ABSTRACT
THE MARSILIAN SYSTEM might be viewed as a political philosophy with especial emphasis upon the nature of the law. But a system such as this was new in the Middle Ages: considerations of government had so far been wholly conducted within the legal sphere, within legal scholarship, because its main ingredient was jurisdiction. That is why the medieval science of government was so much the prerogative of the jurists. It was they who, primarily, if not exclusively, examined, analysed and resolved the questions which were governmental because they were juristic problems. But since first the Roman law and later also the canon law were the most easily available and best-composed books of law, and since these two systems exhibited or were supposed to exhibit an unadulterated descending point of view, the resultant doctrine of both Romanists and canonists was overwhelmingly of the same stamp. Nor should one forget that there was an unceasing circle of cause and effect: so many of the graduates, especially of Bologna, achieved high positions, either in the imperial or the papal service, sometimes reaching the very top of the ladder, with the consequence that the mechanics of government lay so largely in their hands, resulting in the translation into practice of the doctrines which they had imbibed as former students. And the law thus made became once again the subject of doctrinal elaboration at the Universities-a circle from which there appeared to be no escape. It is assuredly not without coincidence that Marsiglio cited not a single Romanist-intellectually and in spirit as laymen the Romanists would have been his kinsmen-because the doctrine propounded by the Romanists was, for his purposes, not only useless but positively harmful. What inducement should there have been for him to quote the Romanists? In fact, their doctrine was the very opposite of what he tried to set forth. Moreover, the Romanists were not touched at all by the new Aristotle: a lawyer’s task is to explain the law and to resolve questions of a general nature arising from a problem inherent in the law itself. But the Aristotelian standpoint was notionally an aliud; and when Aristotelian knowledge percolated into the lecture halls of the Romanists it was with a certain detachment that he was mentioned.
