Conclusion: Mirrors for Princes and the Development of Reflections on the State

In: A Critical Companion to the 'Mirrors for Princes' Literature
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Jean-Philippe Genet
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The communication systems of contemporary societies are rapidly adapting to the social, political and cultural transformations that they are helping to generate. But was this the case before the advent of the printing press?1 The choice of the editors of this volume to take a long-term view—covering a long period from the seventh century B.C. to the beginning of the sixteenth century—can only highlight the permanence of many characteristics of this very particular “political literature” that constitutes the texts grouped under the disputed and questionable, but convenient, name of “mirrors for princes”. While not a literary genre in the strict sense,2 those discussed in the preceding pages form a collection of acceptable homogeneity, if we take at least two of the three criteria retained by Einár Már Jónsson in his classic definition:3 1. they are addressed to a ‘prince’—whatever his title, royal or not; in reality it may be a group—and 2. they are meant to educate him with advice, information and possibly criticism to make him an ideal prince, the one he can see in the mirror held up by the text. Most often, this is done by going through a catalogue of both private and public virtues (the royal function makes any distinction between these two spheres futile). Beyond this base, diversity reigns: diversity of the literary forms chosen, diversity of the institutional and situational situations of the addressees, diversity of the social and sociolinguistic contexts…. It is therefore obvious that we must not allow ourselves to be locked into the problem of literary genre, and from this point of view, the term paradigm, which Charles Briggs and Cary Nederman happily use, seems to me a useful substitute.4

1 The Legacy of Antiquity

Of course, as early as Greek antiquity, other types of texts present royal figures and possibly comment on their qualities, defects and duties. But they are not mirrors because they show a kingship that is not debatable, that imposes itself as a fact of nature, marked by the seal of a legitimacy that cannot be questioned. John Lenz quotes Hesiod on the Homeric kings: Kings are from Zeus.5 And Tom Stevenson puts his finger on the borderline between this primal kingship and the one that mirrors will take over when he evokes the treatises on monarchy of the Hellenistic period, which transcend this rule without accountability6 that is the hallmark of kings by highlighting the virtues of the Prince, starting with the first of these, ‘philanthropy,’ i.e. love for his subjects. To the royal monolith in relation to the gods is added (without replacing it) the king in his relation to the humanity of citizens and subjects. It is obviously to Athens, to the development of the Greek city and to the appearance of democracy that we owe the appearance of this second stratum; but the Hellenistic example shows that the first did not disappear. In fact, it remained present throughout the history of mirrors, not without tensions and contradictions. And in the Roman period, as in the Middle Ages, the king chosen by God(s), whose legitimacy and power cannot be questioned, continued to be put forward, in parallel with his reappearance in the mirrors, notably in the liturgies: Karl Ubl cites the Laudes regiae,7 but one could also cite the ordines of the coronations of Western kings, mirrors in action as revealed by the analysis of the “ordo-miroir” (Jacques Le Goff) of the coronation of Saint Louis, probably made for the king on his return from the crusade.8

The case of ancient Greece helps us understand why this duality is constitutive of mirrors. Indeed, it was with the disciples of Socrates, reacting to the “excesses of democracy”9 in fifth-century Athens, that they began to reflect on kingship in terms of its superiority over other modes of government. It is in this movement of thought that the first texts appear that can be considered as mirrors, highlighting eastern models (Cyrus, for Xenophon and Antisthenes) or peripheral models (Evagoras, the king of Cyprus, for Isocrates, and we know that Plato wrote for the tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius). Aristotle—himself from Macedonia—follows this view when he argues for monarchy as the best type of government. For all these authors, the problem lies in the personality of the prince and his ability to practice the virtues, an ability that distinguishes him from the tyrant, whose antithesis he is. The Hellenistic treatises developed this classical opposition between the prince and the tyrant and gradually penetrated Roman ideologies.

But the Romans, although they were able to recognize and fight tyrants very early on, apparently had nothing to do with kings, whose removal was precisely the basis of their political culture. Hence the real difficulty in grasping the problem of personal power, even though it was gradually imposed in the very structures of the republic. However, the evidence became clear: since everything that could curb or control the will of the princeps had disappeared, everything depended once again on his virtues. The great Roman texts that can be likened to mirrors are either treatises devoted to virtues, such as De Clementia, which continues the path traced by Cicero in his pleadings for clients who had to rely on Caesar’s clemency, or biographical portraits of rulers, such as the one offered by Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, which, like De Clementia, was to remain a widely read text throughout the Middle Ages (along with Macrobius’ commentary). The first two texts mentioned give a cosmic dimension to the reflection on the power of the Prince: understanding of the world and of natural cycles is imposed on those who have the responsibility of leading the res publica. If they raise themselves to the level of the gods, they must then accomplish their mission by coming up against the harsh realities of earthly life,10 and it is through their humanitas that they will succeed in doing so, a virtue that Seneca recommends above all to Nero, for whom his treatise is intended.11 This transcendental vision of politics gives pride of place to ethical reflection, which it helped to integrate with Christian thought, as shown in the Life of Constantine by Eusebius of Caesarea, which is both an imperial biography and a eulogy of the first Christian prince.12

On the other hand, the few treatises written by Greek philosophers during the Roman period show above all how incapable they were of replacing Greek kings with emperors;13 these texts had no posterity, unlike the historical biographies and “Caesarian speeches” (as Tom Jefferson calls them) of Cicero. All in all, since the Romans did not see themselves as followers of kingship, they did not make their mark on the mirror genre, preferring, in the imperial biographies written by historians, a philosophical discussion of the virtues or a historical perspective. Only Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations stands out from this literature; but it was written in Greek and was not read again until the Renaissance, whereas Alexander haunted the medieval imagination, as did Trajan, whose passage to posterity as a model of a virtuous ruler is partly due to Pliny the Younger’s Panegyric of Trajan. This text marks a decisive break from this point of view by bringing together the Prince as a historical individual (Cicero’s Scipio is largely imaginary) and the abstract model of the active virtues. Panegyrics, in prose and increasingly in verse, were to become a genre in themselves. Here, one can speak without restriction of a literary genre, in which the rhetors whose importance in the paideia of the transition period between antiquity and the Middle Ages14 is well known, and of which one of the most striking examples is the Panegyric of Theodoric by Ennodius of Pavia.15 But the genre quickly ran out of steam, as the recipients capable of appreciating the virtuosity of the authors disappeared. It was no longer the philosopher who addressed the new sovereigns, the barbarian reges, but the priest, and the letter from Saint Remi to Clovis is also another point of rupture that marks a new beginning. The letter replaces the speech.

2 Mirrors for Three Worlds

As we can see, the mirror, or what took its place, was sensitive to the sociopolitical environment, well before the appearance of the modern state. The transition from Late Antiquity to the three worlds that share its legacy amply demonstrates this. There may be letters in Byzantium, such as that of Photius to the Bulgarian Boris I, or that of Nicholas the Mystic to the Khalifa Al Muqtadir, addressed by a cleric to a prince as a bishop does in the West to a barbarian rex. But on the whole, Byzantine mirrors retain the imprint of ancient models, with a strong presence of collections of advice (gnomai), even if they are often shaped by the eventual context of their writing. While he refutes Paolo Odorico’s peremptory verdict that there are simply no mirrors for a Byzantine prince,16 Günter Prinzing acknowledges that there are relatively few of them:17 he counts only twenty, eleven of which are what he calls integrated mirrors, i.e. speeches or chapters included in a larger work. This differentiates Byzantium not only from the medieval West, but also from the Islamic world.

