[In the following essay, Ullmann discusses the influence of the Policraticus on fourteenth-century Neapolitan jurisprudence.]

The fastidious elegance of John of Salisbury's style, the comprehensiveness and logical consistency of the thoughts expressed in the Policraticus, his dispassionate approach to vexatious problems, the straightforward character of the solutions he proposed, the high moral sense which pervades them, and the preponderance of the ‘positive ethical element’¹—all these explain John's appeal to a very wide circle of readers. In recent times John's book has rightly been acclaimed as ‘probably the most perfect and the most complete summation of the political speculations of the past centuries’.² Yet the extraordinary influence which John of Salisbury exercised through his Policraticus on continental scholarship in the later middle ages has so far entirely escaped notice. One reference to the Policraticus made by Dante's commentator, Benvenuto da Imola,³ can no longer be considered extraordinary,⁴ when the literary tendencies gaining ground in the fourteenth century are taken into account. For as soon as the humanistic light dawned on the minds of scholars and thinkers in the later middle ages, the Policraticus came into vogue. Strangely enough, recent researches into fourteenth-century jurisprudence have shown that the Policraticus was one of the most quoted and perused treatises written by a medieval philosopher. It was especially amongst the scholar jurists of the Neapolitan seat of learning—pioneers of the humanistic method in legal science—that the Policraticus enjoyed absolute authority in all questions pertaining to the sphere of social ethics. It was upon the Policraticus that a whole system of legal thought was built. Two centuries after its composition this English treatise had become an indispensable source of information and the standard work on certain fundamental questions. Although the scholars of the kingdom of Sicily had no connexion with the country in which this philosophic system was composed, or with the school which influenced the thought of its author profoundly, i.e. that of Chartres, they were dominated by his ideas to a degree comparable only to that of Aristotle. More than that: it can easily be verified that in certain questions John's influence outstripped that of the ‘Philosopher’. Probably on account of his somewhat unorthodox views and methods, through his constant resort to the Roman classics, and through his honesty of thought, John seemed to have strongly appealed to the minds of the southern Doctors.

Yet the author of the treatise was unknown to the Neapolitan scholars who, without exception, substituted the title of the treatise for its author. The Policraticus was thought of, not as an English philosopher's system of thought, but as the name of the author himself: right down to the sixteenth century the stereotyped phrase amongst the scholars who relied on the book was: ‘Ut ait Polycraticus’. The copy which they used was most certainly extremely accurate and reliable. The references in the books and commentaries of the jurists testify at once to their thorough-going study of the treatise and to the correctness and exactness of the copy which they used.

The sway which the Policraticus held over the Neapolitan scholars is most conspicuous in the fourteenth-century jurist, Lucas de Penna. He may well be taken as the outstanding scholastic figure in the august assembly of the southern jurists. Not only is he one of the first lawyers whose language, style, technique, and outlook show typically humanistic traits, but he was also a scholar of the highest rank and quality. In Lucas de Penna's system of legal thought it was in more than one respect that Aristotle and Cicero recede into the background in favour of John. Two centuries after writing his Policraticus John of Salisbury found in this Neapolitan scholar one of his most ardent and confident followers. John's biting criticisms of contemporary institutions were readily applied by his Neapolitan admirer to the changed and changing conditions of the mid-fourteenth century; John's shrewd observations of the perversities, follies, and vices which made twelfth-century scholarship a mockery, were eagerly snatched at by the Neapolitan jurist: like John, he did not mince words in his fierce condemnation of the perversities, follies, and vices corroding legal scholarship of his time; from John he inherited his aversion to dialectics, in whose network he was never enmeshed. In the sphere of legal scholarship Lucas's work marks the dawn of the humanistic era, and it may well be that it was through John's influence that the first humanistic commentary of law came to be written.

