O. RanumTyranny from Ancient Greece to Renaissance Francehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43185-3_9

9. Giles of Rome on Tyranny in His Regime of Princes

Orest Ranum¹

(1)

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

Orest Ranum

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 tyrannyAristotle, recovery ofTraits 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 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 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.
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

Footnotes

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.

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.”

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.

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.