Mirrors for princes abound in the Islamic world, where history was also, as in Rome, an inexhaustible reservoir of subjects for political reflection: they often appear as a mixture of maxims and historical exempla. These allowed the opinion of the reader/listener to be directed in a subtle way while sheltering behind the authority of history; at least, this is what is revealed by Louise Marlow’s18 comparison of anecdotes featuring Hārūn al-Rashīd in three of these oriental mirrors. Although the term mirror is hardly ever used, it does apply to several kinds of texts, although a very broad definition can also be adopted for the Islamic world: most historians consider the story collection Kalila and Dimna, Ibn al-Muqaffaʾ’s translation into Arabic of a Persian version of the Sanskrit Panchatantra, to be a true mirror. The complete Arabic version was in turn translated into Castilian in 1251 at the request of Alfonso X of Castile,19 and from there into Latin (by Raymond de Béziers). Coming from Persia, the Testament of Ardashīr refers more directly to the Sassanid political tradition. The first political texts translated into Arabic also show a Greek filiation through the apocryphal correspondence between Alexander and Aristotle, which would eventually give rise, in the tenth century, to the Sirr-al-asrar, the compilation of which is attributed to Yahyā Ibn al-Bitrīq and which exists in numerous versions in which the pseudo-Aristotelian content is accompanied by scientific, medical and occult content that makes this mirror for prince a sort of encyclopedic manual and further accentuates its naturalistic side. As we shall see, its diffusion throughout the Latin West was extraordinary.20 One of these letters, undoubtedly Aristotelian if not authentic, the Letter of Aristotle to Alexander on the policy towards the cities,21 would play a particularly important role in political reflection in the land of Islam.

These Greek and Persian filiations permeate the literature of the adab, which is generally agreed to be equivalent to that of the Western22 mirrors. The Sassanid tradition is particularly evident in the texts produced in the Iranian world, insofar as Iran forms the heart of the Abbasid caliphate: after its collapse, the center of gravity for political thought would shift to Syria.23 It is clearly visible in one of the earliest and most widespread Arabic mirrors, Ibn al-Muqaffaʾ’s Kitāb al Ādāb al-kabīr, written during the reign of the caliph Al Mansūr. But even the ādāb sulṭāniyya or Ādāb al-mulūk (literally “advice to the king”) such as that of Al Thaʿālibī or the Siyar al-muluk of Nizām al-Mulk, while they transmit the Sassanid tradition of a ruler by divine right, also contain an essentially religious Arabic component, derived from the Qurʾan, hadith and sunna. In the Arab-Iranian East, as Ardashīr’s will stated, “kingship and religion are sisters”,24 a phrase found in many Arabic mirrors.

We certainly find here the Sassanian heritage of an absolute monarchy against which it is impious to revolt, but the security it provides the prince allows him to devote himself to the ideal of political justice that should be his. “When the king renounces justice, the people renounce obedience”, says Ardashīr, and Makram Abbès, who quotes this text, makes this explicit by stressing that the religion in question here “means not so much religious laws as moral habits and social traditions rooted in a society or community”, which some people continue (wrongly) to analyze as a powerful factor in conservatism.25 Religion, “as a moral bond between men”, thus appears in the mirrors as the omnipresent subtext of the discourse on the ethical commitment of the prince through the virtues he must practice, in the first place justice. Compared to the Latin West, the relationship between the religious and the political appears singular here: there is no cleric who admonishes or enlightens the one he addresses. Muslim theologians are concerned with finding a theoretical solution to the problems of imamat or religious laws, not with giving advice to a prince. The authors of the Arab mirrors were, moreover, mainly viziers or secretaries whose experience legitimized them as wise or learned men, and although religion underlay their discourse, it was in no way opposed to philosophy, through which Greek political theory infiltrated.

While it is known that the Arabs were generally much more familiar with all Greek texts, including those of Aristotle and Plato, than the Latins, this was not entirely true in the political sphere, since Aristotle’s Politics remained virtually unknown in the Arab world. If Aristotle’s work occupied an essential place, it was mainly through the Nicomachean Ethics, although Plato played a more important role, with the Republic and the Laws, than in the West.26 A fundamental point is the fact that the translators did not find an equivalent for the word politeia, which refers to the constitution of the Greek city. As we know, the same problem arose for Latin translators,27 and the separation of the Latin mirrors into several branches according to whether they were addressed to princes or to city magistrates is an echo of this difficulty. In fact, the “constitutional” question is secondary; the essential point is that politics and ethics must be inseparable in order to lead the social community (not the city) to prosperity and happiness. Thus Averroes, in his Commentary on Plato’s Republic28 (a text lost but reconstructed from its Hebrew translation), draws a parallel between the physician and the prince, both of whom use their practical rather than their theoretical intelligence. This diversion through philosophy is necessary to understand the extent to which pragmatism penetrated the Arab mirrors, leading them to approach certain problems from the modern angle of the “reason of state”,29 far from the conservatism that is attributed to them, and well before this concept emerged in Commynes or Machiavelli.

In any case, this is a far cry from the Latin West, where knowledge and wisdom are almost always enunciated by a cleric, speaking from his double pedestal as pastor and legitimate interpreter of holy texts to a layman who is by definition illiterate. However, these texts, which are considered to be mirrors, as in the Byzantine and Arab worlds, adapted to the evolution of sociopolitical structures. Letters to bishops of barbarian kingdoms were succeeded by treatises intended for Carolingian kings and emperors, in which the relationship between ecclesiastical and royal power became more complex, similar to the relationship between the emperor and the patriarch in Byzantium. The change in political structure began in the middle of the eighth century and transformed what was perhaps the most important vector of communication with the appearance of the Laudes Regiae in the middle of the mass. But it took time to clarify the position of the sovereign in relation to the Church (with Charlemagne’s Admonitio generalis in 789) and for reflection to begin on this point before a new interpretation of the royal image could be developed. For the Carolingians deliberately broke with ancient models, seeking the foundations of kingship in the Bible, particularly the Old Testament: Josiah, David, Solomon as models, Nimrod, Saul and Rehoboam as bad examples. The monks Smaragdus and Sedulius Scotus and the bishops Jonas of Orleans and Hincmar of Reims drew their arguments from church fathers (Augustine, Gregory the Great, Isidore of Seville and an Irish treatise, De duodecim abusivis saeculi) and each addressed a particular ruler to persuade him that he was invested with a divine office. The major concern of these authors is the salvation of the prince, as if this were the necessary and (almost) sufficient condition for their subjects to be well governed. Moreover, it is significant that Jonas and Hincmar expressed their ideas on royal ministry within the framework of the councils of the Carolingian church, at the Council of Paris in 829 for Jonas, and at the Council of Quierzy in 858 for Hincmar.30 The sovereign must above all protect the Church and its property, on which his salvation depends; as for his subjects, the essential virtue that the prince must practice towards them is justice. But the Carolingian mirrors were a false start: the genre faded as quickly as the empire.

One text, however, escaped this genealogy. Indeed, the Sirr al-asrār, already mentioned, entered the West through Andalusia, translated by John of Seville between 1112 and 1128.31 This short version of the Secret of Secrets, entitled Epistola Aristotelis de dieta servanda, of which more than 150 manuscripts survive, retains the Aristotelian reference but concentrates on the medical part of the treatise: as Hugo Bizzarri says,32 it is a regimen sanitatis as much as a regimen principum. Between 1230 and 1240, a second (long) version comprising the entire text was translated by Philip of Tripoli for the bishop of that Palestinian port: more than 350 manuscripts survive. Accounting for the manuscripts is made very difficult by the existence of multiple versions, each author or compiler reorienting the text according to his own interests or those of his sponsors. Great scholastics, such as the Benedictine Engelbert of Admont33 and the Franciscan Roger Bacon, studied this text, and Bacon produced an edition with extensive notes in which he showed himself to be much more interested in the scientific aspects than in the political.34

