemented by biblical and early-Christian sources. The distinctions between the people and the citizens are strong. There are private persons who have no power at all, but who are in the people and can act collectively in the founding of a republic and magisterial offices. There are the higher or superior magistrates and the lower magistrates, the latter being between citizens who do not hold an office, and the inferior magistrate. In fact, Bèze defines the superior magistrates as all high-­ ranking officials who have very early historical origins: constables, for example; and he includes the peers, because they are hereditary, as titled nobles are.6 The lesser royal officials and the mayors and town councilors constitute the inferior magistrates, in effect, the members of the third estate in an estates-general; but for Bèze they were a second estate, because there would be no first estate, that is, the clergy. Bèze’s constitution has no specific corporate or individual membership of pastors— whose powers also come from God through the people, but do so through constitutions.

4  For a general discussion of arguments founded on power held by the people, see G. Boas, Vox Populi (Baltimore, 1969). 5  Mesnard, L’Essor, 311. 6  Turchetti, Tyrannie et Tyrannicide, 426; Franklin, 110.

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Bèze recognized that magistrates might disagree with the citizen who lodges a complaint against an individual who, his conscience tells him, is a tyrant; or magistrates (superior ones) may disagree among themselves. Redress might occur by the action of an estate or an assembly of superior magistrates, but at this point the type of tyrant informs the analysis. For Bèze, there are the usual two types of tyrants. There is the usurper of power without any legitimacy, and there is the tyrant who has legitimate power as king, prince (or governing body, as in Switzerland), and who begins to govern in his own interest rather than in the interests of the people. In the first instance, if no one acts to depose or mitigate the exercise of illegitimate power by the magistrate, the citizen himself cannot, in good conscience, kill the tyrant. In the second instance, the magistrate must use his powers to restrain the prince who is becoming a tyrant, and to convince him to mend his ways. If there is no amelioration, the citizen has no recourse but to live beneath the tyrant’s rule. Bèze quotes Saint Peter and Saint Paul to the effect that the citizen on his own cannot resist or otherwise eliminate tyrannical power. But if the superior magistrates agree with the appellant, the magistrates who are meeting for an estates may lawfully act to depose a legitimate prince who has become a tyrant, a manifest tyrant. Bèze added the adjective “manifest,” demonstrating confidence that not only the people but also the magistrates would recognize the abuse of power, so that after a deposition, a new king may be elected. Cast in a carefully constructed framework that moves from divine authority as constituted in divine law, on to natural law, and then to magisterial powers, there is also a principle of duty in the actions taken by the magistrates on behalf of the people. Bèze’s ideas about the nature of power, of human nature, and of all action are such that a detailed description of the tyrant as a monster did not seem necessary. And, of course, all divine action is good; but that is not true of kings, who are, after all, mere humans. Julius Caesar merited being assassinated.

CHAPTER 20

Bodin on Tyranny in the Six Books of the Republic

Abstract  Bodin on tyranny in the Six Books of the Republic (1576). A polymath and pursuer of general patterns in events and laws, and in history, religion, and nature, Bodin, a jurist, takes the Aristotelian frames about governance and caps them all by a definition of sovereign, absolute power. A tyrant is a king who exploits his subjects while being afraid of them; and they fear him. He rules solely for his own benefit and is above the law. Keywords  Bodin on tyranny • Sovereignty • Traits of a tyrant Born in 1529/1530 in Angers to a family of cloth merchants and lawyers, Jean Bodin had the means to pay for his education in Paris and then in Toulouse.1 Attracted at an early age by universals, Bodin carried out various large-scale learned quests that would culminate in works with very general themes such as the Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, which he published in 1566, at the age of thirty-six. Two years later he published his Response to the Paradoxes of Master Malestroit on the Rising Cost of Everything, an influential study of what would later be known as “inflation.” In the full title, Bodin describes himself as an advocate to the court. 1  H.A. Lloyd, Jean Bodin (Oxford, 2017), an immensely learned and beautifully written work that contains little or no comment on Bodin’s view on tyranny.

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The Six Books of the Republic, Bodin’s most influential book, appeared in 1576. H.W. Lloyd, his most recent biographer, writes about the context: “It was against an immediate background of controversy conducted in heated terms and violent unrest that he completed and published the Six Books of the Republic.”2 In 1586 Bodin published a Latin version that he himself had translated. He was involved in political activism intermittently throughout his life, but what interested him most would be the pursuit of ordering and the setting down of knowledge (savoir). For example, major works that discuss comparative religions,3 the natural world,4 and witchcraft5 were published prior to his death in 1596. Bodin’s thought about power, institutions, and tyranny is deeply and interestingly Aristotelian. In constructing the term “sovereignty” into a very strong concept, his answer to religious and civil turmoil was the absolute royal state.6 It is in Book II of the Six Livres de la République (Six Books of the Republic) that Bodin presents and comments upon Aristotle’s Politics, starting with definitions of the forms of government and tyranny. Indebted not only for the framing of the definitions, Bodin recounts materials from various sources that are less exemplary and more exploratory. Like the Philosopher, Bodin seeks a deeper understanding of the political than definitions can offer. The results are complex and cannot be reduced to the formulaic. His sense of excitement is contagious as he explores numerous accounts of political activity where tyranny is present. Attentive throughout to how he perceives power in action, in the Six Books of the Republic, which will be read as individual topics indicated by subheading, Bodin briefly repeats his definition of the word “tyranny”: 2  The tenth edition of the Republic, which appeared in Lyon in 1594, will be relied upon here, as reprinted by the Librairie Fayard in 1986. 3  For his book on comparative religions, known as The Colloquium, see Lloyd, 240–56. 4  A. Blair, The Theatre of Nature (Princeton, 1997). 5  Lloyd, 171–89. 6  Bodin also wished to refute François Hotman’s arguments for “mixed monarchy.” Sovereignty is his term for characterizing each form of government. Puissance in French, rather than pouvoir, is the term he used to describe what the Estat has, because it emanates from the State. Bodin is aware of the differences between Plato and Aristotle over the forms of government, and which forms are more likely to become tyrannical. He rejects Polybius’s definitions of perverted forms of government.

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“For the one makes himself a sovereign prince by his own authority— without being elected or by succession, or change, or a just war, or a special calling from God.”7 And then he continues by noting that it is this type of tyrant whose death the writings and laws of antiquity envisaged. Monuments, he says, that are erected to honor tyrants should be torn down, or never built at all; and the histories written by persons in the tyrant’s pay should be torn up. Listed in a binary fashion, the tyrant does the opposite of what the good prince does: • He builds his house on the ruins of his subjects’ houses. • He cruelly avenges those who curse him. • He triumphs in the shame of chaste women. • He divides his subjects in order to ruin them. • He hides as if his subjects were enemies. • He is fearful of his subjects. • He swallows his subjects’ blood, gnaws their bones, and sucks the marrow to weaken his subjects. • He engages thieves and the wicked [for employment]. • He tramples the laws. • He is hated by everyone. • He makes war on his subjects. • He has foreign garrisons. • He keeps his subjects in perpetual fear. • He has no trust in his friends who often are treasonous and disloyal. And finally, “Tyrants’ lives are the most miserable in the world, fearing and being perpetually afraid, menaced ceaselessly, punched and seeing their status and their lives always shaken up, while hating their subjects [they] are also feared and hated by everyone.”8 Bodin recognizes that peoples are different, and that they have to be governed differently. Also, there are conditions that require a good king to govern as if he were a tyrant: the argument from necessity.

7  Bodin, Six Livres, 69. Murderers of tyrants have received great rewards. Indeed, several have been mistaken in their definitions, among them Bartolus. 8  Bodin, Six Livres, 60–61.

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When changes from one type of government to another take place, the murders, exiles, and confiscations that come about are not tyrannical. And when the prince is too easy-going (doux), the republic may be lost.9 What had happened to the Florentines under the Medici? The senators, nobles, and great lords of ancient Rome hated Domitian; but after his death, attitudes toward him became more favorable. Bodin comes down in favor of rigor and severity, rather than gentleness: “A nasty man makes a good king,” goes the proverb.10 Numerous historical examples are mentioned, including the French kings Charles III the Simple, and Charles, called Le Fainéant, “the Do-Nothing.” Bodin brings up Francis I, who was viewed as “great, rich, and flourishing in arms and laws.” Later, however, Francis became “troubled and inaccessible” so no one dared approach him to ask for something when estats (titles), offices, and benefices were only given to persons of merit and honor. In addition, gifts were cut back to such a point that when the monarch died, there was a million in gold and 700,000 écus in the treasury, and the revenues for the March quarter had yet to be collected.11 Just the opposite took place under Henry II, a monarch so gentle, so gracious and so affable that the monies saved up by the father would be quickly disbursed. Estats (titles) were put up for sale, benefices were given without respect, and judgeships went to the highest bidder.12 His goodness should have been mixed with rigor, and his easiness with austerity. There are commentaries on Solon’s and Valorius’s laws that have to do with whether the suspect tyrant has taken command of fortresses and garrisons. Sulla, the Roman dictator, took power away from the people when he had an army at his command in the city. Asking whether a tyrant may be killed, Bodin presents the usual issue, that is, how he came to power; and he implies that this makes little difference. Similarly, he recognizes that, if possible, a tyrant may be brought before a court of law and sentenced to death; but he again leaves the remark as an observation, not a requirement.