Born about 1320 in Penna, a small place near Pescara, Lucas pursued his legal studies at the University of Naples, graduating there in the year 1345⁵ and devoting practically the rest of his life to a scientific legal exposition of the last three books of Justinian's Codex. His commentaries were truly prolific and, as he himself tells us in the preface, caused him much toil and sweat. The actual reason for his writing these exhaustive commentaries was his dissatisfaction with contemporary methods of legal science. He complained that contemporary lawyers, though earnestly striving after an elucidation of the principles underlying law, were trying to achieve their aim by entirely inadequate methods. His chief thesis was that law cannot be explained from within itself and that a satisfactory exposition of the ideas embodied in law must necessarily resort to materials which are, strictly speaking, extra-legal. He was well aware of the unorthodoxy of this procedure when he announced this intention in the preface to his greatest work, the Commentaria in Tres Posteriores Libros Codicis Justiniani.⁶ In other words, he denied the self-sufficiency of law and therefore resorted to extra-legal material, such as the gospels, patristic literature, contemporary philosophic writings, ancient literature, historical and poetical alike, and, of course, to Plato, Aristotle, and the Roman thinkers. Now, it is interesting to note that, when he announced in the preface to his work his unusual mode of procedure, he called certain representatives by name, such as Cicero, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, St. Isidore, Innocent IV, and others, all of whom must certainly have been familiar to his contemporaries. On the other hand, he omitted to mention the Policraticus specifically, but, taking for granted his readers' acquaintance with it, referred to it in the very first lines of the preface by simply quoting a passage from its prologue. Speaking of the spiritual and mental influence which is exercised upon soul and mind by the perusal of good literature he said in the preface: ‘For, as Policraticus says in the prologue, “the soul is redeemed from vices, and will be refreshed with delightful and prodigious mirth, when the mind is directed to good literature”’. This reference to the Policraticus and the numerous other allusions and quotations leave no room for doubt that Lucas de Penna considered the Policraticus as the name of the author. We may select at random two more passages in which this personification occurs. In the one passage Lucas said: ‘We may add to the fore-going considerations the words of Policraticus who wrote about this very same subject in the second book, last title’.⁷ When treating of the justification of tyrannicide—a very topical subject at Lucas's time—he referred to the Policraticus in this way: ‘About tyrannicide Policraticus himself wrote many things that deserve to be impressed upon the mind’.⁸