Above all, numerous Latin versions were translated or adapted into the main European languages. For example, Hugo Bizzarri lists two castilian translations of the short version for John of Seville and at least two of the long version for Alfonso X, the most widespread of which is the Poridat de las poridades. A new translation (Aragonese, by Juan Fernández de Heredia) seems to have become established; there is also a Catalan version. In French (including Anglo-Norman), there are two complete translations of the long version (one and five manuscripts respectively) and at least seven more or less complete, but better distributed, versions which remove the cosmological, magical and astrological passages to concentrate on moral and hygienic aspects.35 In English, there are about fifteen versions, often translated from Anglo-Norman or French.36 To this must be added German translations (at least seven from 1282), Dutch, Italian (at least three), Dutch, Czech (two different translations) and even Russian. All in all, Stephen J. White’s estimate of a thousand manuscripts rather than 500 is convincing. But even if the Dutch version, for example, is a real mirror, an abridgment in verse made around 1266 by Jacob Van Maerlant for the young Count Floris V of Holland,37 the Secret’s character as scientific encyclopedia often makes it appear as a kind of manual of good behavior, going from social morals to hygiene and medicine, clothing and food.38 Once scholars had in their hands the genuine political texts of Aristotle, they stopped considering the Secret as an Aristotelian reference text. Only the vernacular versions were ever printed. The Secret of Secrets nevertheless disseminated a crypto-Aristotelian ideology in the West, stemming from the assimilation by the Arab authors of Aristotle’s Ethics and their awareness that humans are first and foremost social animals and that what matters above all is the happiness and prosperity of their society, a prosperity that it is the duty of the prince to foster through his government. This was in any case different from the vision of the Carolingian mirrors, which were soon forgotten, but the evolution of sociopolitical frameworks would lead to the reinvention of mirrors in the West in a completely different form.

3 The Modern State

3.1 Capetian Mirrors and Political Language

The birth of the modern state can be placed in the second half of the thirteenth century, although its genesis began much earlier.39 This is consistent with both the chronological path proposed by Charles Briggs and Cary Nederman and their presentation in the form of a textual40 family; it is clear that the three “ancestors” they present are not mirrors, although they have to do both with politics in general and with the affirmation of feudal monarchy. Eugene III, to whom Saint Bernard addressed his “mirror of the popes” (the expression coined by Jean Jolivet)41, had as enemies not only the people who had driven him out of Rome, but also the savage kings castigated by Giraldus Cambrensis42 and John of Salisbury43 in their respective treatises, through the figure of Henry II. The first salvo of authentic mirrors—in that they were addressed to the prince himself to offer him the image of what he should be—was indeed that of mirrors mostly produced at the Capetian court in the years 1250–1265 for Saint Louis and members of his family (his wife Queen Marguerite of Provence or his son-in-law Thibaut V of Champagne) or his court (Thibaut IV of Champagne) by mendicant friars (Vincent of Beauvais,44 Guibert of Tournai)45 who had passed through the Parisian schools. Others followed, such as the Speculum dominarum by the Franciscan Durand de Champagne46 for Queen Jeanne de Navarre (the wife of Philip IV the Fair), or the Liber de informatione principum (also by Durand de Champagne?)47 for Louis X. This statement should be qualified: one of the authors was a future Cistercian (Jean de Limoges)48 and it is not absolutely certain that one of the Dominicans, Guillaume Peyraut,49 did indeed pass through the Parisian schools. And let us not forget that Saint Louis wrote his own mirror (around 1267?), Enseignements à son fils et à sa fille,50 for his children, the future Philip III and Isabella, who became the wife of the king of Navarre, Thibaut V of Champagne.

These texts were successful: some of them were also translated, including the Mirror of Guillaume Peyraut (into French and Italian), one by Vincent de Beauvais (into French by Jean Daudin) and the Liber de informatione principum (into French, by Jean Golein for Charles V), and they were relatively well distributed.51 They also benefited from the canonization of Saint Louis, whose figure is visible in the background, a charismatic model, and not only for those countries whose dynasties included him in their symbolic genealogy (France, Naples, Hungary, Poland, England). As is rightly pointed out here, these works drew on the old Augustinian background and continued to convey the traditional hostility of clerics towards the power of the lay domini, descendants of Nimrod and the predatory kings of the Bible,52 who were stripping the Church and abandoning themselves to the vices of lust and greed, guided only by the arbitrary vis et voluntas of the tyrant.53 In the face of the development of a feudal monarchy in the Plantagenet style, the charismatic personality of Saint Louis showed that a new type of king, through the strength of his personal virtues, could save the Church and his people by practicing a government of justice instead of the tyranny to which his potestas predestined him. The need for the sovereign’s salvation is still as strong as in the Carolingian period: everything is based on the sovereign’s individual personality, and it is this personality that the “Capetian mirrors” intend to shape through the mastery of the rhetoric of persuasion developed by the mendicant orders; but beyond the royal person, there is not an ounce of state in the Capetian mirrors.

However, at the time when these Capetian mirrors were written, between 1240 and 1260, there was what can be called an “écrit d’État”. Benoît Grévin reminds us that, although the successive powers in Western Europe had inherited “un même ensemble d’outils communicationnels liés à la romanité impériale”, and in particular a “prose d’État … rhétoriquement surchargée”, the skills that had allowed them to be used were quickly lost in the High Middle Ages. The first attempts at constructing a political language by feudal and royal chancelleries, inspired by the papal model, did not come until the end of the eleventh century,54 when they fully blossomed in the imperial chancellery of Frederick II55 and spread to all western chancelleries. This construct took up elements from late antiquity, but incorporated new content, particularly biblical. Even as Latin gave way to the vernacular languages, from the mid-thirteenth century onwards, it passed on its “phraseology”. This is precisely the time when the transformation of feudal kingdoms into modern states was taking place, under the pressure of their increased needs and the ensuing fiscal development; it is therefore tempting to bring these mirrors closer to the writings of contemporary political practice. Of these writings, legislative and normative texts are particularly important.

Let us leave Castile aside. Although the Siete partidas (as they were to be called when they finally came into force in the fourteenth century) were assembled by a group of jurists around 1252–1265 at the instigation of Alfonso X the Wise, the undertaking was premature and its impact was initially negative due to opposition from the Castilian aristocracy. Instead, a completely different type of texts, of eastern inspiration, spread, and although these may be compared to mirrors, provided that the term is taken in its broadest sense, they had nothing to do with the Capetian mirrors. In 1251, Kalila and Dimna was translated from Arabic into Castilian for the future Alfonso X,56 and in 1253 the Sendebar for his brother Fadrique. In addition to these collections of stories and exempla, there are collections of maxims, also produced in the royal entourage, which “imitate the characteristics of oriental treatises”, such as the Libro de los doze sabios and the Flores de filosofía. These texts imparted a completely different ideology from that of the French treatises, exalting a monarchy in which the king exercises supreme power unhindered by clerical control, a message close in fact to that of the Arabic texts from which they originated or which influenced them. This tradition continued into the fourteenth century in, among others, El Conde Lucanor by Don Juan Manuel, this time conveying the views of the aristocracy against a royal power that it considers invasive.57

In France too, legislative concerns were present, and in December 1254 Saint Louis published his famous Ordonnance de réforme, behind which Louis Carolus-Barré believed he could, no doubt rightly, discern the hand of Guy Foucois, the future Pope Clement IV, one of the main administrators of Alphonse of Poitiers and of Saint Louis.58 The recent work of William Jordan, Jacques Le Goff, Gaël Chenard and Marie Dejoux, however, makes it possible to reintroduce order into a tight sequence of which Louis Carolus-Barré was only able to situate a few stages, and whose key moments are the investigations ordered by Saint Louis (1247–1248) and his brother Alphonse of Poitiers (1249, 1251) to prepare their departure for the Seventh Crusade,59 which continued after the return of the king in 1254. The technique of the enquiry came from England, through the Capetian conquest of Normandy; the Plantagenet administration practiced it assiduously, and the Capetian monarchy had resorted to it since the reign of Philip-Augustus. However, the aim of Capetian enquiries had become quite different from that of the Anglo-Norman enquiries, which were primarily concerned with infringements of the king’s rights or domain, although, to instill confidence in their subjects, they also sometimes aimed to restore unjustly confiscated property (particularly the early enquiries, under Henry II).