 Bodin, Six Livres, 64–67.  Bodin, Six Livres, 65. 11  Bodin, Six Livres, 66. 12  Bodin, Six Livres, 66. 9

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“Doctors and theologians,” citing Aquinas, have answered that tyrants may be killed; but Bodin does not state whether he agrees with them, or disagrees. Old-Testament accounts of tyranny and tyrannicide tell of violent and bloody acts that do not yield an emphatic answer as to whether there was divine intervention. Nebuchadnezzar was tyrannical; so was Saul, who under the influence of a malin esprit, a “malevolent spirit,” killed God’s priests without cause.13 By suspending categorical judgment, Bodin may simply have been respecting the overarching emphasis on observation, rather than approving an action that depended on specific conditions—not unlike Aristotle’s approach on the same issues. In a very weighty remark made after listing the monarchies where kings are absolute sovereigns—France, Spain, England, Scotland, Ethiopia, Turkey, Persia, and Russia—Bodin states that subjects have no right to attack their monarch either by assault (voie de fait) or by justice, that is, through the courts, no matter how wicked, impious, and cruel he may be.14 In the royal presence, magistrates no longer have authority. It is not lawful for a subject to judge his prince, or a vassal his lord, or a servant his master. The Lex Julia and lèse-majesté are mentioned just before Bodin moves on to two historical examples that are just, although they prompt a sense of pathos. A Norman gentleman during the reign of Francis I had had bad thoughts about killing the king,15 a capital crime of lèse-majesté for which he was condemned to death, despite his subsequent repentance. In another case, a monk (a Franciscan, that is, a “Cordelier”) who was “insane” (insensé) pulled out a sword against Henry II without doing him any harm. Nevertheless, despite his being “furious” (furieux), which usually was excused by law, he was sentenced to death. God’s laws and “the Julia” forbade assaulting a magistrate. Bodin scoffs at people who doubt the existence of God, and asserts that he will not waste time addressing them. He seems surprised that there are people who, despite the clarity of printed books, argue that it is possible to take up arms against a tyrannical prince. At this point, he cites Luther (and Calvin) in support of his argument, as if adopting their point of view: “a special order is received from God.”16  Bodin, Six Livres, 77.  Bodin, Six Livres, 75. 15  Bodin, Six Livres, 76. 16  Bodin, Six Livres, 78. 13 14

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Having cited some historical examples, Bodin adds: “But one must not turn this special order from God into a model for plots and rebellions by mutinous subjects against their sovereign prince…. In an upright monarchy it is never lawful to assail, or fight against, or attack the life or the honor of one’s king.” Then he adds: “We read that the Protestant princes of Germany, before taking up arms against the emperor, asked Martin Luther if it was lawful; and he bluntly replied that it was not legal, no matter what tyranny or impiety one might cite.”17 Bodin laments the ruin of many illustrious houses in Germany; he quotes Cicero; and he remarks that the emperor is not, however, a sovereign prince (as he defined one). Farther down his exhaustive list of examples, Bodin returns to Roman history, commenting that it was Cicero who passed legislation that required a dictator to be forgotten after his death, and that most of the legislation promulgated under Caesar, Nero, and Domitian remained the law. A real effort had been made to discern universal principles that could be found in various bodies of law. The historical examples he cited constituted political knowledge, irrespective of whether they conformed to principles. Here are two examples: Most tyrants are surrounded by éponges (“spongers”) and mignons (“favorites”) who become the targets of popular fury. Tiberius had Sejanus, Nero had Tigillinus, Dionysius the Younger had Philistus, King Henry of Sweden had George Preschon. In some instances, entire families—including wives, children, servants, and clients— would be killed. Their statues and the histories they had sponsored would also be destroyed. Bodin conveys something approaching a sense of wonder as he describes phenomena that seem never to have been framed into laws. A telling example is King Charles VII of France, who permitted his rebellious relative to be tried and sentenced to death for lèse-majesté. On the king’s order, the sentence was not, however, carried out. Indeed, a prince should not put someone of his own blood into the executioner’s hands: in doing so, he “forges the knife against  Bodin, Six Livres, 79.

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himself.”18 The emperors of Constantinople, and the kings of Spain and of England dirtied their hands in this way. It is far better, asserts Bodin, that for the monarch’s utmost security, people believe that the sovereign prince is holy, inviolable.19

18  Bodin, Six Livres, 86. Bodin is referring to the revolt known as the Praguerie, during which several high-ranking vassals opposed Charles in 1440. In lieu of arrests and executions, the rebels were eventually bought off. 19  Bodin, Six Livres, 86. The rest of the work would later be described as being comparative government, that is, the forms of government, the distribution of power, particularly in aristocratic (oligarchic) states: Pharsalia, the early state of Marseilles, Genoa, Geneva, the inhabitants of Ragusa, Lucca, the German empire, Nuremberg. And in the chapter about the popular state, Bodin disagrees with Aristotle concerning the social composition of the popular state; and he notes that he will find “geometric equality” among the rich and arithmetic equality among the poor.

CHAPTER 21

The Vindiciae contra tyrannos on Tyranny

Abstract  Tyranny in the Vindiciae contra tyrannos. Published anonymously and containing the most systematically argued critique of tyranny, the Vindiciae draws on biblical and ancient sources. Laws are granted to the people by God. What happens when a prince or feudal lord orders an act that is clearly contrary to divine law? Only tyrants give such orders. Over thirty attributes of tyranny are listed. Keywords  Vindiciae contra tyrannos on tyranny • Traits of a tyrant There are many works of ethical and political thought. There also are histories that contain at least some, or perhaps a large amount of, material on tyranny; but rare it is to find a work that has tyranny as its principal theme. Indeed, the word is in the title.1 The subtitle is: “Concerning the l­ egitimate 1  The edition and translation of Vindiciae by G.  Garnett (Cambridge, UK, 1994) is an exemplary work of scholarship. His painstaking verification of all the frequent borrowings and allusions to Roman and canon law requires this fact to be noted in any commentary or simple presentation of the text—a context that might be considered deterministic and constraining were it not for the presence of a great analytical mind. “In short, law is a mind, or rather a gathered multitude of minds,” 98. Julian Franklin, Introduction and translation of selected passages, in Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1969), 11–46, 138–140. Page 208 is on the question of authorship down to 1968. For a brilliant early effort, see P.  Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique (Rotterdam, 1697), 2:1286–1294. See also F. J. Baumgartner, Radical Reactionaries, the Political Thought of the

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power of a prince over the people and [sic] of the people over a prince.” There is a remarkable concentration of thought; there is no clutter, there is little effort to reach the general reader. The deeper the reader’s law studies, his reading of the Bible, and his knowledge of the early church, the deeper the understanding and appreciation of the achievement of the anonymous author. Vindiciae (the word is plural) is a legal instrument in Roman law. When used in the singular, vindicatio in libertatem defines the process of freeing a people from servitude.2 Since the author wished to be anonymous, let us respect his wishes and refer to him as “Anon.” Is it surprising to find that the book is actually more about kingship than about tyranny? There are usurpers of power who have no title or legitimacy; but if they succeed in imposing themselves upon the people, they can become like kings, or they can become actual kings, especially if they govern for the benefit of all the people, instead of increasing their own power and accumulating wealth for themselves. Anon arranges his work around four questions. The first one is whether or not subjects are bound, or ought to obey princes who command something against God’s law.3 Sometimes kings are referred to, and sometimes princes; but there do not seem to be specific differences in the general meaning of the two terms. In either instance, the people who live under these royal persons are subjects.4 In the process of working over his argument, Anon presents several political-social models that deepen the meaning of the general model: a monarch or a prince’s relations with the people. Thus feudal relations are brought in, to characterize a legitimate arrangement of powers; the same is true for the Roman-medieval principle of the tutor and his ward. The just king is also compared to the shepherd and to paternalist powers.

French Catholic League (Geneva, 1978), 142–144.; and M. Turchetti, Tyrannie et tyrannicide de l’Antiquité à nos jours (Paris, 2001), 418–442. 2  Vindiciae, Garnett, ed., xliv; L. Giavarini, ed., L’Écriture des jurists (Paris, 2010), introduction, 11–29. 3  Vindiciae, 14; A. McLaren, “Rethinking Republicanism: Vindiciae contra Tyrannos,” The Historical Journal, 49 (2006), 23–52, rightly points out that the biblical sources are of the utmost importance. 4  Garnett finds exceptions. For example, Caesar says that in Gaul there was a clear distinction between princeps and rex, a detail that Anon found in Hotman’s Franco-Gallia.

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Monarchical, feudal, and tutorial relations propose different vocabularies, yet other words or concepts remain the same throughout. Among them are: God’s law, the people, law, right, slave, nobility. As with God’s laws, all powers that determine human relations in the world come from Him, through a covenant with the people. There are laws affecting relations between peoples (Jus Gentiam), and there is a law of nature derived from being human. While kings are elected by the people, they are bound by the covenant with God5; and the people chosen by God shall worship Him with their king,6 and together they promise to obey God’s laws.7 The brief first formulations are Anon’s efforts to capture the essential features of divine, human, and community relations found in the Old Testament and, to a lesser extent, in Roman law. The law of property serves, along with feudal examples that are described in such a way that the law of God is the highest law of all. If a king orders a person to do something contrary to the law of God, the person may resist: If a prince commands that any innocent be killed, or that he be despoiled, or that violent hands be laid upon him, no-one in whom any vestige of conscience remains would wish to obey. If he demands that his crime—such as adultery, or parricide, or something of the sort—be approved, some Papinian will emerge amongst those heathens who will reproach Caracalla to his face and will choose death rather than obedience.8

The law of God applies here. It is the two tables of the law that were handed to Moses.9 If not a result of evil, the fates of those who do not obey God’s law first are tragic. Examples from the New Testament complete the chapter on the First Question. And it is human nature to do everything possible to avoid servitude. Rather than worship idols, many have died as martyrs. And there is a living religious proof that is at once  Vindiciae 18.  Vindiciae, 22. 7  There is considerable emphasis on the custom of consultation and oath-taking by the king who has been elected (chosen) by the people. Vindiciae, 134–135. For Aragon and Castille, 136–137. See P.  Mesnard, L’Essor de la philosophie politique, 3rd edition (Paris, 1977), 340 ff. It is important to point out that resistance has its own analysis, and it differs from tyrannicide. 8  Vindiciae, 30. 9  Vindiciae, 30. “The only office of emperors and kings is to show concern for the people. For royal dignity is not really an honor, but a burden; not an immunity, but a function, not a dispensation but a vocation, not licence but public service,” p. 93. 5 6