This last-named reference ushers us straight into the sphere of influence which John exercised upon Lucas. His influence was most marked in political problems and, generally speaking, in all questions which touch upon issues of social ethics. It is John's idea of the organic structure of human society which is almost completely adopted by Lucas de Penna: the organic structure of society, wherein each member has to fulfil an organic function, is likened to, if not identified with, the organic structure of the human body. Thus, in close adherence to John and with extensive quotations from the Policraticus,⁹ Lucas stated that the prince has the function of the head of the body politic, that the senate as an advisory body plays the role of the heart, and that the eyes, ears, and tongues of the body politic are represented by the judges and the governors of the provinces; other executive officials are likened to the arms of the government. The peasants, Lucas said, following John, resemble the feet of the community. In pursuance of this thesis Lucas declared that the function of the stomach of the body politic is fulfilled by the fisc which ‘feeds’ the various public officials by furnishing them with salaries.¹⁰ The conception of the tyrant—the most evil creature on earth, as Lucas termed him¹¹—and the moral justification of tyrannicide, unmistakably betray the strong influence exercised by John's forceful opinion on this topic: like John, Lucas did not restrain himself in his condemnation of this ‘pestilence and outcast of humanity’,¹² and Lucas went even so far as to declare that divine law permits the removal of this menace to human society: ‘The Heavenly Father will only be comforted by the destruction of this public enemy (‘publicus hostis’).¹³ Lucas faithfully quoted the words of the Policraticus¹⁴ that it is not only permissible, but right and just to kill the tyrant.¹⁵ Lucas's ensuing disquisition is an almost verbatim quotation from the same passage of the Policraticus. The tyrant does not rule on the bases of law and justice, which are, Lucas held, closely following John, the safest guides to the attainment of man's preconceived end, but by brutal force and despotism. And once law and justice cease to be the foundations of government, all rule is bound to lead to tyranny, Lucas was firmly convinced,¹⁶ once again borrowing one of the main arguments of the Policraticus.¹⁷ For the basis of this government is the criterion by which the tyrant can be distinguished from the prince. The former, Lucas stated,¹⁸ verbally quoting the words of the Policraticus,¹⁹ oppresses his people by his cruel and despotic ruling, whilst the prince governs on the basis of the laws. It is significant and interesting to note, however, that Lucas neither quoted nor alluded to the passage in the Policraticus in which John, by advising the tyranny-ridden people to resort to prayers instead of forcefully removing him, to all intents and purposes cancelled his previous remarks on the justness of murdering the tyrant.²⁰ The laws themselves are the gift and invention of God—once more Lucas derived basic tenets from the Policraticus:²¹ the law is the external form of equity, the pattern of justice and the image of the divine Will—all these ideas were taken over by Lucas from the Policraticus. Both authors declared that the aim of law is the extermination of vices which are harmful to the temporal prosperity of mankind.²² More than that: the prince is the image of God—‘divinitatis imago’—a cardinal tenet of John and a basic principle of Lucas.²³ According to both writers the tyrant is the ‘image of depravity’. It is not then to be wondered at that not only fundamental concepts, such as justice, equity, law, and the like, were faithfully copied, but also that unavoidable implications of fundamental theses reappeared in the system of John's Neapolitan admirer, who, we may add, without exaggeration, built his system of legal thought on the conceptions of John of Salisbury and always referred to him with an apparent sense of confidence. The perennial idea of the moral purpose and function of the State, so conspicuous in John's system, re-emerged in the legal edifice of this southern Doctor. Thus, from the Policraticus Lucas derived the conception that human laws must not be at variance with the divine ideas of the government of the world or with the divine and natural law as they appear expressed in the gospels: if human law contradicts them, it is invalid and should not be enforced.²⁴ The explanation which John offered for the famous Roman dictum that ‘princeps legibus solutus est’, is wholeheartedly endorsed by Lucas: the meaning of this dictum, he states, drawing support from John's argument, is that because he is expected to act on the basis of his innate sense of justice, there is no necessity to subject the prince to the external force of the law.²⁵ Another of John's important theses, which is fully adopted by Lucas, is that of the equality of all citizens as regards their public services and civic duties. Lucas derived this idea from the Policraticus, book iv, chapter 1. The principle of public utility, which finds so pronounced a place in John's treatise, falls on highly fertile soil. The spirit of John reappears in Lucas's axiom that the consideration of the public good is the supreme duty of the prince. Once public and private interests clash, the prince should drop the latter and be guided in his decision purely by the exigencies of the former.²⁶ The principle of public utility in conjunction with the idea of equality of all citizens as regards their public duties became a corner-stone in Lucas's legal system. In it the principle of public utility, in particular, played the role of a criterion by which the purely spiritual could be marked off from the purely temporal. Lucas's strong aversion to any restriction of human liberty and his genuine hatred of any kind of servitude reveal at once his own high-minded conceptions of the value of the human personality and his close adherence to John of Salisbury: servitude in the social and civic sense is defined by Lucas as ‘the image of death’,²⁷ whilst liberty is ‘the light of our life’—‘lumen vitae nostrae’.²⁸ John's thesis that simplicity of conception, lucidity of style, brevity of expression and naturalness of idea are the hall-mark of the legislator, re-emerged in Lucas's system when he said, quoting John's words, that the legislator should avoid superfluous expressions and ambiguous terminology and strive to obtain a lucid presentation of the idea to be embodied in law. For, referring to the Policraticus,²⁹ Lucas pointed out³⁰ that the aim of the legislator, and no less that of the interpreter of law, should be simplicity, naturalness, and the avoidance of cloudy and hazy language and of involutions, which only tend to obscure otherwise simple issues. ‘In legibus magis placet simplicitas quam difficultas.’