On the contrary, from 1247–1248 onwards, the Capetian enquiries are remarkable for their spiritual and penitential scope, which takes on its full meaning in view of the Crusade, the major preoccupation of Saint Louis, to which he subordinated everything else.60 The objectives of these enquiries are described in the letters of commission given to the investigators, most of whom were ecclesiastics or lay or mendicant friars; they were to collect all complaints against royal officers and, after examining their validity, to restore the sums or goods that had been wrongfully appropriated. Marie Dejoux proposes to speak of “enquêtes de réparation” rather than administrative investigations.61 They were followed by several others in the domains of Alphonse of Poitiers in 1249, when he was about to join the king as a prisoner in Damietta, and then, as he had crossed again on his return, in 1250–1251, his first departure having been cancelled. There were then almost annual enquiries, although they were not always general, as, from postponement to postponement, Alphonse did not leave until 1270, attending Louis in Tunis at his death, and dying himself near Genoa on his way home. These investigations were also followed by ordinances in which reforms were attempted to remedy the shortcomings noted, as in 1251 (the officers of the county of Toulouse),62 and in 1253 and 1255 (the importance of morality in the choice by the seneschals of tenants on the provosts’ farms).63 The similarities between all these texts are numerous: Marie Dejoux has thus counted nearly fifteen similarities between the Alphonsine ordinance on the officers of the county of Toulouse of 1251 and the Grande ordonnance of Saint Louis of 1254. The penitential concern is omnipresent: the title of one of Alphonse of Poitier’s main registers, Salus anime, is significant. Although undoubtedly a response to a demand from public opinion, reparations were primarily intended for the salvation of the prince’s soul, and in this respect were fully in line with the soteriological aim of the Capetian mirrors.

Across the English Channel, meanwhile, the political discourse, albeit exactly contemporary, was completely different. In fact, is it really necessary to cross the Channel? The tug of war between John Lackland and his barons, essentially due to the king’s financial needs and his desire to draw on his subjects’ assets, began as soon as he acceded to the throne, culminated in Magna Carta, and almost led the father of Saint Louis to take the English throne. Louis VIII did not fail to inform himself thoroughly about the institutions and conditions of the political dialogue that he would have to conduct in his future kingdom;64 in fact, he may have had a copy of the Magna Carta during his English adventure.65 The Capetian entourage was all the more aware of the crisis that England was going through at the same time as the mirrors were being written because Saint Louis was both Henry III’s brother-in-law—they had married two sisters—and the brother-in-law of Simon de Montfort, who had married Henry III’s sister. In January 1264, the opposing parties appealed to the king of France to arbitrate their dispute at the Mise of Amiens; in order to be able to decide, the king received some of the texts issued by both Henry and the barons. He was not impressed by them; in his arbitration, he ordered that all these “predictas provisiones, ordinationes, et obligationes omnes, quocumque nomine censeantur” be cancelled.66 He is seen to be insensitive to this effort to institutionalize the language of negotiation between king and subject, which continued as confrontation and up to civil war, from the Magna Carta in 1215 to the Dictum of Kenilworth in 1266. The Lord Edward, on the other hand, understood the meaning of this evolution of political dialogue and language: having defeated Montfort, he took over many elements of the baronial Provisions of Westminster of 1259 in what became the Statute of Marlborough in 1277 and, as Edward I, gradually shaped Parliament.67 For their part, the successors of Saint Louis, especially Philip the Fair and his sons, quickly aligned themselves with the new political language, abandoning the penitential aspects of reparations and transforming institutions by opening up dialogue with their subjects.

3.2 The Shock of Aristotelianism

Did these transformations in political language and the affirmation of the modern state at the end of the thirteenth century imply the end of the mirrors for princes? The answer is no, but it was at the cost of a real revolution. The authors of the great mirrors of the late thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome, were friars, like Vincent of Beauvais or William Peraldus, and they both addressed a specific king: the king of Cyprus, Hugh II of Lusignan by Thomas in Rome around 1266–1267, and the future Philip the Fair for Giles in Paris in 1277–1279; but they based their approach on an excellent knowledge of Aristotle. Political Aristotelianism was not totally new; although it was diffused, as we have seen, in the versions of the Secret of Secrets, and even in tales of eastern origin that circulated at the time, it was not unknown to John of Salisbury, even if the great texts of Aristotle were still unavailable.68 But the translation of the Nicomachean Ethics (by Robert Grosseteste in Oxford), the Rhetoric (by Hermannus Alemannus in Toledo around 1250–1260) and the Politics (by William of Moerbeke in 1260) in the years 1250–1260 radically changed the situation. Thomas Aquinas commented on Politics and Ethics during the years 1269–1272 in Paris, where Giles de Rome was attending his classes; he himself commented on the Rhetoric in Paris. Thomas Aquinas’ mirror is unfortunately unfinished, and although it was later completed by another mirror written by the Dominican Ptolemy of Lucca, that was in a spirit quite different from that of Thomas.69 We shall therefore concentrate on the De regimine principum of Giles of Rome,70 whose success was immense; the treatise was translated into 38 versions in ten languages, of which 440 manuscripts have survived (319 for the Latin version, not including the abridgments).71

Although, as we have said, it is undoubtedly a mirror, it breaks radically with those that preceded it. The plan of the work is purely Aristotelian: the first book shows how the prince must govern himself to achieve happiness (see Ethics), the second how he must govern his house to achieve harmony (the Economics), the third how he must govern the City so that his majesty imposes itself on the kingdom harmoniously (Politics). Several traditional elements of the content of mirrors of antiquity are found in this plan: the first part deals with morals, passions and virtues; the second with the choice of advisers and their qualities. Above all, at the beginning of book III, he poses the principle that humans are by nature social animals and that the City is a natural organism, which implies that its government must be guided by natural reason. This does not mean abandoning the Christian virtues—they were dealt with in the first part—but it does imply choosing the best possible regime, and Giles relies on Aristotle to justify the choice of monarchical power, which is best able to guarantee the happiness and prosperity of the social community. He therefore refers politics to nature, as does Thomas Aquinas, for whom human laws are based on natural law, not divine law.72 But Thomas proposes an integrated model of the coexistence of the two laws, in which “the natural edifice, composed of human laws based on natural law, can only play its role fully if it is supplemented by divine law. … This whole rational organism functions, left to itself, only in a defective manner. It needs to be supported (adjuvatus) by grace in order to operate properly”.73 For Giles, perhaps forced by circumstances—for he had become one of Boniface VIII’s advisors and must be seen as inspiring, along with Matthew of Aquasparta, the bull Unam Sanctam—the relationship between the two laws, natural and supernatural, was a hierarchical one; this is what he expressed in 1302 in his De ecclesiastica potestate.74 While royal power enjoys a certain autonomy in the natural order, it remains subject to the supernatural order, which implies the supremacy of papal power.

It should be added that the political Aristotelianism seen in the Nicomachean Ethics was also disseminated at the same time by another text, the Treasure75 of Brunetto Latini.76 This notary, who was to become a renowned rhetorical master by the end of his life, was a supporter of Charles of Anjou, whom he served in Tuscany and Florence, notably as chancellor in 1272–1274, and to whom he dedicated his work in 1266. It is written in French, which shows that its author was trying to reach a wide audience. But this layman did not choose to write a mirror for prince, a genre still reserved for ecclesiastics. He chose to write a kind of encyclopedia in three books, the second of which is on ethics and logic, and the third on rhetoric and politics, a section he entitled “How the lord should govern his people”. Latini frequented academic circles in Paris, which may have given him access to early translations of the Ethics, but he was certainly familiar with Eustratius’ commentary on the Ethics. Although less successful than that of Giles of Rome, the work was nonetheless widely read: 95 manuscripts of the original version survive, and it was translated into Latin, Italian (four translations and 38 manuscripts), French (re-translated from Tuscan), Castilian (15 manuscripts), Aragonese (one manuscript) and Catalan (three translations in five manuscripts). If we add to this the numerous manuscripts of the Secreta Secretorum, conveyors in Latin or in the vulgar of a diffuse Aristotelianism, as we have seen, it is clear that from the end of the thirteenth century onwards, the spread of political Aristotelianism was rapid and reached a wide range of audiences, especially because the De regimine principum was quickly translated into French, as we shall see.