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religious and historical; indeed, there is more: “For whenever the apostles instruct Christians that they should obey, he obeyed first and foremost.”10 Kings have powers and duties that are not unlike those of a general: they protect the people, that is, their subjects,11 and they assure welfare and justice.12 However, the people themselves are not above the law13; nor did Christ’s coming change the authority of magistrates. Kings should be fathers of their country, associates of the people.14 With judicial powers comes the power of life and death over subjects. The king is the living law. The “people” in a “well-constituted” kingdom are the officers, princes, peers, politicians, magnates, and others. The powers of all of them are inferior to the king’s power, although they are more powerful collectively, as in a council, estate, or parlement.15 When they are in a corps such as an estate, they represent all the people. It is the duty of nobles to act as a constraint on kingly power. While they are all “people,” there are differences between citizens and subjects. The former live in cities and have corporate identities (my word).16 Subjects may be lofty in rank, and the king honors them as brothers who help defend all subjects.17 Fortresses are built to fend off enemies, not to intimidate subjects. Princes and peers are subjects nonetheless. Subjects are not slaves. But are not the “inhabitants of the countryside” in servitude to the nobles or to the church?18 If feudal relations between God and the king, and between the king and the nobles and the town leaders, manorial relations consist of degrees of servitude; but Anon does not discuss them. (As “part of the people,” peasants had rights?)

 Vindiciae, 32; and 129 about the covenant between king and people.  Vindiciae, 82. The doges of Venice are mentioned, as are the elective Polish kings and popes. 12  Vindiciae, 94. 13  Vindiciae, 103. 14  Vindiciae, 7. 15  Vindiciae, 47 and 86. For the powers of church chapters and councils, which are also superior to the powers of bishops and popes, see Vindiciae, 47. 16  Vindiciae, 54, 56. 17  Anon includes Aristotle’s famous anecdote about tyrants who lop off the tallest corn (wheat). Vindiciae, 123. 18  Vindiciae, 154. About the conduct of bishops: “ … for the office of bishop is in no way charged just because most bishops take from the poor what they may shower on their kings, and lay waste all estates and woodlands,” Vindiciae, 126. 10 11

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Women are scarcely present in the Vindiciae. They turn up as violators of the Salic Law: they are, therefore, tyrants.19 Elsewhere they are characterized as “lacking in self-mastery,” and as “furies” that need to be “repressed.”20 Turning to the tyrant, his technique of governance consists of “struggling, scheming, and undermining,” in order to gain power.21 His conduct is the opposite of the conduct of a just king: Tyranny is not simply a crime; it is the chief and, as it were, a sort of summation of all crimes. A tyrant overthrows the commonwealth, takes plunder from everyone together, as a whole, plots against the lives of all, breaks faith with all, and despises the entire sacred obligation of a solemn oath. So he is more wicked than any thief, robber, murderer, or sacrilegious person.22

As Anon researches examples, he is confronted with the ambiguity that history brings. There is very little on the tyranny of oligarchy, yet it is recognized as a possibility, as is the tyranny of democracy (“mob rule”).23 Aristotle’s balanced constitution (politeia) is held up as the ideal; kingship is closest to the politeia in practice.24 Anon’s understanding of Aristotle is deeper and more thoughtful than many authors whom we have read here. But the historical material includes rulers who are slow to act. No prince is perfect, and there are instances where the people put up with a great deal. Still, the longer the tendencies toward wickedness and/or incompetence, the worse that tendency becomes.25 Thanks to Professor George Garnett’s extensive and learned identifications, readers are able to imagine Anon, reading directly, or perhaps pulling together notes to be read to him from the Bible or the works of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, Bartolus of Sassoferrato, and Cicero, for the twenty-eight more or less axiomatic statements in the Third Question that define tyranny.26 Some of the statements are  Vindiciae, 142, 153; 96, 154.  Vindiciae, 154. When one has read his spouse’s Mémoires, it is difficult to believe that Duplessis-Mornay made such a comment. Her memoirs suggest not only excellent marriage relations but also a sharing of religious, political, and philosophical engagements. 21  Vindiciae, 150. 22  Vindiciae, 155. 23  Vindiciae, 147. 24  Vindiciae, 147. 25  Vindiciae, 147. 26  Vindiciae, 143–147. 19 20

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complemented by historical examples; other statements receive commentary with a view of always helping the reader contrast monarchy and tyranny. The first two statements are about the difficulties anyone confronts when trying to define tyranny, because tyranny is not rational. Kings govern by reason, tyrants know no limits to their desires (fear, power, possessions, conquest, and so forth: my words). Anon then offers an analogy from geometry: the just king is the right angle; the tyrant is like oblique angles, many and varied. Keeping to Anon’s order, here are the remaining thirty-odd attributes.27 They are translations or paraphrases of the original (but “tyrant” sometimes replaces the pronoun “he”). They have been separated for ease of reading. • A tyrant crops the tallest ears in the cornfield.28 • He often fabricates conspiracies initiated against himself, in order the more swiftly to remove these men from its midst. • He does not even spare his relatives and brothers. • A tyrant raises up against the nobles, the lowborn, and as it were, the sons of the soil, who fawn upon him and are servile to him. • A tyrant pursues eminent and just men with hatred, and holds them in suspicion. • The tyrant does not consider himself to be safe until he has corrupted the habits of all and has instituted eating houses, inns of ill repute, brothels, and gaming houses. • A tyrant either avoids or abolishes public meetings, and dreads the assembly of the estates. • … and like a bat, he flees the light of men.29 • A tyrant sets his subjects at variance with each other; he contrives, foments, and nourishes factionalism within the commonwealth. • The tyrant holds suspect the conversation, speeches, and attitudes of his subjects.

 Vindiciae, 143–47.  “Corn” in England refers to wheat. There is almost a literariness in Anon’s choosing this venerable metaphor from Aristotle’s Politics, III, xiii. 29  Garnett observes that this is Anon’s only reference to Machiavelli’s Prince, viii; and that Machiavelli is citing Aristotle. 27 28

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• A tyrant sets his subjects at variance with each other; he contrives, foments, and nourishes factionalism within the commonwealth. • A tyrant forces those whom a king protects and defends against the attacks of enemies to plunge their swords into their own innards. • A tyrant places foreigners in garrisons, and constructs fortresses against the citizens. He disarms the people, and expels them from fortifications. • He surrounds himself with barbarous and servile guards, and with public funds he hires spies and informers against his subjects like scouts against an enemy. • He thinks that he has as many guards as citizens. • In whatever way he fortifies a citadel, all the while the tyrants of tyrants—Fear and Dread—occupy, so to speak, his highest stronghold: the mind. • A tyrant has innumerable attendants and guards who keep the mob away from him, yet they may not drive away fear, suspicion, and the wretchedness and turmoil of a disturbed mind. • A tyrant wages wars abroad if civil disturbances are wanting, and he constructs fortifications … • The tyrant is always either preparing or threatening or pretending to be bent on war. In short, he is more likely to provoke it than to prevent it. • The tyrant never fishes without a golden hook30 or undertakes a war from which he may fear more danger for the commonwealth than he may expect to gain. • A tyrant applies all his artifice to draining off the resources of his subjects, so that in their anxiety for sustenance they should scarcely think about recovering liberty. • The tyrant takes away from the many in order to endow the few. • The tyrant wrecks public resources in order to build up his own; he sucks the blood of the people to the point of collapse. • The tyrant apportions food doles to the people, he does so in order that he might gut the people all the more easily afterwards. • As Holy Scripture compares the [king] to a shepherd, it likens [the tyrant] to a roaring lion, with which a fox is associated in many instances. 30  This metaphor from Suetonius on Augustus, suggests that the fish that possibly can be caught is worth less than the hook that may be lost.

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• The tyrant feigns piety toward God, which Aristotle calls the most potent of all tyrannical artifices. • The tyrant affects devotion to the commonwealth. • The tyrant feigns praise for justice and faith in certain matters … in order that he may be able to do wrong and to deceive more easily. • He attacks clemency; but in such a way that he grants a full pardon to certain evildoers. • The adroit tyrant wants to appear to be what the king actually is. Since he knows that men are inflamed by love of virtue, so he understands that they are to be deceived by the shadow of virtue. • However much a fox dissembles, the fox’s tail shows; however much he yelps, the gaping jaws and roar reveal a lion. In the end, Anon abandons the juridical and diminishes the historical examples to create an inventory of tyrannical acts that center on the person—the tyrant—with little attention to social, military, and cultural conditions that are favorable to it. In the third book, the subheading where these attributes are to be found is “Where the Tyrants Are.”31 The authorial voice becomes more personal; there is less searching for historical examples or for laws that clarify a given social-political situation: So much for tyrants by practice. We have not been concerned with their depraved habits, which are said to make not so much the evil prince as the evil man. If anyone is not satisfied with this description, then besides the more detailed portraits of tyrants which he may find in histories, he has any number of living, breathing, fully developed tyrants in many localities at the present time, whom he should consider. Aristotle complained about them in his own age.32

 Vindiciae, 140.  Vindiciae, 148. There are no citations about law in the subchapter “Who Tyrants Are.”

