Pope Francis's recent encyclical on Climate Change harks to an earlier thinker, one who is not well known in the English speaking world, but one who re-introduced vital concepts in Europe of the early middle ages with the intent of creating order (and sustainability) based on a universal purpose. He proposed his ideas in the Cura Reipublicae et Sorte Principantis. This translates to About the administration of the public interest and the role of the ruler. In the year 1350 this was no small title.
This innovator was the young lawyer, Philips van Leyden. His education at the university of Orléans in France had exposed him to concepts of Roman Law that divided property into five classes:
Private: house, farm, land
Common: air, flowing water, sea, beaches
Public: all navigable rivers, harbors
Corporate: theaters, racecourses
Nobody’s: sacred and subject to divine right
In Philips’s time there was no effective separation of the last four kinds of property. Cities, nobles, and even clergy controlled portions of some, or all, and were benefiting from the proceeds. Today we would call these arrangements corrupt. Philips thought so, too, and he borrowed and expanded on the Roman concept of the respublica (Public thing or public good).
He had the audacity to suggest that the ruler had duties with regard to the public interest. However, as opposed to his academic contemporaries, Philips was no dreamer. He did not come up with revolutionary concepts, other than the ones he needed to reconcile seemingly contradictory opinions. He was a realist who wanted to create stability in his turbulent world. To accomplish this, he needed order and a balance of power between the players. The closest thing to democracy that he was acquainted with was the corporate nature of the city governments. With their mayors, aldermen, sheriffs, and judges, their operations could be quite messy. Deadly even.
In his native Holland, the councils of nobles and city representatives that the Count occasionally called, were no better. So he looked back to Roman law and found comfort in the notion that the Emperor himself was bound to care for the public interest, and, crucially, that he could not alienate (sell or rent) that which was considered public and common. He was only its keeper.
Of course there was no longer an emperor in Rome. But there were kings and counts. As the highest powers, they were functionally keepers. All these laws applied to them. He wrote, “The Empire is torn up, therefore the lower lords have to perform [the emperor’s] duties!”
Philips developed these ideas in Orléans and worked on them after obtaining his degree in Canon law in 1349 and his return to Holland. By 1355 found himself in ‘sGravenhage in the employment of Count William of Holland.
Count William’s predecessors had substantially weakened their the position by giving away rights and privileges in return for cash. They had also borrowed large sums from Lombard financiers and sold annuities to investors in Flanders. The rights and privileges were in the hands of nobles and cities. They included toll collections, toll exemptions, fisheries, exploitation of peat and salt, proceeds from lands (agriculture), and perpetual use of estates that had not formally been made their property.
Philips regarded all of these a part of the public interest that a ruler could not alienate. The ruler therefore had the right and duty to revoke these ill-gotten rights. Almost immediately, Count William reclaimed many rights and privileges directly under his control.
Count William also made a start with another of Philips’s ideas. Many of the nobles lived in castles or other fortifications. This was fine for the defense of the County’s borders, but served no purpose in the interior other than the security of the noble himself, providing a measure of independence from the Count. The nobles employed small armies to meet the requirement of putting them at the Count’s disposal should he need them. But often these forces were used to settle disputes among the nobles themselves and, sometimes, cities. Philips’s notion, that only the ruler could have an army and no one else (a monopoly on the legitimate use of force), was an easy sell to the young Count. William had all castles and fortifications in the interior dismantled. At Philips’s advice he integrated all private armies into his own and made the nobles its officers. In that way, the quarreling nobles and their armies were under his direct control. The concept was not entirely new. It had been practiced in parts of France previously and that is possibly where Philips learned of it.
The removal of privileges from nobles and cities probably raised some resentment. However, it also brought much needed stability and peace. Corrupt practices diminished. The power of the nobles weakened while an increase in trade and industry strengthened the power of the cities. The Count regularly conferred with representatives of the cities and appeared to govern with their approval.
Philips wrote the basics of his work before his employment with the Count. Throughout his life he continued to make small changes and kept adding to the tract. No doubt new experiences in the employment of new masters introduced issues that demanded fresh views.
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The concept of the Public Good is strongly with us today, much of it built on the work of van Leyden although he has mostly been forgotten.
Christian doctrine teaches that the Earth is God's Garden and that humanity is its keeper. In the deeply religious world of Philips van Leyden he found a practical way to tend to that garden. In our own time, Pope Francis re-invokes the responsibility we have toward that garden and to ourselves as its keepers.
(Excerpts from Chapter 3, A Realist in the Wetlands, of Many Heads and Many Hands, James Madison's Search for a More Perfect Union. eBook version published 12/2014. Print with 84 illustrations and maps to be published 12/2015.)