4 The Consequences of the Success of De Regimine Principum

The triumphant success of De Regimine principum, coupled with the indirect impact of De ecclesiastica potestate, had two main consequences. One, however, is of no direct interest to us here: it is the radical transformation of the field of political theory, where the problem of the nature/supernaturalness of political power and of the possible superiority of the power of the pope over that of the Emperor or kings triggered a virulent debate between Augustinian theologians on the one hand (James of Viterbo, Augustine of Ancona) and their opponents (John Quidort of Paris, Marsilius of Padua, William of Ockham, the Dante of De monarchia). This debate became increasingly complex and quickly extended to new questions, prompted by the events and institutional transformations that disrupted the fourteenth century. This field of political theory also gave new life to old texts, such as John of Salisbury’s Polycraticus, which was once again copied and read.77 Reflections on the State were found only incidentally in the mirrors, which, while retaining some of Giles’ concepts (the notion of government, the rational approach to the problems of societies perceived as natural structures), still put the personal—and Christian—virtues of the prince back in the foreground.

The other, however, is of direct interest to us, for the success of texts of Aristotelian inspiration profoundly modifies the field of production of mirrors for princes. Indeed, the copies of the manuscripts of the De Regimine, to which those of the Secret may be added, while leaving some room for the production of new texts, encouraged an evolution of the genre: from this date onwards, we can indeed speak of a genre in which the memory of Saint Louis, as seen in Capetian mirrors, and the Aegidian model merge. The reading public continued to believe in the pedagogical virtue of mirrors, and it seemed normal to buy them for the training of young men: William of Paris,78 the Dominican preceptor of the children of King Philip the Fair, had a missal worth 20 livres parisis bought for the princes’ chapel, as well as a breviary and a De eruditione principum, perhaps that of Vincent of Beauvais, for 32 livres parisis, along with two Bibles for Louis and his brother Philip (Philip V) for 80 livres tournois.79

Hence a kind of dichotomy in literary production between Latin and vernacular mirrors. The Latin mirrors are quite numerous, but the vast majority of them had a very low circulation. Some of them aim to address a message to the king on a contemporary political problem and wrap their message in a more or less careful mirror presentation; this is the case, for example, of William of Pagula’s80 Speculum regis Edwardi III. Five manuscripts survive, while the same William is the author of an Oculus sacerdotis of which more than fifty survive (not to mention its widespread abridgment by John de Burgh). Another remarkable mirror is the one that the Infante Peter of Aragon (a layman, but soon to enter the Franciscan order) addressed to his nephew, King Peter IV of Aragon: he intended to give him useful advice on the war he would soon be waging with Castile and to remind him that he would need to enlist the support and collaboration of his subjects. Only one manuscript is known. Alexandra Beauchamp, who has studied this text, emphasizes its pragmatic aspect and notes that there is no trace of Aristotelian or Aegidian influence.81 Other Latin mirrors are more like visiting cards left by the author to make himself known and to signal the potential granting of a favor.

Mirrors in the vernacular are even more numerous, mixing translations of the Capetian mirrors (already mentioned), translations of Giles of Rome, and some new texts. Some were the result of commissions and had a small circulation, such as the Avis au roy.82 Like the Latin mirrors, they can be a response to the demands of the moment. Thus Um styrilsi konunga was written (probably by Matthias Laurentii)83 after 1340 for the children of King Magnus Eriksson. But to the three parts of Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum, which he adapts, the author saw fit to add an introductory chapter in which he asserts, in accordance with the views of his patron, the superiority of the hereditary principle in royal succession, whereas Giles placed election in the first place (which was in fact the Swedish tradition), hereditary succession being imposed in the end only because of corruption.84 The market was, however, invaded by translations and adaptations of the Capetian mirrors and especially those of Giles of Rome’s De Regimine principum. The Castilian translation of Giles of Rome was made for the future Peter I. Provided with glosses and additions, it survives in three distinct redactions, some twenty manuscripts and two incunabula editions.85 Noëlle-Laetitia Perret’s study of the French versions shows that only one of them, made by Henri de Gauchy, was really disseminated; but, whether they were unable to obtain it, were unaware of its existence, or recognized its limitations, patrons never ceased to request new translations. It is remarkable that the social level of the enthusiasts was extremely varied, from the French king Charles V himself to a simple bourgeois from Orléans.86 Copyists of these other mirrors sometimes ascribed the often anonymous texts they were copying to Giles, as shown by certain manuscripts of the Liber de informatione principum. These texts were generally not very successful, with the exception of those distinguished by their exceptional literary quality, such as Thomas Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes, which is essentially an adaptation of Gilles de Rome’s De regimine principum (it is counted among the 38 versions mentioned above), and the works of Christine de Pisan, whom Charles Briggs and Cary Nederman rightly refer to as “the most prolific, and yet often overlooked, author of political ‘mirror’ books in medieval Europe”.87

5 Decline or New Departure?

In the absence of striking successes, the mirror genre seemed to wither away in the fifteenth century, but the evolution of political structures and cultural transformations gave it new life. The progress of an absolute monarchy of divine right, which was intended to concentrate power in the hands of the prince without his becoming a tyrant, on the one hand, and a humanism now capable of proposing reading programs that included all the great texts of antiquity,88 on the other, led to the exaltation of a dominating monarchy whose prince must be virtuous, of course, but also perfectly well trained by a thoughtful educational program. Among the mirrors that continued to be offered to sovereigns or their children, whether commissioned or not, there was one that would profoundly mark the era: the Institutio principis christiani, written by Erasmus for Charles of Ghent, the future Emperor Charles V, who was all the more attentive to the pedagogical aspect because he had little confidence in his pupil’s intellectual abilities.89 The rediscovery of ancient texts—Sylvène Édouard points out the influence of Isocrates’ Nicocles discourse and Xenophon’s Cyropaedia—offered a wide range of new models, while Erasmus’ Christian humanism tempered royal absolutism with an insistence on the necessary sapientia of the sovereign and the importance of the wise advisors who should surround him. The survey presented here concerns a dozen mirrors (but there are many others, such as Guillaume Budé’s Institution du prince) and does not go beyond the 1550s,90 but the genre continued until at least the eighteenth century in northern Europe. Monique Cottret suggests that Jacques-Joseph Duguet’s Institution d’un prince is the last mirror,91 although she herself adds that there may be another, and the most beautiful of all, Mozart and Schikaneder’s Magic Flute.

But this applies only to northern Europe. Italian humanism seems to have treated the mirror genre quite differently. Of course, there were mirrors in Italy, such as Giovanni Botero’s De regia sapientia, dedicated to Charles-Emmanuel of Savoy in 1583. But many of the Italian Renaissance states had moved away from the model of the modern state, and humanists no longer offered their patrons the model of Saint Louis but that of Julius Caesar. The mirror was completely folded into historical biography, as in Roman antiquity, while the discourse became purely rhetorical. From this point of view, the De rebus gestis Alphonsi I commentarii by Bartolomeo Facio (1455), Lorenzo Valla’s successful rival for the position of official historiographer of Alfonso of Aragon, King of Naples, was a text that influenced the whole historiography of the signori, starting with that of the Sforzas, the De vita rebusque gestis Francisci Sfortiae by Lodrisio Crivelli and the De rebus gestis Francisci Sfortiae commentarii by Giovanni Simonetta.92 The Italian model even reached northern Europe, where Tito Livio da Forli was commissioned to write mirror biographies for Henry V, King of England, and his brother, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, who commissioned the two works. The heroic rhetoric of the princely biographies finds a striking parallel in the portrait of the prince in armor, a characteristic of Italian Renaissance93 painting.