31 32

CHAPTER 22

Mariana on Tyranny

Abstract  Mariana on tyranny in De Rege et Regis Institutione (1599). Tyrants are evil; they enervate their people by sedentary occupations. They raise taxes and listen to flatterers. The tyrant fears his subjects, and his subjects fear him. Not just a right, but almost a duty, to kill the tyrant created possibilities for defending Henry III’s assassin, Jacques Clément. A king may be deposed by a theology faculty. Keywords  Mariana on tyranny • Henry III king of France, assassination • Jacques Clément • Traits of a tyrant Of all the commentators on tyrannicide and regicide who wrote at the turn of the century, it would be the Spanish Jesuit Juan de Mariana (1535–1627) who gained notoriety on the subject, which would last over centuries.1 Born in Toledo and educated there, Mariana became a prominent teacher and writer as a member of the Society of Jesus for life. Mariana’s almost delicate refusal to condemn Jacques Clément for assassinating Henry III of France set him apart from other writers of the day. Both his writings and his person became the subject of extensive debate in the pamphlet literature of the time. 1  R. Mousnier, The Assassination of Henry IV, tran. J. Spencer (New York, 1973). For an overview, see E.  W. Nelson, The Jesuits and the Monarchy. Catholic Reform and Political Authority in France (1590–1615) (Aldershot, 2005).

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Did Mariana condone regicide? The supervision of virtually all writings by other Jesuits, both in Spain and in Rome, created an appearance that the entire Society condemned regicide. The intervention of Spain into French politics, particularly intervention through the Holy League in Paris, had already created strong anti-Spanish sentiment. The nefarious views published by Mariana in 1599, in his De Rege et Regis Institutione Libri III, which was translated into French in 1605, set the stage for what seemed a cause-and-effect relation when Ravaillac assassinated Henry IV in 1610. His education finished, Mariana was posted to Rome, where he taught in a Jesuit school, and then to Sicily for a few years, and after that he taught in Paris and earned a doctorate in theology at the Sorbonne, the very institution which, in the early 1590s, had voted to depose Henry III as king and to appeal to the pope to support their action. Was Henry still a king after this deposition? Had a regicide in Mariana’s mind become a tyrannicide? In 1592 Mariana had published a general history of Spain down into the 1490s. Highly patriotic and eloquent in Latin, Mariana celebrated the Spanish past, especially its triumph over Islam and the spiritual intensity of its church.2 Well-connected at court, Mariana was encouraged to write a mirror of princes for the education of the young king, Philip III. The De Rege would include a lengthy reflection not only on kingship but also on tyrannicide. Beginning with descriptions of human nature, the founding of societies, and the early mythical history of the Spanish monarchy, Mariana came down in favor of kingship as the best form of government. This was certainly no surprise, but into his reflections on kingship in general, he mixed a conceit from Spanish political culture with an almost idealized form of government: a “mixed” constitution of powers shared with the monarch, powers shared with the church, and powers shared with magistrates from various institutions.3 Mariana advises that bishops be appointed to administer various aspects of the government. Not unlike Erasmus, Mariana states the characteristics of the good king, and then those of the tyrant. There is little here that surprises, except that  R. Kagan, Clio and the Crown (Baltimore, 2009), 117–123.  J. Mariana, The King and the Education of the King, trans. G.A. Moore (Washington DC, 1948), book I; G. Lewy, Constitutionalism and Statecraft during the Golden Age of Spain, a Study of the Political Philosophy of Juan de Mariana, S.J. (Geneva, 1960), 51–65. 2 3

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after bringing up what tyrants do, Mariana holds forth at length on tyrannicide, breaking the conventional order of themes characteristic of a mirror of princes. Child rearing, education, honors, finances, taxes, and so forth all follow his pointed and lengthy treatment of tyrannicide. At times Mariana seems on the brink of informing us that he wishes to be read on what was one of the currently debated issues of the day. But first, the general description of governance by a tyrant: Tyranny which is the most evil and disadvantageous type of government, as compared with the kingly, exercises an oppressive power over its subjects, and is built up generally by force. Or at least, starting from a sane beginning of a reign, the tyrant declines into vices, and especially avarice, license and cruelty. And although the duties of a real king are to protect innocence, punish wickedness, provide safety, to enlarge the commonwealth with every blessing and success, on the contrary the tyrant establishes his maximum power on himself—abandonment to boundless licentiousness and the advantages therefrom, thinks no crime to be a disgrace to him, no villainy so great that he may not attempt it; through force he brings blemish to the chaste, he ruins the resources of the powerful, violently snatches life away from the good, and there is no kind of infamous deed that he does not undertake during the course of his life.4

The king is protected by the affection of his people, and he lets citizens (sic) keep their arms and horses. Tyrants enervate their people with sedentary occupations, and the nobles with an abundance of sensual pleasures, pandering, and wine.5 The tyrant imposes heavy and unusual taxes, and he listens to flatters: Of course the tyrant fears, and the King fears. But the King is concerned for his subjects; the tyrant fears for himself, and he is afraid of his subjects, … and he forbids the citizens to congregate.6

Though the title of his next chapter is whether or not there is a right to destroy a tyrant, it narrates several historical examples of the murder of tyrants, beginning with Jacques Clément’s murder of Henry III: “a deed of remarkable resolution and an exploit to be remembered.”7 Mariana  Mariana, The King, 135.  Mariana, The King, 136. 6  Mariana, The King, 140. 7  Mariana, The King, 143. 4 5

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notes that Clément had been studying theology in a Dominican college, and that he himself was a Dominican. The tension and the militant competition between the Dominicans and the Jesuits are well-known, but at this time it was particularly intense regarding censuring. The pope had granted the Dominicans an exemption from having to submit their writings for review by the institution that was empowered to censure writings, an institution controlled by Dominicans.8 Had Clément believed that he had merely killed a tyrant, not a king? By framing Clément’s act within the Dominicans’ administration of censureship, he may have thought that the Jesuits would not and could not be held responsible for Henry III’s death.9 But Mariana continues, making the point that, in special circumstances, individuals have the right—indeed, almost the duty—to murder the tyrant who rules over him.10 Before making the case still more strongly for Clément, Mariana narrates the murderous act and, in so doing, shifts his entire work from routine and weak exemplarity, to an example that becomes so strong that it edifies. The courtiers around the wounded king stabbed Clément. Mariana says that “after being stabbed, and is prostrate on the floor, Clément says nothing, rather he is glad, as appears from his countenance, because with the deed accomplished he missed the other tortures which he feared would be due him.”11 Mariana continues: By the death of the king he made a great name for himself. A killing was expiated by a killing, and at his hands the betrayal and death of the Duke of Guise were avenged with the royal blood. Thus Clément died, an eternal honor to France, as it has seemed to very many, twenty-four years of age, a young man of simple temperament and not strong in body; but a greater power strengthened his normal powers and spirit.12

Note the “royal blood.” A king may be deposed by a theology faculty, but that does not change the blood in his veins (as Bodin similarly noted).  J.-P. Gay, Le Dernier théologien? Théophile Raynaud, (Paris, 2018).  Lewy, Constitutionalism and Statecraft, Chap. IX. 10  Turchetti, Tyrannie et tyrannicide, 473–479. 11  Mariana, The King, 143. 12  Mariana, The King, 144. 8 9

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The assessment of Henry III does not include the word “tyrant.” After returning from Poland, Henry “turned everything into a mockery.” But what was the “greater power” that culminated in disaster? Mariana supplies the answer: “Thus Fortune, or a mightier force, makes sport of human affairs.”13 There follows the analogy that although Saul had “slipped down into folly and crimes, David did not kill him.” After still more examples, Mariana observes that “Besides, we reflect, in all history, that who ever took the lead in killing tyrants was held in great honor.”14 And after still more examples, he adds: “A tyrant is like a beast, wild and monstrous [who] lays everything waste, seizes, burns, and spreads carnage and grief with tooth, nail, and horn.”15 The ordering of the attributes of the good king, followed by those of the tyrant, reminds us of Erasmus, as does reference to the tyrant as a monster. For his readers, in his own lifetime, it would have been his vivid account of Clément’s act that would be remembered, rather than the more specific attributes of the tyrant. From the 1560s onward, the Paris Parlement had opposed teaching by the Jesuits. The reverend fathers eventually lost the right to reside in France. Early in the reign of Henry IV their appeal to return provoked opposition that was finally overcome in 1603, just about in time to settle in before Ravaillac’s murder of Henry IV unleashed a new and even more virulent outburst among the judges of the Parlement and a public outcry against the Jesuits. The De Rege was ordered publicly burned.16 Mariana’s views on kingship and tyranny do not belong to the genre of political theology. The obvious casuistry in the phrase “the greater power strengthened his [Clément’s] normal powers and spirit”—Fortune—led to inferences that were just the opposite of those who argued that Clément had had divine support in his action against a king who was no longer a king owing to the decrees of the Sorbonne and the Holy League. Popes claimed, in general, the power to depose a king. There would be dithering in Rome about the League’s appeals to depose Henry. Only after the critical attacks against the Jesuits in Paris did the Spanish king 13  Mariana, The King, 144. When readers in 1605 found the word “Fortune” on the page before them, did they think of the great French poems of the Renaissance that contain that word? Did they think of Machiavelli’s Prince? 14  Mariana, The King, 146. 15  Mariana, The King, 147. 16  Mousnier, The Assassination, 32–43.

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Philip III’s principal minister, Lerma, persuade the king to have Mariana arrested and tried for treason. Philip appealed to Rome for a decision to have Mariana executed or not, but it never came. So Mariana went on writing, criticizing Jesuit governing instead of tyrants, until his death in 1624.

