Francesco Maiolo has set about inquiring into the medieval concept of sovereignty. His particular emphasis in this endeavor is on the fourteenth century, especially the polemics of Marsilius of Padua and the legal writings of Bartolus of Saxoferrato. This inquiry is hampered by two obstacles. One is the modern concept of sovereignty as unitary, a single power ruling a defined territory. Much of the literature on medieval and legal political thought is dominated by this concept. The study of legal thought, in particular, also has been dominated by positivist opinions that rule out appeals to higher law. Maiolo tries, in the face of such opinions, to affirm shared sovereignty within a territory as a legitimate line of argument. He also tries to restore the concept of a higher law, accepted in medieval thought, to this area of research. The other obstacle is the lack of the word "sovereignty" in medieval Latin. Versions of that term appear in the vernacular, but not in the learned language of the era. Maiolo, therefore, pursues the use of the terms auctoritas and potestas, both of which are subject to ambiguities of usage, through both primary and secondary texts.
Maiolo's book is not an easy read. The first part (chapters one through five) reads as a set of historiographic essays. Maiolo states and refutes or adapts the opinions of generations of scholars, reaching at least as far back as Hegel and Henry Sumner Maine. In some cases, such as the discussion of legal positivism, the focus is on the thinkers of more recent centuries almost to the exclusion of medieval texts. This reviewer finds some of these arguments with past scholarship excessive in their density of cross referencing between generations of scholars. Nonetheless, he is sympathetic to Maiolo's efforts to understand medieval thought on its own terms.
The book becomes more compelling in its discussion of Marsilius and Bartolus. Both grew up in the regnum Italiae, the portion of the Italian peninsula that historically belonged to the Empire. Despite efforts by some emperors, particularly Frederick Barbarosa, to dominate that part of the peninsula, communal and seigniorial regimes had grown up. The communes particularly were regimes in which power was shared by more than one person, often with the approval by an emperor to their legitimate existence. The breadth of that ruling population in a commune varied widely, as did the mechanisms through which power was exercised. Marsilius (born circa 1275) was raised in Padua during the later thirteenth century, before the Carrara family became the city's signori following a long contest between the city and the rulers of Verona. Although he was not raised in Perugia, the greatest city of Umbria, Bartolus identified with that city to a great extent. He taught there for much of his short life (1313-1357), becoming keenly aware how papal temporal power, not just communal authority, was important in the affairs of Umbria. It is worth noting, for comparative purposes, that Marsilius favored imperial predominance, at least in his later writings, while attempting demolition of papal claims to any temporal power. Bartolus, to the contrary, made accommodations with papal power in central Italy, although Roman law could be read as making the emperor the world's only legitimate ruler.
Maiolo's discussion of Marsilius is very traditional. It makes much use of older scholarship, and it is focused on the arguments from Dictio I of the Defensor pacis. Maiolo rightly emphasizes the eclecticism and complexity of the Paduan's thought on political topics. His idea of nature was not purely Aristotelian. Instead it has resemblances to existing ideas about peace opening the way not just to material sufficiency but to "living well." Marsilius had a concept of justice that required "temperate governments," not just brute force. This approach was able to be reconciled--as Maiolo notes --with the attack on papal temporal power because the higher ends of the civitas could dovetail with the role of the populace as the universitas fidelium, concerned with salvation. Thus the lay legislator and the ecclesiastical equivalent, a church council representing the faithful, could be reconciled.
The author's discussion of Bartolus is more complex, because it has to deal with both legal commentaries and tracts on political issues. Maiolo shows how Bartolus, despite the problems of reconciling his several statements on the Empire, the papacy, city regimes, and tyrants, was trying to deal with situations, typical in much of Italy, in which local regimes and the competing universal regimes, empire and papacy, shared power. Like C. N. S. Woolf before him, Maiolo looks particularly at the idea of imperium. A higher authority, like the Empire, had merum imperium, the highest power, but this did not make the mixtum imperium of a commune like that of Perugia illegitimate. Here Maiolo does find a good example of how power was shared without the one level of government making the other illegitimate. Bartolus is the best support for his idea of "medieval sovereignty."
On the whole, this is a hard book to read, especially for scholars more interested in medieval writers than in the later historiographies of law and politics. Nonetheless, there is worthwhile material in Maiolo's book, repaying patience in reading it.