But the “princely republic” of Medici Florence94 had little taste for armor: Alexander de Medici, the gravedigger of the Republic, was the first to wear a shining suit of armor in Giorgio Vasari’s portrait of him in 1534.95 It was therefore not a question of the rhetoric of princely power; Florentine historians, starting with Leonardo Bruni, developed a whole rhetoric of freedom to retrace the history of the social community that was Florence. And it is within this framework that Florentine thinkers developed their ideas, in the dark atmosphere of a city marked by the descent of the French upon Italy, the revolution that drove out Peter de Medici, the preaching of Savonarola and the failure of the Republican restoration. By basing his theory on the actions of men “as they are and not as they ought to be”,96 Machiavelli wiped out the Christian precepts that ecclesiastics had tried to instill in princes for centuries. What counts in the end is virtù, that quality that allows one to grasp the best “way of doing” according to the occasion.97

The dialogue in which the cleric stands above the layperson was dead: like Philippe de Commynes before him, whose misnamed Memoirs also invigorated the mirror genre,98 Machiavelli addresses the reader directly, using his knowledge, intelligence and experience as a Florentine agent of a specific regime (the Republic), to propose an analysis that is entirely new in its absolute cynicism. The effective prince must be cruel, manipulative, concealed, a liar if need be; religion is only one of his instruments. Machiavelli’s Prince owes nothing to the Prince of the mirrors, and even his attempt to save him by his virtù and education cannot withstand the sarcasm of a Guicciardini or a Francesco Vettori (a colleague and friend of Machiavelli’s), depicting the popes who have succeeded each other on the throne of Saint Peter’s since Paul II. Volker Reinhart places particular emphasis on the case of Clement VII as analyzed by Guicciardini, for whom Clement was the prince with the highest qualities imaginable, yet who by his very qualities caused the ultimate catastrophe of the sack of Rome by Charles V’s Landsknechte. Guicciardini contrasts this failure with the success of the Venetian republic, governed by the collective experience and intelligence of a class of individuals selected for their merit. His reflections align with those of a work that was the great success of the modern era, contributing to the marginalization of mirrors, Baldassare Castiglione’s Cortegiano, in which the solution to the problem of government lies less in the virtue of the Prince than in that of his entourage.99 Sir Thomas Elyot’s Governor also follows this line. Giovanni Botero’s attempt to rescue the Prince’s Christian virtues in his Ragione di Stato stumbled on the question of religion: if, between Catholic Christian princes, one must behave according to the precepts of Christian education as laid down by the Council of Trent, this is impossible with regard to the “unbelieving” powers of the enemies of the divine word, those Protestants against whom the reason of state and all the moral compromises and crimes it justifies are allowed.

The introduction of Aristotelianism and the triumph of De regimine principum unleashed the growth of political theory, but the mirrors for princes became, for many readers, clones, in less finished form, of the Aegidian mirror. The only ones that really stand out are those that focus on a specific problem or benefit from the literary talent of their authors, like Hoccleve or Christine de Pisan. But even Christine de Pisan, a courtly writer if ever there was one, was not content with the genre of the mirror to the prince; she also entered the historical field with the Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V. Le livre du corps de policie, generally considered to be one of her mirrors, also belongs by its content to the political field. The development of the field of politics is one of the constitutive elements in the genesis of the modern state;100 but the initially considerable place occupied by mirrors in this field was progressively reduced as new objects of debate and controversy appeared. As for the field of history, an inexhaustible source of exempla, which was also expanding rapidly with the affirmation of the state, its texts also came to compete with mirrors, as shown by the heroic biographies of Italian princes, or Philippe de Commynes so called Mémoires. Christian humanism may have led people to believe in a new beginning, but the morose contemplation of the damage caused by the modern state of war led the best minds to make this fatal observation: the worst enemy of the king, who is the incarnation of the state, is the king within the limits of his human body, all too human, impossible to educate or raise to the level of perfection, a perfection that would be useless, moreover, in confronting the hazards of the moment.101 So what good are mirrors?

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  • Thélamon, Françoise, “Constantin, ‘l’empereur cher à Dieu’ selon Eusèbe de Césarée dans la Vita Constantini”, in Le Prince au miroir de la littérature politique de l’Antiquité aux Lumières, eds. F. Lachaud and L. Scordia (Mont-Saint-Aignan, 2007), pp. 3143.

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  • Thillet, Pierre, “Aristote conseiller politique d’Alexandre vainqueur des Perses ?” in Revue des Études Grecques 85 (406/408) (1972), pp. 527542.

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  • Treharne, Reginald E. and Ivor J. Sanders, Documents of the Baronial Movement of Reform and Rebellion, 1258–1267 (Oxford, 1973).

  • Zarini, Vincent, “Le prince au miroir des panégyriques versifiés dans la latinité tardive”, in Le Prince au miroir de la littérature politique de l’Antiquité aux Lumières, eds. F. Lachaud and L. Scordia (Mont-Saint-Aignan, 2007), pp. 4567.

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1

Ezio Ornato, “Quelques réflexions pour une histoire matérielle de la culture écrite dans le monde occidental”, in Vecteurs de l’idéel et mutations des sociétés politiques (Le pouvoir symbolique en Occident (1300–1640) - XIII) ed. J.-Ph. Genet (Paris/Rome, 2021), pp. 93–201.

2

Virtually all the authors in this volume address this question at one point or another. The texts listed in Wilhelm Berges, Die Fürstenspiegel des hohen und späten Mittelalters (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Schriften II) (Stuttgart, 1938, repr. 1952), which is an essential starting point, form both the classic corpus of the “genre” and a particularly heterogeneous set of texts in terms of both content and form.

3

Einár Már Jonsson, “La situation du Speculum regale dans la littérature occidentale”, in Études Germaniques 42 (1987), pp. 391–408, at p. 394. See, by the same author, Le Miroir : naissance d’un genre littéraire (Paris, 1995).

4

Charles F. Briggs and Cary J. Nederman, “Western Medieval Specula, c. 1150–c. 1450”, supra.

5

John R. Lenz, “Ideal Models and Anti-Models of Kingship in Ancient Greek Literature”, supra.

6

Tom Stevenson, “The influence of the Speculum Principis in Roman Literature”, supra. This theme is found in Roman law with the opposition between the king who is above the law (Ulpian’s dictum, “Princeps legibus solutus est”), but who can voluntarily submit to the law, as advocated by the emperors Theodosius and Valentinian in the Digna Vox constitution.

7

Karl Ubl, “Carolingian Mirrors for Princes: Texts, Contents, Impact”, supra.

8

Jacques Le Goff, Éric Palazzo, Jean-Claude Bonne and Marie-Noëlle Colette, Le sacre royal à l’époque de Saint Louis (Paris, 2001), pp. 11–19 and 200–205.

9

Lenz, “Ideal Models and Anti-Models of Kingship”, supra.

10

Claire Auvray-Assayas, “Le cosmos et l’éthique du Prince: une relecture du De clementia de Sénèque et du Songe de Scipion de Cicéron”, in Le Prince au miroir de la littérature politique de l’Antiquité aux Lumières, eds. F. Lachaud and L. Scordia (Mont-Saint-Aignan, 2007), pp. 19–30.

11

Tom Stevenson, “The influence of the Speculum Principis”.

12

Françoise Thélamon, “Constantin, ‘l’empereur cher à Dieu’ selon Eusèbe de Césarée dans la Vita Constantini”, in Le Prince au miroir de la littérature, eds. F. Lachaud and L. Scordia, pp. 31–43.

13

Tom Stevenson, “The influence of the Speculum Principis”.