CHAPTER 23

Jean Boucher on Tyranny in the True History of Henry de Valois

Abstract  Boucher on tyranny in the True History of Henry of Valois. A radical member of the Paris League, a scholar at the Sorbonne, and a parish priest, Boucher’s activism stemmed from an immense need to restore religious uniformity in France. The Henry of Valois in question is the deposed King Henry III. The Sorbonne voted to free the French from their fidelity to him. Boucher and his colleagues wrote long briefs addressed to the pope, to recommend that he excommunicate the king. This work contains quite shocking illustrations designed to mobilize opinions in favor of deposition or abdication. Boucher’s list of what tyrants do consists of sixty malfeasances and crimes, some so lurid and scabrous that they reveal his extreme effort to attract as many individuals as possible to his cause. Keywords  Boucher on tyranny • League, Parisian • Henry III king of France, assassination • Traits of a tyrant Historians today1 remain puzzled, as did the Parisians who underwent traumatic, violent, collective/individual experiences during the years when 1  D. Crouzet, Les Guerriers de Dieu, la violence au temps des troubles de religion, vers 1525– vers 1610, 2 vols (Paris, 1990); A. Jouanna, Le Pouvoir absolu (Paris, 2013); A. Jouanna, The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, trans, J.  Bergin (Paris 2007, Manchester, 2013); B. Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross; Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris (New York, 1991). For a valuable comparative political-philosophical approach, E.  Barnavi, “La

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the Holy League was wielding supreme power in the French capital. Words such as “fanatical,” “hysterical,” “wrenching,” “bloody,” and “violent” can be found in all the works about the League; and quite frequently the sermons and the intense political activity of Jean Boucher are mentioned.2 In the pages that follow, I wish to propose a particular interpretation and apology for Jean Boucher’s writings and career, down to 1590. This interpretation is grounded on a sympathetic regard for intense activism in the face of an immense and catastrophic crisis that Parisians confronted in the years between the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572 and the halting restoration of increased political and social stability by Henry IV, circa 1595. As we explore Boucher’s invective (not a neutral term), the portrait of this intensely engaged, brilliantly effective person emerges and goes far beyond what might be considered normative political-spiritual engagement. He wanted the Duke of Guise to defeat the Huguenot armies, and he energetically opposed the Crown’s every effort to compromise. An active founding member of the newly recreated League institutions, he does not seem to have used his influence to halt the more radical, almost individual initiatives, such as Bussy-Leclerc’s arrest of parlementaires. In the end, it would be Boucher’s writings about King Henry III, along with the authority conferred by his membership in League assemblies and at the Sorbonne, and his position as a parish priest, that sets him heroically above the typical learned League radicals. Throughout the Ancien Régime, relations between preachers and kings were not infrequently tense and confrontational.3 It is difficult to shed some light on these clashes, but in many instances it was the bold moral and religious content of a sermon that unleashed royal tongues.4 Jean Ligue Parisienne (1585–94), ancêtre des partis totalitaires modernes?” French Historical Studies, 11 (1979), 29–57. See also R. Knecht, Hero or tyrant? Henry III, King of France (1574–1589) (Aldershot, 2014); J.M. Constant, La Ligue (Paris, 1996); and N. Le Roux, 1er août, un regicide au nom de Dieu (Paris, 2006). 2  For the general background on possible relations between preaching and violence, see, chap. 7. See also C. Labitte, De la democratie chez les prédicateurs de la Ligue (Paris, 1841). 3  L.  Taylor, “Comme un chien mort, Images of Kingship in French Preaching,” in N. Ravitch, ed., Proceedings: Western Society for French History (Riverside, 1995), 157–70. For a sample of one of Boucher’s sermons, see N.  Roelker, One King, One Faith: the Parlement of Paris (Berkeley, 1996), 388–89. 4  G. Couton, La Chair et l’âme: Louis XIV entre ses maîtresses et Bossuet (Paris, 1995). See the general discussion of the League clergy and Boucher by E.  Barnavi, Le parti de Dieu (Brussels, 1980), esp. 29–34; F. Baumgartner, Radical Reactionaries: The Political Thought

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Boucher (1551–1646) not only preached before the new king who had just returned from Poland, he was also present at Henry’s rapidly organized coronation, which became a confrontation. Known for his very stirring sermons, Boucher became what amounted to a founding member of the Seize, the “Sixteen,” the most important governing body that the League would establish. He would also be a member of its General Assembly, as well a member of the city militia, and a member of the Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris, that is, the Sorbonne. In addition, he became the curate of the parish of Saint-Benoit, which not only was situated in the center of the capital but which also lay in the residential district that was the heartland of the League. This member of an elite judicial family would risk exile (if not death) in the name of his principal cause: eliminating heresy from France.5 Had it not been for the intense religious and political divisions and the violence of civil war, Boucher might simply have spent his life doing the work of a curate and occasionally preaching beyond his parish. The need to reach more people in Paris and beyond would transform him into a writer for the rest of his life.6 While not proposing a complete Gallican reform manifesto, Boucher did seek to change what he viewed as too much authority and too much power having been taken from the church and given to the state. The ordering of the citations7 in his more learned works is that of a political theologian: biblical and early-church sources come first. His role in drafting appeals to the pope, in an attempt to convince him to excommunicate King Henry III, is submerged in the collective drafting done by the Faculty of Theology of Paris, an aim consistent with Boucher’s own aims down to 1590.8 In January 1589, the Sorbonne decreed that Frenchmen’s oath of fidelity to the king was abrogated.9 of the French Catholic League (Geneva, 1976), esp. 123–25; R.  Descimon, Qui étaient les Seize? (Paris, 1983). 5  He would, in fact, be exiled to Brussels where he would accept support from the king of Spain. Having authored numerous other works, he died in 1646 at the age of ninety-five. R. Descimon and F. Havier Ruiz Ibáñez, Les Ligueurs de l’exile (Paris, 2005), 262. 6  I have not been able to consult J. J. Servelo, “Jean Boucher, ou la théocratie révolutionnaire” doctoral thesis in public law, University of Aix-Marseille, 2001. 7  T. Lange, The First French Reformation (New York, 2014). 8  C. Zwierlein, The Political Thought of the French League and Rome, 1585–1589 (Geneva, 2016), (that is, J.  Boucher, De Defectione), particularly strong on the contextual framing from Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. 9  Zwierlein, 140, notes the similarity of language between the collective pronouncement of the Sorbonne and Boucher’s work published in 1589. This is curious: I know of no oath that all Frenchmen swore to their king.

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Boucher accepts papal plenitude of power on the issue of whether popes have the power to excommunicate kings; but otherwise he accepts Tradition and canon law. Yet the arguments drafted regarding excommunication would not really be acceptable to the theologians of the Curia.10 In this deeply questioning and exhilarating moment for fervent Leaguers, Boucher and his fellow masters in theology produced several hundred pages of learned prose, grounded on a plethora of sources. Irrespective of the speed at which a researcher worked in the sixteenth century, no one researcher could have produced such thoughtful scholarship in the space of a few months. It is also possible that Boucher and his colleagues were heavy borrowers from some yet-to-be-identified books. How to sway opinions in Rome? How to sway opinions in France?11 How to find an authority that was both religious and historical, and that could justly depose a king on the grounds of tyranny? This was not a mere exercise in learning; it was a search for convincing legal-political and spiritual answers to the crisis in which France found itself. The De Defectione12 (“Failure,” or “Defect”) remained in manuscript until 2016. The opening words are: “That he is a tyrant”; and the first theme is how a king becomes a tyrant.13 The king’s name is not mentioned at this point: he is described as being someone who “refers in all matters to the devil with cruelty, injustice, impotency, wickedness, and hate.”14 There is prosecutorial questioning throughout the text: “Is it allowed to expel a tyrant” is followed by a comment about a “raving individual” who takes a sword to the tyrant. Is an innocent stopped from killing himself? The insane individual who murders unjustly? Exceptional, indeed abhorrent, contrary actions are presented as the context for the argument that tyrannicide can be rational. The corresponding theme is whether the people can deprive a tyrant of his dignities and his life. After the exceptional and non-legal comes the central question being posed. It is followed by historical examples and

 Zwierlein, 162–65.  In the four works generally recognized as part of the campaign to depose or criticize Henry III, there is a shift from anonymity (the Sorbonne) to an author, Boucher, in the De Justa abdicatione. 12  The full title is: De juste populi gallici Henrico tertio defection. 13  Zwierlein, 207. 14  Zwierlein, 207. 10 11

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commentary that range from Cicero, Plato, Aquinas, John of Salisbury, and on to Thomas More’s translation of Lucian.15 At the end of Part II, there is a quotation from the Council of Constance and this comment: “It is an error of faith.” And in morals to say that any tyrant can and most deservedly be killed by any vassal or subject and by whatever kind of plots, despite any oath or confederation sworn and made with him, without waiting for a sentence, or the declaration of the judge. We do in fact embrace that verdict of the Council, as we say that it is a sacrilege to kill a man no matter how impious he might be by way of perjury. On what concerns the sentence not to be waited for, more will be said here below. But we explain that passage [i.e., the decree of the Council] here in this moment like this: a sentence has to be waited for, as long as there is a superior present who oversees all wisely. But if there is no such superior and if the situation is urgent on all levels, then one must provide for the welfare of the republic in all possible ways, so that following him and war then be justly waged. And it has to be stated that he has to be killed, if possible, in a public way, and if that is not possible and if the danger is urgent manifestly and openly, this has to be done in any way, except the [forbidden] means of perjury. Now we must see to what degree Henry descended to the point that he has to be called a tyrant. Henry is a tyrant. [. . . ]16

The authors of the Defect do not list the actions of Henry III that they consider tyrannical. Boucher will do this, and do it at great length in the next text that will be presented here: The Vie et Notables faits de Henry de Valois. The third and final part of the Defect adds more argument and more examples to what has been presented in the second part. The reader of Part III is prepared to learn just what Henry has done as a tyrant, but instead the question is posed: Is some (legal) judgment necessary before a tyrant can be killed, should deposition prove impossible? Here again one finds further arguments and citations that favor the possibility of murdering Henry III.17

 Zwierlein, 160.  Zwierlein notes that Boucher and his colleagues did not use Calvinist monarchomach sources to work out their argument about poplar sovereignty. Zwierlein, 235. 17  Zwierlein, 230–37. The title of the last paragraph reads: Finis huius defectionis, which the censor for the Sorbonne translated as: “The end of this deposition, signed Legoux.” A cursory search for his name on the lists of Leaguers was negative. 15 16

