Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/250

232 companions he was a secular clergyman, by occupation, as it seems, a physician.

Marsiglio must have already meditated a flight from Paris when in 1324 he took a man of like spirit, John of Jandun, a village in Champagne, into his counsel and planned with his help the Defensor Pacis: within, it is said, the space of two months the friends produced the most original political treatise of the middle ages. Soon afterwards they betook themselves to Nuremberg, the seat of Lewis's court. To them and to their Franciscan fellow-workers is due whatever of principle and of permanent historical significance belongs to that prince's scheme to rescue the empire from the unendurable pretensions of John the Twenty-Second, and to reassert for it a power and dignity such as even in the strongest days of the Franconian or Suabian Caesars had been proved totally incapable of lasting vindication. Lewis's career in Italy was short and inglorious. He became for the moment master of Rome; an antipope was chosen, and Marsiglio was named papal vicar in the city. But the opening of the year 1330 saw Lewis again in Germany: his Italian projects had failed utterly, his advisers were branded as heretics. In 1336 he was a suppliant to the power which he had defied. But Marsiglio remained firm in his opinions until his death, which happened not long before April 1343. It is not necessary here to discuss how far the collapse of the undertaking was determined by the irresolution of Lewis, or by the hardy perseverance of his antagonist. The issue indeed lay in the nature of things. The real significance of Marsiglio is to be found less in the events in which he was of necessity precluded from exercising paramount control, even had he been able to exercise it with the desired success, than