14

See for this period in general Marc Reydellet, La royauté dans la littérature latine de Sidoine Apollinaire à Isidore de Séville (Bibliothèque des écoles françaises d’Athènes et de Rome 243) (Rome, 1981).

15

Christian Rohr, Der Theoderich-Panegyricus des Ennodius, Monumenta Germanica Historica, Studien und Texte 12 (Hannover, 1995); see also Vincent Zarini, “Le prince au miroir des panégyriques versifiés dans la latinité tardive”, in Le Prince au miroir de la littérature, eds. F. Lachaud and L. Scordia, pp. 45–67.

16

Paolo Odorico, “Les miroirs des princes à Byzance. Une lecture horizontale”, in L’éducation au gouvernement et à la vie. La tradition des ‘règles de vie’ de l’antiquité au Moyen Âge, Actes du colloque international de Pise, 18 et 19 mars 2005 (Autour de Byzance 1), ed. P. Odorico (Paris, 2009), pp. 223–246.

17

Günter Prinzing, “Byzantine Mirrors for Princes: An Overview”, supra.

18

Louise Marlow, “Royal Power and its Regulations: Narratives of Harun al-Rashid in Three Mirrors for Princes”, supra.

19

See below.

20

On these texts, see Steven J. Williams, “The Pseudo-Aristotelian Secret of Secrets as a Mirror of Princes”, supra.

21

Józef Bielawski and Marian Plezia, Lettre d’Aristote à Alexandre sur la politique envers les cités (Wroclaw, 1970). See the particularly enlightening critical note by Pierre Thillet, “Aristote conseiller politique d’Alexandre vainqueur des Perses?”, in Revue des Études Grecques 85, n. 406–408 (1972), pp. 527–542.

22

For example, see Makkram Abbès, “The Arabic Mirrors of Princes as witness to the evolution of political thought”, supra.

23

Denise Aigle, “The Conception of Power in Islam: Persian Mirrors of Princes and Sunni Theories (Eleventh-Fourteenth Centuries)”, supra.

24

Quoted by Denise Aigle, “The Conception of Power in Islam”.

25

Makkram Abbès, “The Arabic Mirrors”, supra.

26

Makkram Abbès, “The influence of Aristotle’s thought on Arabic political philosophical ideas”, supra.

27

Nicolai Rubinstein, “The history of the word politicus in early modern Europe”, in The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe, ed. A. Pagden (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 41–56.

28

Averroes on Plato’s Republic, ed. R. Lerner (Ithaca/London, 1974), commented by Makkram Abbès, supra.

29

Makkram Abbès, “The Arabic Mirrors”, supra.

30

Karl Ubl, “Carolingian Mirrors”, supra.

31

On this text, see Steven J. Williams, “The Pseudo-Aristotelian Secret of Secrets as a Mirror of Princes”, supra.

32

Noëlle-Laetitia Perret and Hugo Bizzarri, “A comparative perspective on the circulation and reception of Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum in French and the Spanish translation of the Pseudo-Aristotle’s Sirr-al-asrār (Secretum Secretorum) (13th–16th centuries)”, supra.

33

http://studium-parisiense.univ-paris1.fr/individus/19054-engelbertusadmontensis. In order not to overextend the notes, I refer to the bio-bibliographic records of the Studium Parisiense database (available online at http://studium-parisiense.univ-paris1.fr/) which contains data on masters and students of the Parisian universities and schools, with a brief biography for each individual and a complete list of works with the manuscripts and editions containing them. The database is currently being compiled.

34

http://studium-parisiense.univ-paris1.fr/individus/51826-rogariusbacon. The edition of the Secretum secretorum dates back to the 1270s, as it is based on another translation, by Bartholomew of Messina, made at the court of Frederick II’s son, King Manfred of Sicily, as Steven J. Williams has shown. It is known from four manuscripts and is accompanied by a Tractatus ad declarandum quedam obscure dicta in libro Secreti secretorum. Both texts are edited by R. Steele and F.M. Delorme, Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconis (Oxford, 1920), V, pp. 1–172.

35

Françoise Ferry-Hue, “Secret des secrets”, in Dictionnaire des Lettres Françaises. Le Moyen-Âge, eds. G. Hasenohr and M. Zink (Paris, 1964), pp. 1366–1370.

36

Mahmoud A. Manzalaoui, Secretum Secretorum. Nine English Versions, Early English Texts Society, O.S. 276 (London, 1977).

37

Anton Andries Verdenius (ed.), Heimlijkheid der heimlijkheden (Amsterdam, 1917), https://www.uvaerfgoed.nl/beeldbank/xview?identifier=hdl:11245/3.37017.

38

Hans-Joachim Schmidt, “The uses of mirrors of princes”, supra.

39

Joseph R. Strayer, On the medieval origins of the modern state (Princeton, 1970), situates the development of the modern state between 1000 and 1600 in Europe; distinguishing the long-term process of “genesis” (from the eleventh century) and the actual beginning (1250–1350), I would be tempted to extend the phase of development to the eighteenth century: Jean-Philippe Genet, “La genèse de l’État moderne: les enjeux d’un programme de recherche”, in Actes de la Recherche en Sciences sociales 118 (June 1997), pp. 3–18.

40

Charles F. Briggs and Cary J. Nederman, “Western Medieval Specula”, supra.

41

Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 205 (3), 1988, p. 320.

47

The work is anonymous, but it marks a clear change by its interest in the concrete aspects of politics, in particular the beginnings of taxation, which the author contests: see Lydwine Scordia, “Le roi, l’or et le sang des pauvres dans Le livre de l’information des princes, miroir anonyme dédié à Louis X”, in Revue Historique 306 (3) (2004), pp. 507–532. The text should be read in conjunction with William of Pagula’s treatise, Briggs and Nederman’s black sheep, cit. supra.

48

http://studium-parisiense.univ-paris1.fr/individus/52254-johanneslemovicensis1; the form of his mirror (Joseph’s dialogue with Pharaoh) is also different; in fact, Nicolas Michel demonstrates that in all likelihood Jean de Limoges was a secular master of arts who became a Cistercian monk at Clairvaux only after writing his mirror between 1240 and 1250: Nicolas Michel, “Entre milieu universitaire et espace monastique: la vie et l’œuvre de Jean de Limoges, nouveaux regards”, in Revue d’Histoire ecclésiastique 112 (3–4) (2017), pp. 707–734.

50

They are published in David O’Connell (ed.), Les propos de Saint Louis (Paris, 1974), pp. 185–194. Jacques Le Goff has devoted an interesting development to him (and to Guibert of Tournai) in his chapter “Le roi des ‘Miroirs des Princes’”, in Jacques Le Goff, Saint Louis (Paris, 1996), pp. 402–431, especially pp. 418–430.

51

112 manuscripts for the Somnium Pharaonis according to FAMA (http://fama.irht.cnrs.fr/en/), which however lists only 88; 56 manuscripts for the De eruditione principum of Guillaume Peyraut: but this is very few compared to his two “sums” from which the latter drew the essential part of his exempla (631 manuscripts for the Summa de Viciis and 437 for the Summa de virtutibus).

52

Charles F. Briggs and Cary J. Nederman, “Western Medieval Specula”, supra. On the basic hostility of clerics towards secular power, see Philippe Buc, L’ambiguïté du Livre. Prince, pouvoir et peuple dans les commentaires de la Bible au Moyen Age (Paris, 1994).

53

On feudal levies and the opposition between procedures by will and procedures by law, see the analyses of Gerald L. Harriss, King, Parliament and Public Finance in Medieval England to 1369 (Oxford, 1975), p. 8.

54

Benoît Grévin, “Le style de l’État. Réflexions sur la naissance et le développement de la phraséologie étatique occidentale (XIIe–XVIIe s.)”, in Vecteurs de l’idéel et mutations des sociétés politiques, ed. J.-Ph. Genet, pp. 221–249.