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The major clerk and scribe for the faculty has had the “treatise” examined and has found “the taking of arms against [Henry] to be just.” Then, curiously, he adds: “Otherwise they have found nothing to be deviant from doctrine.”18

La vie et Notables faits de Henry de Valois The authorship of this virulent tirade19 is uncertain, but it seems to be part of Boucher’s logical evolution in genres between Gaveston and Justa abdicatione. Boucher’s Defectione ends with a list of the reasons for deposing or murdering Henry III. Boucher’s Gaveston discusses a person, a favorite who is loathed by the League: Épernon, the king’s most occasionally effective advisor. The Justa abdicatione quickly descends into ad hominem attacks. There are strong similarities between the lists of crimes in the Vie et Notables faits and the lists in the Justa abdicatione. The Vie et Notables faits was destined for French readers; the Justa abdicatione for learned readers who knew Latin. There are similar underlying themes in the Vie and the Juste abdication. First, Henry III’s attitudes and his policies toward heretics have impeded, if not stopped, their suppression (and military defeat). Second, Henry himself is a heretic and an atheist inclined to the new religion. In addition, Henry is a dissimulator. The Sorbonne’s decree had released the French from their fidelity to Henry. Consequently he no longer was a king. There is also a general argument or assertion that spiritual power is stronger than secular or profane power; that the pope has the power to excommunicate Henry; and that the French people have the power to depose or murder him. Henry’s crimes, as listed in the Vie, are sometimes presented as paraphrases and sometimes as quotes. There is not a single favorable remark about this king who is no longer king. There are woodcut illustrations to which the author refers in his text.20  Zwierlein, 237.  Vie et faits notables de Henry de Valois, with an introduction by K.  Cameron (Paris, 2009). It is also in Cimber and Danjou, Archives curieuses de l’Histoire de France (Beauvais, 1836), first series, XII, 415–83. I cite Cameron’s edition, which has greater availability. 20  The Vie de Henry Valois has the characteristics of a work that is attempting to reach infrequent or less well-prepared readers. Dictation may help explain the repetitions in the list of crimes, and the sense of urgency as well. 18 19

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• The Lorraine [princes and cardinals] have preserved his crown for him. • He is a coward who seeks to destroy the Catholic Church. • He has lewd affections. • He is surrounded by flatterers and mignons. • Voluptuousness. • Malversations. • Ransoms. • Sacrileges. • Abductions. • The rape of sacred virgins. • Underhanded help given by the king to heretics. • Treason. • Cruelties. • Murders. • Assassinations [usually committed by Henry’s forty-five elite guards]. • He divulged the king’s [Charles IX’s] secret about the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. • He supported the Huguenots of La Rochelle during the siege [of 1572]. • He is responsible for changes in the [royal] finances. • He borrowed money and used the relics of the Sainte Chapelle as collateral. • He fails to proceed against Protestants. • He is full of pride and scornful of the nobility. • He has had railings installed around his throne in the Turkish manner. • The holy Ampulla [with its oil] was absent at his coronation. • He does not touch [to cure sickness]. • He makes improper gestures. • On the pretext that the crown hurts him, it fell off [his head] twice. • He is in secret intelligence with heretics. • He raises revenues on the pretext of necessity and the people are impoverished. • He wants two religions in his realm. • The edict on the coinage [benefits the Crown]. • The mignons are insupportable spendthrifts who duel with one another. • Quelus [Caylus] is killed in a duel and Henry commissions a very large, expensive monument to him. Maugiron is jealous. [The first reference to Henry as a tyrant occurs here].

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• He ought to have completed his father’s funeral monument. • The Polish Estates-General declared Henry a traitor, a perjurer, incapable, indigene; his coats of arms are attached to a horse wearing the Polish crown as it progresses through the muddy streets of Cracow. He is not helping to reform the church. • Nogaret de La Valette has become a mignon who scorns princes. • Sacrileges, prodigalities, avarice, thefts, assassinations, lewdness, sexual encounters, abductions, rapes of sacred girls, perfidiousness, treasons, blasphemies, scorn for divine ordonnances, magic, atheism [have appeared at his court]. • He is like Caligula, Heliogabalus, and Nero. • He excludes the Guises [from his court] and has mignons and naked women. • He visits convents where he seduces virgins. • His Forty-five [guards] are cruel and bloody. • There are naked bodies in the rivers. • The Lyonnais sent their wives from the city for security when he came to visit. • He coerces the Parlement to create more and more offices. • The first president of the Parlement, Christophle de Thou, suffered a royal reproach and died of déplaisir. • He had poor relations with his brothers [Charles IX and Anjou], who died as a result. • Épernon, the favorite – Séjanus. • Guise pays attention to the Huguenots [to maintain the upper hand for the king]. • He raises troops in Germany. • Elizabeth of England could not have put Mary, Queen of Scots, to death without the connivance of Henry of Valois. • He feigns to accept changes that strengthen the Guises. • The king uses treason against the Guises. • He makes a dissimulating speech to Guise. • He is an atheist. • He is a coward. • The king seeks to introduce atheism tainted by the new religion. Just before the Vie continues on to a list of crimes, there is a more formal prose narrative about the major events of Henry’s reign, especially the present situation (summer, 1589).

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In the Sainte Chapelle Henry begins to laugh before the relics and says that Jesus must have had a very big head, because the crown of thorns is so big.21 After describing Épernon’s anti-Guise activities, and noting the Guises’ intense popularity, the subject shifts to Henry’s dissimulation toward the Guises during the Estates-General at Blois.22 According to Boucher, Guise had sold land for 120,000 écus to prepare and supply an army that would defeat the Huguenots. He defeated them at Auneau in 1587. He had received only 12,000 écus from the Crown. Although dominated by the League, the Estates had not put up funds for a major campaign.23 For the Leaguers, the divine presence in Guise’s actions was manifest in his trust in the royal word. For Boucher, the assassinations of the Duke of Guise and his brother the Cardinal confirmed that Henry de Valois had not only lost his status as a king, but he also was a diabolical presence. He asks: “What makes tyrants so murderous? Is it their obsession with their own security, which they always mistrust? And their cowardly heart does not supply any other means of reassurance than exterminating those who could offend them.” Thus, when Boucher seeks to comprehend Henry’s tyrannical conduct, he remains first and foremost within the frame of human-political experience. Henry de Valois did not seem to him to be possessed. However, the final paragraph consists of another list. It begins: “treasonous [acts], perfidious [acts], larcenous [acts], sacrilegious [acts], extorsions, and shameful [acts] by which he put the entire French people in despair; but helped by God’s spirit, they are taking courage and hope that by his Holy Grace they will shake off the yoke of tyranny.”24

21  Vie, 94–99. The author relies on memory for his chronology: environ ce temps is frequently mentioned. See the brief overview of the crisis, M.  Wolfe, Walled Towns and the Shaping of France (New York, 2009), 104–113. 22  Here is evidence of when the text was drafted. The Estates-General of Blois opened October 16, 1588, and closed on January 16, 1589. The Guises were “executed” December 23–24, 1589. Henry was murdered August 1, 1589. The De Abdicatione was approved August 17, 1589. 23  Vie, 115. 24  Vie, 146. K. Cameron, Henry III, a Maligned or Malignant King? (Exeter, 1978).

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The Justa abdicatione If the people elect the king, they can also depose him.25 The Justa abdicatione has some of the characteristics of a legal brief or a factum; but instead of being addressed to a court of law, it speaks to the people to whom it is effectively addressed. A tremendous sense of urgency had already developed in the League’s effort to get rid of (depose) Henry III. It became still more intense after the assassination of the Guise brothers (“execution,” was the word used by the radical absolutists) on December 23–24, 1588. The Justa abdicatione seems to have been almost complete when Valois was killed by Jacques Clément on August 1, 1589. Boucher took this action into account before publication, because tyranny might well become a threat if the French people shifted their support to Henry of Navarre after what could only be a short reign of Charles, Cardinal de Bourbon, who was sometimes styled as Charles X.26 Just how legal-civil or legal-canonical Boucher meant to be in the different parts of the De Justa abdicatione is a question that does not concern us; but there was a procedure called a “dénonciation” which emanates from an ecclesiastic who is, by virtue of his office, entrusted with calling attention to criminal facts: the [royal] judge is then obliged to begin prosecution.27 The historical examples come from the Bible, the early church, and Roman history. There is little providentialism. Should one translate abdicatione as “renunciation” or as “deposition”?28 The subject is Henry de Valois, and abdication connotes an action on his part. Deposition connotes action done to the accused by another person 25  The full title is De Justa Henrici tertii abdicatione e Francorum regno (Paris: Nicolas Nivelle, 1589). The League printer chose especially fine type fonts, vignettes and illustrated capitals (Roman, Italic, Greek), with marginalia to help readers with citations and topics. F. Baumgartner points out that it is dedicated to the Universus toto Orbe Christiani, and that the Latin text is addressed to the intelligentsia of Europe, 126. Barnavi describes the strong supervision by the League of all printed matter, 176. The Permission is signed by Senault, and not only the Sorbonne but also the Assembly of the League gave its approbation, August 1, 1589, Zwierlein, 59–77. The Weill and Baumgartner readings are from the perspective of the history of political thought. Turchetti’s is centered on the topic of tyranny, but his description of tyranny is quite brief. 26  He died May 9, 1590. 27  A. Laingui and A. Lebigre, Histoire du Droit Pénal (Paris, 1979), 48–49. 28  P.  Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique (Rotterdam, 1697), 1:642 uses the word déposition.

