MARSILIUS OF PADUA [MARSIGLIO MAIN ARDINO] (1270-1342), Italian mediaeval scholar, was born at Padua, and went to Paris about 1311. He became rector of the university (for the first term of the year 1313). With the philosopher John of Jandun, he composed the famous Defensor pacis (1324,) one of the most extraordinary political and religious works which appeared during the 14th century. The work set out to demon strate at a crisis in the quarrel between pope and emperor, the supremacy of the Empire, its independence of the Holy See, and the emptiness of the prerogatives "usurped" by the sovereign pontiffs—a demonstration naturally calculated to give them a claim on the gratitude of the German sovereign.
Marsilius denies, not only to the pope, but to the bishops and clergy, any coercive jurisdiction or any right to pronounce on their own authority excommunications and interdicts, or in any way to impose the observation of the divine law. He is not opposed to penalties against heretics, but he would have them pronounced only by civil tribunals. Desiring to see the clergy practise a holy poverty, he proposes the suppression of tithes and the seizure by the secular power of the greater part of the property of the church. The clergy, thus deprived of its wealth, privileges and jurisdiction, is further to be deprived of inde pendence, for the civil power is to have the right of appointing to benefices, etc. The supreme authority in the church is to be the council, but a council summoned by the emperor. The pope, no longer possessing any more power bishops (though Marsilius recognizes that the supremacy of the Church of Rome goes back to the earliest times of Christianity), is to content him self with a pre-eminence mainly of an honorary kind, without claiming to interpret the Holy Scriptures, define dogmas or dis tribute benefices; moreover, he is to be elected by the Christian people, or by the delegates of the people, i.e., the princes, or by the council, and these are also to have the power to punish, suspend or depose him. To overthrow the ecclesiastical hier archy, to deprive the clergy of all their privileges, to reduce the pope to the rank of a kind of president of a Christian republic, which governs itself, or rather submits to the government of Caesar—such is the dream formed in 1324 by two masters of the university of Paris.
When the two authors of the book arrived at Nuremberg in 1326, Louis of Bavaria, king of the Romans, to whom the book was dedicated, and in whose cause it was written, was at first inclined to treat them as heretics. He soon changed his mind, however, and loaded them with favours. Marsilius accompanied Louis of Bavaria to Italy, where he preached or circulated written attacks against the pope, especially at Milan, and where he came within the sight of the realization of his wildest utopias. To see
a king of the Romans crowned emperor at Rome, not by the pope, but by those who claimed to be the delegates of the people (Jan. 17, 1328), to see John XXII. deposed by the head of the Empire (April 18), and a mendicant friar, Pietro de Corbara, raised by an imperial decree to the throne of St. Peter (as Nicholas V.) after the sham of a popular election (May 12), all this was merely the application of principles laid down in the Defensor pacis. The two authors of this book played a most active part in the Roman Revolution. Marsilius, appointed im perial vicar, abused his power to persecute the clergy who had remained faithful to John XXII. In recompense for his services, he seems to have been appointed archbishop of Milan, while his collaborator, John of Jandun, obtained from Louis of Bavaria the bishopric of Ferrara.
Marsilius of Padua does not seem to have lived long after 1342. But the scandal provoked by his Defensor pacis, condemned by the court of Avignon in 1326, lasted much longer. Benedict XII. and Clement VI. censured it in turn; Louis of Bavaria disowned it. Translated into French, then into Italian (14th century) and into English (16th century), it was known by Wycliffe and Luther, and was not without an influence on the Reform movement. See J. Sullivan, American Historical Review, vol. ii. (1896-97), and English Historical Review for April 1905 ; Histoire litteraire de la France (1906), xxxiii. 528-623 ; Sigmund Riezler, Die literarischen Widersacher der Papste zur Zeit Ludwig des Baiers (Leipzig, 1874). There are numerous manuscripts of the Defensor pacis extant. We will here mention only one edition, that given by Goldast, in 1614, in vol. i. of his Monarchia sacri imperii; an unpublished last chapter was published by Karl Muller, in 1883, in the Gottingische gelehrte An zeigen, pp. 923-925. Count Llitzow in The Life and Times of Master John Hus (London and New York, 19o9), pp. 5-9, gives a good abstract of the Defensor pacis and the relations of Marsilius to other precursors of the Reformation.