the local potentates were ever increasing their power, and that of a king of France—a country in which even then a contrary, that is to say, a centralist tendency, began to appear. As had been the case in France, in Germany also, the sovereign found able literary men who devoted much talent and erudition to the defence of Louis of Bavaria. Such men were Marsiglio of Padua, John of Jandun, William of Occam, and others.[1] If, on the whole, Louis’s struggle with papacy may be considered as having been unsuccessful, this cannot be entirely attributed to his incompetence, but to a certain extent also to the extreme vehemence of his literary allies, which alienated many moderate-minded men. These were fully aware of the necessity for church-reform—no right-minded man at that time could fail to perceive it—but they objected to the revolutionary character of some of the writings of Louis’s allies. This applies particularly to Marsiglio of Padua’s Defensor Pacis. In this strange work almost all the subsequent attacks on papacy are foreshadowed, and it has, as Neander has written, already what may be called a “Protestant” character. The Defensor is one of the most important works that belong to the Middle Ages. It contains the germ not only of Protestantism, but also of all those liberal and democratic views that only attained their full development centuries later. I shall here, however, as far as the necessary coherence of my work permits, limit myself to outlining that part of Marsiglio’s work in which he expresses opinions similar to those of Hus and the other Bohemian reformers. Marsiglio of Padua, born in the city of that name about the year 1270, studied for a considerable time at the University of Paris and was, in 1312, rector of that university. It is stated that in Paris he fell under the influence of William of Occam. They were men of about the same age, but it is probable—though the dates of the works of both writers are uncertain—that Occam expressed disagreement with the papal
- ↑ The best account of the lives and writings of these men is still that given by Dr. Riezler in his brilliant work, Die Liter Literarischen Widersacher der Päpste.