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or entity. In Boucher’s title, the subject is still referred to as Henry III, despite the Sorbonne’s decision of December 16 stipulating that a bad king can be deposed. Would a deposition by the League have rendered useless the attempt to convince the pope to excommunicate Henry; and it would have been not a little offensive toward papal authority? After a first volley of assertions and arguments about the “powers of the intelligent people,” and about how the king holds his power from the people, Boucher gives numerous examples of elected kings drawn from sacred history. There are examples of deposed kings, including some from profane history. Is deposition to be done by the church, or by majestas, that is, the state? The authority of the church is higher, greater. Henry III’s crimes fill more pages than the arguments about authority fill. The lists are reminiscent of those given by Erasmus in his Education of the Christian Prince, although there was no specific prince in mind. This is not to suggest that Boucher was inspired by Erasmus’s lists of crimes. In Book II there are ten reasons that give the church power to depose a king: perjury, assassination, parricide, murder, promotion of heresy, schism, simony, sacrilege, magic, impiety. They all justify ecclesiastical anathema. For a king, they bring the equivalent of excommunication.29 While Boucher gives still more details about Henry’s crimes in Book III, he finally turns to narrating such recent events as Henry’s assassination by Jacques Clément, and the way the world universally deems this act to be a tyrannicide.30 Beneath the principal crimes lie other crimes dispersed throughout the historical examples. Boucher does not accept the decrees of the Council of Trent. Machiavelli is mentioned (123, 185), for example, in the context of Henry’s study of Julian the Apostate (215). Henry is described as being ungrateful, inhuman, arrogant (superbia), dull, and impious toward the dead (208). He also creates factions (236), does not honor the nobility, and shows no solicitude for the people. He prepares for a defensive war when he should be preparing for an offensive one (236). He is on favorable terms with the heretic king of Navarre (285).  De Justa abdicatione, 127v. Turchetti, Tyrannie et tyrannicide, 464.  Book IV consists mainly of documents regarding Pope Sixtus’s acceptance of the charges listed in an appeal from the League. There is a solemn warning that the king’s excommunication might be forthcoming. There are separate charges against Henry, addressed to the French church (274v), the nobility (278), and the commons or plebes (280). In his final word addressed to all the Catholics in Gaul, Boucher cannot give up his repetitious listings of Henry’s crimes. 29 30

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Boucher comes upon the famous Roman-law tag: Quod principi placuit . . . ,31 which he characterizes as tyrannical. He understands that the power of majestas is incarnate (my word) in the estates and assemblies, not in the office of king.32 Boucher then arrives at the question of whether a king can be murdered. It is not quite an afterthought, but his principal effort is to collect historical examples from both sacred and profane sources. He mentions that Cicero gives several examples, then notes that Coligny (who is not a king) and William of Orange (who is not a king) were killed or ordered killed by Charles IX and Philip II of Spain. The tyrant who is legitimate cannot be killed by one individual unless that individual is carrying out a public judgment to that effect. For Boucher, then, a public judgment is not necessary for killing a usurper. He is treated, as if he were a mere thief who breaks into a house and can be killed by anyone (176). For his murder of the king, Clément claimed divine authority. The League would consider him a martyr and saint. When Chastel attempted to murder Henry IV, Boucher wrote a public apology for the action. Exiled to Brussels along with several other League activists, Boucher accepted financial support from the king of Spain and would continue to spew forth fulminations until his death in 1646 at the age of ninety-five. Accusations of tyranny and apostacy would continue,33 as would attempts on the king’s life. Ravaillac succeeded in May 1610.

 Juste abdicatione, 154v; Turchetti, Tyrannie et tyrannicide, 465.  Turchetti, Tyrannie et tyrannicide, 465. O. Carpi notes that Boucher does not explicitly call for Henry’s murder, Les Guerres de Religion (Paris, 2012), 487. It is certainly correct that Boucher strongly favored deposition over murder. Was Henry already dead at this late point in the writing? 33  R.  Mousnier, The Assassination of Henry IV, tr. J.  Spencer (New York, 1973). For a thoughtful analytical overview, D.A. Bell, “Unmasking the king,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 20 (1989), 371–86; and S.  Daubresse and R.  Haan, eds., La Ligue et ses frontières (Rennes, 2015). 31 32

 Afterthoughts: An End to a Beginning

Coincidences and similarities are always striking. They inspire reflection— and often wonder—in the mind of this historian. Here one marvels at the continuity of the vocabulary about abuses of power, actions that are briefly described across the centuries, often in commonplaces. With a reluctant but necessary morceaux-choisis approach, and doing a close reading (but never quite close enough), and with biographical and historical contexts that are all too brief, observing human self-interest and abusive self-­ aggrandizement was constituted into lists of varying lengths, but with a strange and similar hermeneutic intensity and depth of perception. Learning (again) about the strengths of the commonplace is a first point for reading most, if not quite all, premodern writings about power and human nature. While the degrees of engagement in civic life vary with each commentator over a life time, this engagement is present in all the writer-­philosophers addressed here. Measuring the intensity of political activism cannot be done without attention to all of a given author’s works and to lengthy contextual research. What is deemed fiction may convey a closer and deeper vision of what was truly believed than the work that is proposed as a learned comment on that same theme. And then there is the problem of the meaning of the word “power”: is coercion acceptable or unacceptable over individuals, armies, administrations, citizens, or subjects? It is commented upon elsewhere, no doubt in their works, and commented upon

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at length. The meaning of power is generally only implicit in the lists of tyrannical actions. Among the many tasks yet to be done is a close reading of the lists themselves, beginning with the ordering of themes. Are the points that are mentioned first the most significant points about breaches of customs, justice, and the sense of well-being? Numerous other questions of this type come to mind. To what extent are the lists developed or influenced by listening to what was being said in the street, in the agora, at court, in the cloister, in the militia quarters? Much could be said about how the lists of tyrannical actions need more context in the light of the author’s more theoretical concerns. In On Principalities, Machiavelli conjoins the tyrant and the prince, in founding new states. And Hobbes will argue for the uniquely personal disinterestedness (my word) of the individual as a desirable qualification for a ruler. But the transhistory of the issues raised by the lists of tyrannical actions obviously requires breaks that are arbitrary and unjustifiable. Dionysius I the Tyrant returns here for the last time, with some words from the greatest collection of commonplaces in the Renaissance, the Essays of Michel de Montaigne: “‘And I, said Pollio, ’am keeping quiet; it is not wise to be a scribe against a man who can proscribe.’ They were right. For Dionysius, because he could not match Philoxenus in poetry, and Plato in prose, condemned the one to the quarries and sent the other to be sold as a slave on the island of Aegina.”1

1

 “The Disadvantage of Greatness,” Essays, tr. D. Frame (Stanford, 1948), III:7, 703.

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Index

A Absolute monarchy, 40, 41, 72, 73, 81, 82, 128 Acropolis, 22 Aeschylus, 9 Agathocles, 77 Albertus Magnus, 49, 60 Alexander VI, Pope, 75 Alexander the Great, 7, 67, 84, 85, 93 Anjou, Duke of, 156 Appian, 86 Appius, 75 Aquinas, see Thomas Aquinas Aristocracy, 73, 74 Aristophanes, 9 Aristotle, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 13, 17–23, 34, 41, 46, 49–51, 54, 56, 59–69, 81, 88, 90–93, 110, 111, 117, 128, 131, 139, 142 Athens, 8, 26, 75, 93, 117 Aubigné, Agrippa, 8 Augustine of Hippo, 46, 53, 60, 61 Auneau, Battle of, 157 Avicinna, 60 Avignon, 62

B Babbit, Susan M., 62 Barker, Ernest, 18, 59, 69 Bartolus of Sassoferrato, 56, 139 Becket, Thomas, 45 Bellay, Joachim du Belloy, Pierre de, 105 Benedict, St., 151 Benedict XIII, 112 Bible, 5, 41, 92, 125, 136, 139, 151, 158 Bodin, Jean, 4, 5, 7, 127–133, 146 Boniface VIII, 54 Borgia, Cesare, 75, 76 Bosworth Field, Battle of, 99 Boucher, Jean, 5, 106, 149–160 Bruni, Leonardo, 41, 42, 61 Buckingham, Duke of, 99 Budé, Guillaume, 6, 65, 67, 69, 83–86 Burckhardt, Jacob, 39, 40 Burke, Edmond, 59 Burrus, 32 Bussy-Leclerc, Jean, 150 Bèze, Théodore de, 7, 123–126

© The Author(s) 2020 O. Ranum, Tyranny from Ancient Greece to Renaissance France, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43185-3

173

174 

INDEX

C Cabochiens, revolt, 66 Caesar, Julius, 7, 33, 75, 77, 93, 126, 132 Caesar Augustus, 7, 33, 34, 36, 93, 94 Caligula, 46, 90, 156 Calvin, Jean, 116, 124 Canon law, 152 Caracalla, 137 Cardinal of Guise, 4, 106, 124, 157 Catherine de Médicis, 105 Cato, 84 Charles I of Spain (later Charles V, Emperor), 6, 62, 67, 87, 94, 130 Charles III the Simple, of France, 130 Charles V of France, 6, 7, 61, 65, 67, 87, 94 Charles VI of France, 112 Charles VII of France, 132 Charles VIII of France, 80 Charles IX of France, 104, 155, 156, 160 Charles X of France, 158 Chartres, 46, 106 Chastel, Jean, 160 Christine, de Pizan, see Pizan, Christine de Church, 42, 45, 63, 68, 107, 136, 144, 151, 155, 158, 159 Cicero, 31, 46, 51, 62, 85, 132, 139, 153, 160 Cinna, 33, 36, 94 Citizen, 28, 29, 35, 74, 86, 91, 92, 94, 117, 118, 126, 138, 141, 145 Cleitus (Clitus), 84 Clément, Jacques, 143, 146, 147, 158–160 Cleomenes, 77 Clitus, 84 Clovis, 119 Coligny, Gaspard II, 103, 104, 160 Colonna family, 53, 75