55

Benoît Grévin, Rhétorique du pouvoir médiéval : les Lettres de Pierre de la Vigne et la formation du langage européen (XIIIe–XVesiècle), Bibliothèque des Écoles françaises d’Athènes et de Rome 346 (Rome, 2010).

56

John E. Keller and Robert W. Linker (eds.), El libro de Calila e Digna (Madrid, 1967); see Corinne Peneau and Olivier Biaggini, “Acquaintance between wisdom literature, law and the mirrors of princes”, supra.

57

John E. Keller and Robert W. Linker (eds.), El libro de Calila e Digna.

58

Louis Carolus-Barré, “La Grande Ordonnance de Réformation de 1254”, in Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 117 (1) (1973), pp. 181–186. See Jacques Le Goff, Saint Louis, pp. 216–220; but see today Marie Dejoux, “La fabrique d’une loi. Retour sur la grande ordonnance de réforme de 1254”, in Médiévales 79 (2) (2020) pp. 189–208.

59

Gaël Chenard, L’administration d’Alphonse de Poitiers (1241–1271) (Paris, 2017), pp. 497–512, in particular on the general enquiry, pp. 512–524. The conclusions of the enquiries and the Salus Anime register are published in Pierre-François Garnier and Pascal Guébin, Enquêtes administratives d’Alfonse de Poitiers : arrêts de son parlement tenu à Toulouse et pièces annexes (Paris, 1959).

60

William C. Jordan, Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade (Princeton, 1970).

61

Marie Dejoux, Les enquêtes de Saint Louis. Gouverner et sauver son âme (Paris, 2014).

62

Marie Dejoux, Les enquêtes de Saint Louis, p. 357.

63

Chenard, L’administration d’Alphonse de Poitiers, p. 517.

64

See Frédérique Lachaud, “La collection londonienne de lois : un ‘Miroir’ pour Louis de France (1216–1217) ?”, in Les miroirs aux Princes aux frontières des genres, ed. N. Michel, forthcoming.

65

The Treaty of Lambeth stipulated in 1217 that Prince Louis should return, among other royal records, “the charters of liberties made in the time of King John at Runnymede”: Sir James Holt, Magna Carta (2nd ed., Cambridge, 1992), p. 443.

66

Reginald E. Treharne and Ivor J. Sanders, Documents of the Baronial Movement of Reform and Rebellion, 1258–1267 (Oxford, 1973), pp. 280–290 (citation p. 286).

67

Treharne and Sanders, Documents of the Baronial Movement, p. 60.

68

Cary J. Nederman and John Brückmann, “Aristotelianism in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus”, in Journal of the History of Philosophy 21 (2) (1983), pp. 203–229; the article shows that John was familiar with the Organon, including the Topics.

71

Jean-Philippe Genet, “Gilles de Rome dans le champ théologico-politique à la fin du XIIIe et au début du XIVe siècle”, in Le théologico-politique au Moyen-Âge, ed. D. Poirel (Paris, 2020), pp. 103–123.

72

François Daguet, “Thomas Aquinas and the Renaissance of Political Science in the 13th Century”, in Le théologico-politique au Moyen-Âge, ed. D. Poirel, pp. 87–102.

73

François Daguet, “Thomas Aquinas and the Renaissance of Political Science”, p. 97.

74

Robert W. Dyson, ed. and trans., Giles of Rome on Ecclesiastical Power. A medieval theory of World Government. A critical edition and translation (New York, 2004).

75

Francis James Carmody, Li Livres dou Tresor, 4 vols. (Berkeley, 1939–1948).

77

Frédérique Lachaud, “Filiation and Context. The Medieval Afterlife of the Policraticus”, in A Companion to John of Salisbury, eds. C. Grellard and F. Lachaud (Leiden, 2015), pp. 377–438.

79

Jules Viard (ed.), Les journaux du trésor de Philippe IV le Bel (Collection des documents inédits sur l’Histoire de France) (Paris, 1940), p. 653, no. 4480: see Sean L. Field, The Beguine, the Angel and the Inquisitor: The Trials of Marguerite Porete and Guiard of Cressonssart (Notre-Dame, 2012).

80

Josephus Moisant (ed.), De Speculo Regis Edwardi III (Paris, 1891), pp. 83–123 and Cary J. Nederman (ed. and trans.), Political Thought in Early Fourteenth-Century England (Tempe, 2002), on purveyance. This is a good example, as the first version is a petition addressed to the king by William as rector of Winkfield in Windsor Forest, while the second version is a real speculum written in more general, if no less severe, terms; see Briggs and Nederman, supra, pp. 37–40.

81

The text is available online: http://www.narpan.net/ben/indexderegimine.htm. On this mirror, see Isabelle Beauchamp, “De l’action à l’écriture : le De regimine principum de l’infant Pierre d’Aragon (v. 1357–1358)”, in Anuario de Estudios Medievales 35/1 (2005), pp. 233–270.

82

Julien Lepot, “Le cœur équivoque dans l’Avis aus roys : un ‘miroir des princes’ du XIVe siècle”, in Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes 28 (2013), pp. 273–294, CRMH, https://doi.org/10.4000/crm.13418. Julien Lepot believes that this is a treatise probably written by John the Good’s confessor, the Dominican Pierre de Treilly, future bishop of Senlis, for the king’s children in 1347.

84

Corinne Péneau and Olivier Biaggini, “Acquaintance”, supra.

85

Corinne Péneau and Olivier Biaggini, “Acquaintance”, supra.

86

Noëlle-Laetitia Perret and Hugo Bizzarri, “A comparative perspective”, supra; see Noëlle-Laetitia Perret, Les traductions françaises du De Regimine Principum de Gilles de Rome (Leiden, 2011).

87

Charles F. Briggs and Cary J. Nederman, “Western Medieval Specula”, supra.

88

Sylvène Édouard, “Specula principum and sapientia in The Renaissance: a political and social utopia?”, supra.

89

Marie Barral-Baron, “Place et rôle de l’histoire dans l’Institution du prince chrétien d’Érasme”, in Le Prince au miroir, eds. F. Lachaud and L. Scordia, pp. 351–367.

90

See Reinhardt Volker, “Political Praxis and Political Theory in the Florence of the Medici’”, supra, for further mirrors.

91

Monique Cottret, “The Institution of a Prince by Jacques-Joseph Duguet (Leiden, 1739). Un dernier miroir ?”, in Le Prince au miroir, eds. F. Lachaud and L. Scordia, pp. 393–403.

92

Gary Ianziti, Humanistic Historiography under the Sforzas (Oxford, 1988).

93

See Diane H. Bodart, “Le prince miroir : métaphore optique du corps politique”, in Le miroir et l’espace du prince in Italian Renaissance art, ed. P. Morel (Tours, 2018), pp. 123–143.

94

Reinhard Volker, “Refutation, Parody, Annihilation. The end of the Mirror for Princes in Machiavelli, Vettori and Guicciardini. Political Praxis and Political Theory in the Florence of the Medici”, supra.

95

See Antonella Fenech Kone, “1534 : trois artistes pour Alexandre de Médicis, premier duc de Florence”, in De Dante à Rubens. L’artiste engagé eds. É. Anheim and P. Boucheron (Le pouvoir symbolique en Occident (1300–1640) - XI) (Paris, 2020), p. 313, esp. pp. 326–328 for the analysis of the symbolism of decorative elements of this portrait “d’un prince victorieux dont la suzeraineté vient des armes”.

96

Volker, “Refutation, Parody”, supra.

97

Jean-Louis Fournel and Jean-Claude Zancarini, De principatibus. Le prince (Paris, 2000), pp. 20–27.

98

Joël Blanchard (ed.), Philippe de Commynes. Mémoires (Geneva, 2007), 2 vols.

99

Volker, “Refutation, Parody”, supra.

100

Jean-Philippe Genet, La genèse de l’État moderne. Culture et société politique en Angleterre (Paris, 2003), pp. 292–305.

101

Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies. A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, 1957).

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