Marsilius of Padua

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section needs to be wikified to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please help improve this article with relevant internal links. (January 2008)

This article or section needs copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone or spelling. You can assist by editing it now. A how-to guide is available. (January 2008)

Marsilius of Padua (Italian Marsilio or Marsiglio da Padova; c. 1275 – c. 1342) was a late-Medieval Italian scholar.

Born at Padua, Marsilius began studding medicine in his native country of Italy. He practiced various professions including the life of a soldier, and went to Paris in 1311. The reputation which he had gained in the physical sciences soon caused him to be raised to the position of rector of the university (for the first term of the year 1313). While still practicing medicine he composed the famous Defensor pacis (1324), one of the most extraordinary political and religious works which appeared during the Fourteenth century. A violent struggle had just broken out between Pope John XXII and Louis (Ludwig) IV the Bavarian, the imperial candidate at that time, and the latter, on being excommunicated and called upon to give up the empire, only replied to the pope’s threats with fresh provocations. Marsilius of Padua and John of Jandun, though they had both reason to be grateful for the benefits of John XXII, chose this moment to depart France for the German court. Marsilius - writing alone, not with John, as once thought - set out to demonstrate, by arguments from reason [Dictio I] and from authority [Dictio II] the independence of the Empire from the papacy, and the emptiness of the prerogatives “usurped” by the sovereign pontiffs—a demonstration naturally calculated to give him a claim on the gratitude of the German sovereign.

When in 1326 Louis IV saw the arrival in Nuremberg of the book dedicated to him, startled by the boldness of its political and religious theories, he was at first inclined to it as heretical heretics. He soon changed his mind, however, and, admitting Marsilius and John to the circle of his intimates, loaded them with favours. John XXII, for his part, excommunicated Louis IV on April 3, 1327. Having become one of the chief inspirer's of the imperial policy, Marsilius accompanied Louis IV to Italy, where he preached or circulated written attacks against the pope, especially at Milan, and where he came within the sight of the realization of his wildest dreams. To see a king of the Romans crowned emperor at Rome, not by the pope, but by those who claimed to be the delegates of the people (January 17, 1328), to see John XXII deposed by the head of the Empire (April 18), and a mendicant friar, Pietro de Corbara, raised by an imperial decree to the throne of St Peter (as Antipope Nicholas V) after a "popular" election (May 12), all this was seemed an application of principles laid down in the Defensor pacis. Marsilius, appointed imperial vicar, persecuted the clergy who had remained faithful to John XXII. In recompense for his services, he seems to have been appointed archbishop of Milan (althouhgh still a layman^[1]) , while John of Jandun obtained from Louis IV the bishopric of Ferrara.

Marsilius of Padua also composed a treatise De translatione [Romani] imperii , which is merely a rearrangement of a work of Landolfo Colonna, De jurisdictione imperatoris in causa matrimoniali, intended to prove the exclusive jurisdiction of the emperor in matrimonial affairs, or rather, to justify the intervention of Louis of Bavaria, who, in the interests of his policy, had just annulled the marriage of the son of the king of Bohemia and the countess of Tyrol. But, above all in the Defensor minor, Marsilius completed and elaborated on different points in the doctrine laid down in the Defensor pacis. He dealt here with problems concerning ecclesiastical jurisdiction, penances, indulgences, crusades and pilgrimages, vows, excommunication, the general church council, marriage and divorce, the unity with the Greeks. Here his challenging theory still more clearly leads up to a proclamation of the imperial supremacy.

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• The defender of peace (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
• Writings on the Empire: Defensor minor and De translatione imperii (Cambridge University Press, 1993).
•   "Marsilius of Padua". Catholic Encyclopedia. (1913). New York: Robert Appleton Company. 

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.