Artificiality of reasoning was as repugnant to Lucas as it was to John of Salisbury. For, Lucas avowed in true allegiance to John, scholarship that is infected with the virus of logistic dialectics, can never be termed a genuine science, the criterion of which is soundness of doctrine and not sophistication of argument. Copying the very words of John,³¹ Lucas declared that all true science aspires to prove eventually that man is subject to the law of God.³² Lucas's abhorrence of the dialectical method, by which legal scholarship had already been corroded, reveals the same train of thought and is merely a consequence of the deep influence of the Policraticus. Logic, Lucas affirmed, is not in itself a science, but only a ‘modus sciendi’.³³ Lucas was wont to stress that genuine belief in the truths of Christianity rests not only on the rhetorical strategems of sermons, nor on logical and rational arguments, but solely on the simplicity of faith. It was not through dialectical subtleties that God appealed to His Son.³⁴ ‘If these garrulous dialecticians want to pursue this point any further’, Lucas counselled, ‘they should take heed of what Policraticus says.’³⁵ His verdict on the dialectical method was couched in the following sarcastic terms: ‘The wiles of dialectics are phantoms and shadows which rapidly vanish; the mental conditions of those whom dialectics torture by day and by night, progressively deteriorate’.³⁶ Finally, John's belief in the superiority of ‘the ideal over the material’³⁷ re-emerged in Lucas's strong assertion of the supremacy of the mind over matter. In a lengthy discussion on the merits and demerits of medical science he arrived at the conclusion that the chief defect of the medical scholars was too great a reverence for ‘nature’. This attitude to the fundamentals of life on the part of the ‘professores medicinae’—in whom we may easily recognize the precursors of modern natural scientists—entails a conception of creation and creator and of notions, such as soul, virtue, and, the like, totally at variance with the conceptions presented by the faith, ‘aliter quam fides habeat’. In his typically idealistic manner he elevated legal science to the sublime level of a sacred science.³⁸ For on the grounds that it is concerned not with a questionable remedy of physical maladies, but with the spiritual and ethical elements and forces orientating social life, it is, he declared, ‘far nobler and worthier than medical science’.³⁹

This array of John's important theses and cardinal tenets which Lucas embodied in his system testifies to the great reliance of the Neapolitan Doctor on the English philosopher. But it should be borne in mind that Lucas was by no means a slavish follower of John of Salisbury. To take only one obvious instance, in his doctrine of the relationship between secular and ecclesiastical authority, of the position of the prince as regards his ecclesiastical counterpart, of the function of the clergy within the body politic, Lucas's opposition to John's ideas was as strong as his agreement with them in other cases. Furthermore, John's conceptions served Lucas only as instruments with which to forge his own legal armoury. It is needless to say that some of John's ideas underwent considerable modification and reformation in the hands of the Neapolitan lawyer. This applies, in particular, to the conception of the prince, who, in Lucas's system, assumed a function and position by no means identical with that given to him by John.

But Lucas de Penna was not the only one who put his confidence in the Policraticus. Paris de Puteo, a representative of the, Neapolitan law school in the fifteenth century, was no less conversant with this book. Throughout his tract, De sindicatu,⁴⁰ Paris de Puteo referred to the Policraticus and disclosed his complete familiarity with John's main ideas. The uncompromising attitude which John took up against tyranny, seemed to have particularly appealed to the jurists of the later middle ages. For it is especially in topics which touch upon government and public administration that the jurists referred to the Policraticus most frequently. When dealing with the problem of rulership in his tract, Paris said that ‘this topic is profoundly discussed by Policraticus in the 17th chapter of the 7th book’.⁴¹ Paris's treatise is indeed crowded with references to, and quotations from, the Policraticus. Space prevents us from going into the details of John's influence on Paris de Puteo. The perusal of the Policraticus was not confined to the southern shores of the Italian peninsula. The north, too, knew him, or to be precise, the Policraticus, as is borne out by the references to it in one of the first encyclopedic books which were written. The Bolognese professor of laws, Guilielmus de Pastrengo, who died in 1336, invoked the Englishman's book (‘teste Policratico’) in his De Originalibus Rerum Libellus.⁴² It should, furthermore, be mentioned that sixteenth-century political scholarship in France was still fully conversant with John's Policraticus. ‘The celebrated jurist’,⁴³ Pierre Rebuffe, accepted this book as his adviser in all questions affecting the fundamentals of social ethics.⁴⁴

It can only be a matter of speculation as to how the Policraticus reached the southern part of Italy. No data are as yet available which would justify a definite statement. This hitherto neglected aspect of medieval English philosophic thought and its bearing on the development of humanistic legal scholarship on the Continent warrants more attention than the subject has so far received.

Notes

1. R. L. Poole, Illustrations of Mediaeval Thought and Learning (1932), p. 190.

2. See McIlwain, The Growth of Political Thought (1932), p. 324.

3. See Benvenuto da Imola, Commentum super Dantis Aldigherii Comediam (Florence, 1887), iii. 523.

4. Cf. Miss Waddell, ‘John of Salisbury’, in Essays and Studies, xiii. 30.

5. See Lorenzo Giustiniani, Memorie istoriche degli Scrittori del Regno di Napoli (1788), iii. 39, and also Professor F. Calasso, ‘Studi sul commento ai Tres Libri di Luca da Penna’, in Rivista di Storia del Diritto Italiano, v. (1932), 401; cf., furthermore, F. Savigny, Geschichte des Roemischen Rechts, vi. 199.