Commonplaces, 5, 28, 66, 72, 113 Conspiracies, 76, 77, 99, 104, 140 Constantine, 54 Constantinople, 133 Constitutionalism, 69, 85, 125, 139 Constitutions, 125 Coronation, 105, 155 Cracow, 156 Cromwell, Thomas, 68 Curia, 152 Cyprus, 50 Cyrus, 73 D Dailochus, 28 Democracy, 14, 20, 29, 73, 82, 139 Dictatorship, 34, 86, 130, 132 Dion, 13, 19, 20 Dionysius I of Syracuse, 6, 12, 13, 20, 34, 67, 84, 85, 117, 132 Dionysius II of Syracuse, 13, 19, 20, 85 Dominicans, 49, 53, 60, 146 Domitian, 130, 132 Dorléans, Louis, 105 Duplessis-Mornay, Philippe de, 8 E Edward IV of England, 98, 99 Egyptians, 112 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 60 Elizabeth I, of England, 99, 156 Émile, Paul, 110 England, 4, 88, 131, 133 Enlightenment, 89 Épernon, Duke of, 106, 154, 157 Erasmus, Desiderius, 6, 7, 25, 65–68, 87–94, 112, 144, 147, 159 Excommunication, 111, 151, 152, 159

 INDEX 

F Factionalism, 15, 73, 140 Fauchet, Claude, 112 Favorite, 77, 84, 132 Fear, 141 Ficino, Marcilio, 64 Florence, 4, 41, 61, 68, 130 Forms of government, 8, 14, 15, 20, 21, 74, 77, 81, 110, 128, 144 Fortuna, 72, 73, 75, 76, 147 Francis I, 6, 7, 67, 79, 80, 84, 130, 131 Franks, 112 Frederick II, Emperor, 4, 39, 40 Freiburg, 88 Friendship, 28 Froben, Johann, 88 G Gaguin, Robert, 110 Gallicanism, 151 Garnett, George, 139 Gay, Peter, 89 Gelo, 19 Gelon, 26 Geneva, 124 Genevieve, 104 Germany, 132 Gifts, 77, 99, 130 Giles of Rome, 6, 39, 53–56, 139 Government, 51, 74–76 Goyet, Francis, 66 Gregory, Pope, 110 Grey, Richard, 99 Grossteste, Robert, 61 Guise family, 4, 42, 103, 105, 106, 124, 146, 150, 156–158 H Hapsburg family, 7, 87, 89 Heidelberg, 124

175

Heliogabalus, 90, 156 Henry II of France, 40, 130, 131 Henry III of France, 4, 8, 42, 68, 81, 97, 104, 105, 132, 143, 144, 147, 150, 151, 153–159 Henry IV of France, 106, 144, 147, 150, 158, 160 Henry VI of England, 98 Henry VII of England, 7 Henry VIII of England, 6, 68, 96, 97, 100 Herodotus, 9, 90 Hexter, J.H., 66 Hiero, 6, 25–29, 64 Honor, 28, 74, 75, 130, 145 Hooker, Richard, 69 Hotman, François, 5, 7, 109–113, 117, 124, 125 Huguenots, 103–105, 107, 116, 150, 155, 157 I In loci, 4 J Jardine, Lisa, 93 Jesuits, 143, 144, 146–148 John of Salisbury, 6, 39, 45–47, 54, 61, 65, 153 Julia, 131 Julian the Apostate, 159 K Keohane, Nannerl, 118 Kingship, 18, 32, 33, 63, 64, 81, 92, 110, 125, 136, 144 Kitto, H.D.F., 9 Kleinias, 14

176 

INDEX

L La Boétie, Étienne de, 7, 25, 115–121 La Rochelle, 155 League, 106, 107, 144, 147, 150–152, 154, 157, 159, 160 Leon X, Pope, 64 Lerma, Duke of, 148 Lèse-majesté, 131, 132 Lex Julia, 131 Liberty, 75, 116, 117, 120 Lloyd, Howell, 128 Locke, John, 59 Loreto, 106 Louis IX of France, 42 Louis XI of France, 4, 7, 111, 112 Louis XII of France, 80 Lucan, 84, 85 Lucian, 96, 153 Luther, 132 Lycurgus, 22 Lyonnais, 156 M Machiavelli, Niccolo, 6, 65, 68, 69, 71–77, 81, 117 Manutius, Aldus, 64 Marcus, 31 Mariana, Juan de, 143–148 Marseille, 79 Maugiron, 155 Medicis family, 41, 64, 68, 76, 130 Megacles, 22, 96 Megapenthes, 96 Milan, 4, 41, 67, 80 Mirror of princes genre, 32, 50, 63, 66–68, 71, 76, 83, 93, 100, 144, 145 Moerbeke, Thomas, 61 Monarchy, 14, 29, 42, 51, 73, 74, 80–82, 85, 116, 132, 136, 140

Montaigne, Michel de, 115, 116, 119, 120 Monte Cassino, 49 More, Thomas, 6, 7, 65, 68, 69, 95–100, 109, 153 Morton, John (cardinal), 99 Moses, 73, 137 Mousnier, Roland, 120 N Nabis, 73 Naples, 49 Nature, 64, 89, 92, 144 Necessity, argument of, 77, 105, 124, 129 Nero, 4, 6, 31, 32, 36, 46, 90, 132, 156 New Testament, 137 Nimrod, 68 Nobility, 33, 74, 76, 97, 104, 130, 137, 138, 140 Nogaret de La Valette, 156 O Octavian, see Caesar Augustus Old Testament, 137 Oligarchs, 12, 14, 41, 74, 139 Oresme, Nicole, 8, 61–64 Oriental, 33 Orléans, 116, 123 Orosius, 46 Orsini family, 75 Orvieto, 49 Orwell, George, 5, 77 Ovid, 64 P Palissy, Bernard, 8 Papacy, 40, 43, 54

 INDEX 

Papinian, 137 Paris, 49, 65, 79, 88, 104, 124, 127, 144 Parthenon, 9 Paternalism, 29, 92, 96, 136 Paul, Saint, 126 People, 22, 40, 55, 75, 76, 88, 89, 97, 110–113, 117–120, 125, 126, 129, 136–139, 141, 158, 159 Pericles, 8, 10 Persians, 40 Peter, Saint, 47, 126 Philip II of Spain, 160 Philip III of Spain, 144, 148 Philip IV of France, the Fair, 42, 54 Philistus, 132 Pibrac, Guy du Faur de, 104 Pisistratus, 4, 6, 21, 22, 34, 75, 93, 117 Pizan, Christine de, 65–66 Plato, 6, 9, 11–15, 18, 26, 59–69, 82, 85, 88, 90, 92, 153 Pliny, 85 Plutarch, 84–86, 116 Poissy, colloque of, 124 Poland, 104, 147, 151, 156 Politeia, 18, 139 Pollard, A.F., 6 Pollux, Julius, 92, 93 Pompey, 84, 85 Poujol, Jacques, 119 Preschon, George, 132 Protestants, 88, 103, 104, 106, 116, 124, 132, 155 Providentialism, 158 Q Quelus, 155 Quintus Curtius, 85

177

R Ravaillac, François, 144, 147, 160 Republic, 34, 73, 77, 130 Richard II of England, 66 Richard III of England, 4, 97–99 Rivers, Earl of, 99 Roman law, 7, 40, 136, 137 Rome, 4, 46, 49, 74, 86, 104, 144, 147, 152 Romulus, 73 S Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, 105, 124, 150, 155 Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 104 Salic Law, 106, 139 Salisbury, John of, 45 Saul, 131, 147 Savoy, 79 Scotland, 131 Sejanus/Séjanus, 132, 156 Seneca the Younger, 6, 31–36, 40, 92 Servitude, 137, 138 Seyssel, Claude de, 5, 6, 65, 67, 69, 79–82, 111 Sforza, Francesco, 4, 41 Shakespeare, William, 98, 100 Sherman, Claire, 63 Siena, 8, 68–69 Simonides, 26–29 Slavery, 9, 15, 35, 93, 94, 96, 137, 138 Socrates, 9, 25 Solon, 21, 22, 75, 130 Sophocles, 9 Sorbonne, 106, 144, 147, 150, 151, 154, 159 Spain, 31, 60, 105, 131, 133, 144, 160 Sparta, 22, 25, 73 Stacey, Peter, 72

178 

INDEX

Stoic thought, 32, 35 Subjects, 26–28, 33, 35, 50, 51, 54, 85, 89, 91, 93, 94, 96, 111, 117, 120, 129, 131, 132, 136, 138, 140, 145 Sulla, 6, 34, 36, 85, 86, 130 Switzerland, 7, 117, 126 Sy, 63 Syracuse, 34, 81, 84, 85 Syros, Vasileios, 41 T Tacitus, 110 Tarquins, 74 Theobald of Canterbury, 45 Theology, 106, 151 Thomas Aquinas, 6, 39, 49–51, 60, 69, 131, 139, 153 Thou, Jacques-Auguste de, 42, 124, 156 Thucydides, 9 Thuringia, 110 Tiberius, 4, 132 Tigellinus, 32, 132 Toledo, 143 Toulouse, 127 Tradition, 152

Trent, Council of, 159 Turks, 112, 155 Tutorial, 31, 67, 76, 80, 89, 136 U Usurpation, 41, 85 Usurper, 41, 42, 50, 84, 126, 136, 160 V Valorius, 130 Vaughan, Thomas, 99 Venice, 7, 64, 65, 74, 117 Vézelay, 123 Visconti family, 4, 41 Viterbo, 49 W Walter of Brienne, 4, 41, 42 Wars of Religion, 6 Wars of the Roses, 97 Woodville, Elizabeth, 99 X Xenophon, 25–29, 59–69, 116