ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the account of justice and royal authority in the most influential of the medieval mirrors for princes, Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum. In the history of political thought, Giles is sometimes described as a proponent of proto-absolutist rule because he believed that the prince should make the law but not be bound by it himself. But the crucial role of Giles’s discourse on virtue, both to enable this extraordinary authority of the prince and to explore its limits, has not been thoroughly discussed in previous research. Certainly, Giles felt that the prince should be able to dispose of or change the positive law – in order to make it conform better to the eternal standards of natural law. However, an inseparable part of his thinking about this extraordinary prerogative was that the prince should be a man of supereminent virtue. Giles did not expect each prince to be morally perfect. De regimine principum was an educational tract, and he wrote it to guide his readers towards virtue. In the last instance, however, and in common with other theorists on virtue, Giles knew that the extraordinary level of virtue that was required of the prince, if he was to rule justly, could only be granted by divine grace.