6. The following quotations refer to the edition of Lyons, 1598. His commentaries were first published in Paris, 1509. The edition of Lyons, 1598, is very rare. To my knowledge there exists only one copy of this edition in this country, namely, in Trinity College, Cambridge. I desire to express my cordial thanks to Mr. H. M. Adams, Librarian of Trinity College, for making this valuable copy accessible for me.

7. C. x. 51, Rubrica.

8. See Lucas in his commentary on C. x. 31, 42, no. 2.

9. He referred, in particular, to the Policraticus, v. 2. On John's organic theory, see R. L. Poole, p. 207, McIlwain, p. 321, E. F. Jacob, ‘John of Salisbury and the Policraticus.’, in Political Theories of Some Great Mediaeval Thinkers, ed. Hearnshaw, 1923, pp. 65 ff., and A. W. Dunning, History of Political Theories (1919), i. 187, 188.

10. See his commentaries on C. xii. 55, 2, no. 1; xii. 3, 3, no. 3; xi. 58, 7, no 9.

11. In his commentary on C. xii. 63, 1, no. 74.

12. Loc. cit. no. 74.

13. Ibid.

14. Policraticus, iii. 15.

15. Lucas on C. xi. 46, 1, no. 14.

16. Commentary on C. xii. 63, 1, nos. 73-4.

17. Policraticus, iii. 15; iv. 1; vii. 17; vii. 18. These passages are referred to by Lucas.

18. Commentaries on the passage in C. xii. 63, 1, no. 73; C. xi. 46, 1, no. 14.

19. Policraticus, iv. 1; viii. 17.

20. Ibid. viii. 20.

21. Lucas on C. xi. 18, 1, no. 12, referred to the Policraticus, iv. 2; viii. 17. It is interesting to note that the expression ‘lex est inventio et donum Dei’, attributed to Demosthenes, was usually derived from Martianus; see Bartolus on, D. 1, 3, 2.

22. Lucas, loc. cit. and Policraticus, viii. 17.

23. Lucas on C. x. 31, 42, no. 3, with references to the Policraticus, iv. 1; vi. 25, and viii. 17. It is inaccurate to assume with Professor J. W. Allen, History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (1928), p. 282, that this conception of the Ruler as the image of God was first elaborated in the fifteenth century.

24. Lucas in his commentaries on C. x. 26, 4, no 2, referred to the Policraticus, iv. 6.

25. Lucas, loc. cit., with a reference to the Policraticus, iv. 2.

26. See ibid. loc. cit., and Lucas on C. x. 31, 31, no. 2.

27. Commentaries on C. xii. 63, 1, no. 73, borrowing the very words of the Policraticus, viii. 17.

28. Lucas, loc. cit., with a further reference to the Policraticus, vii. 25 and viii. 5.

29. Ibid. vii. 12.

30. In his commentary on C. x. 47, 14, no. 4.

31. Policraticus, vii. 11.

32. Lucas on C. xi. 18, 1, no. 14: ‘omnis doctrina illuc tendit, ut homo subjectus sit legi Dei’.

33. Loc. cit. no. 14.

34. Loc. cit. no. 17.

35. The reference is to vii. 9 and 12.

36. Loc. cit.

37. R. L. Poole, op. cit. p. 190.

38. On a similar view of legal science, see also my paper ‘Baldus's Conception of Law’, in Law Quarterly Review, lviii. (1942), 387 f.

39. Commentaries on C. x. 52, Rubrica, no. 2.

40. This tract is printed in Tractatus Illustrium Jurisconsultorum (Venice), 1583, tom. vii. fo. 217 ff.

41. See fo. 217, nos. 1, 10, 15, &c.

42. I used the edition of Venice, 1547; see fo. 36.

43. McIlwain, p. 381.

44. See Rebuffe's tract De interpretatione, contained in the collection Tractatus Varii, Lyons, 1581.