A Threat to Invade Cyprus: Pope John XXII, Walter of Brienne Duke of Athens, and the Latin East in 1331

The Brienne family first laid claim to the throne of Cyprus in the 1260s. The family subsequently rose high in the service of the Angevin kings of Naples and continued to assert their claim from time to time, but they seem never to have been a serious threat to Lusignan rule. Nevertheless, recently discovered papal letters demonstrate that as late as 1331 there were concerns that Walter VI of Brienne, duke of Athens, would divert to Cyprus a planned expedition against the Catalans occupying his duchy. Although King Robert the Wise of Naples was the rival of King Hugh IV of Cyprus for the title of king of Jerusalem, the letters also reveal that Pope John XXII called upon Robert to prevent such an invasion, as other newly uncovered letters show the pope to have done when the Genoese threatened to send invasion fleets to the island in 1317 and 1328. The new letters are published in an appendix.

Toward the Golden Bull and against the Pope: The Role of Custom and Honor in King Ludwig IV's Nuremberg and Frankfurt Appellations (1323–24)

This article addresses the onset of a decades-long conflict between the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire King Ludwig IV of Bavaria and the papacy. When Ludwig intervened on behalf of antipapal factions in northern Italy in 1323, Pope John XXII issued an ultimatum demanding that Ludwig immediately cease to exercise the royal power and title on the pretext that he had never received papal approval of his royal election. Failure to comply meant that the king would fall under sentence of excommunication. Ludwig responded with nearly identical appeals issued in Nuremberg and Frankfurt. Against previous arguments that these appeals were either legal documents operating within the confines of Roman Canon law or artifacts of protomodern realpolitik, this article argues that the “Nuremberg” and “Frankfurt Appellations” emerged from the king's preoccupation with his honor. His Appellations utilized the language and form of Roman Canon law to defame his opponent while he sought to ennoble and justify his actions with a rhetoric mirroring that in supposed repositories of imperial customary law such as the Sachsen- and Schwabenspiegel. In arguing that German custom superseded the jurisdiction of papal law in his Appellations, Ludwig elevated a discourse concerning royal elections to the highest levels of imperial politics where it would remain and find inclusion, in intent if not precise formulation, in the famed Golden Bull of 1356.

William of Ockham

William of Ockham (b. c. 1287–d. 1347) is one of the giants of medieval philosophy. He was an innovative and controversial thinker who lived an extraordinarily eventful life. He entered the Franciscan order as a young boy and then studied in Oxford and London, where he composed an extensive body of work on logic, natural philosophy, and theology in accordance with the academic requirements of the time. While waiting to incept as a magister with the right to teach in the faculty of theology at Oxford, he was summoned to the papal court at Avignon in 1324, where some of his doctrines were suspected of being heretical. There, he was drawn into the current political crisis of the day between Pope John XXII and the Franciscan order on the question of who owned the property that the Franciscan order used (buildings, clothing, food, etc.). John XXII argued that use entailed ownership; the Franciscans argued that it did not. Ockham waded into the debate, inaugurating an interest in politics and political philosophy that would occupy him exclusively until his death. Eventually convinced that John XXII was a heretic, Ockham fled Avignon in 1328 in the company of Michael of Cesena and other Franciscan leaders, finding protection at the court of Ludwig of Bavaria, the Holy Roman Emperor. He composed a second body of work on property and property rights, heresy, and the nature, origin, and relationship of temporal and spiritual power. Ockham was excommunicated in 1328 but never officially charged with heresy. Ockham’s body of work is remarkable, and not only because of the abrupt shift in his intellectual and political pursuits. Despite the risk of oversimplification, we can identify certain pervasive tendencies in his thought. He exhibits a general preference for parsimony and privileges minimalism in metaphysics while developing a highly sophisticated analysis of language and logic. He insists on a firm foundation for knowledge in our direct experience of individual and contingent objects. He emphasizes divine omnipotence, simplicity, and freedom, and places human freedom and rationality at the heart of his ethics and politics. Ockham’s reputation as an enfant terrible of the late Middle Ages, whose doctrines were commonly represented as either calamitous or revolutionary, depending on the interpreter, has been substantially revised in the past three decades. A balanced and critical assessment of his thought and position in the history of medieval philosophy nevertheless remains an ongoing project.

The War of St Sardos and the Deposition of Edward II (1323–1327)

This chapter investigates the bureaucratization of administrative and diplomatic practices during international political conflict and domestic turmoil at the time of the Anglo-French war of St Sardos (1323–5) and the deposition of Edward II (1327). The specific aim of this section is to demonstrate how domestic and international conflicts influenced record-keeping and diplomatic practice in England and the papal curia, ultimately questioning whether bureaucratic developments were entirely driven by what Weber called an ‘autonomous’ logic. Focusing on the surviving English and papal diplomatic correspondence, the chapter first looks at how John XXII arbitrated in the Anglo-French conflict and dealt with the English domestic crisis, drawing on the evidence of the registers of secret letters, which were created by the papal chamber as a new series of registers in order to record political correspondence. It then examines English diplomatic correspondence and record-keeping in the same period, in particular the Roman rolls and the Treaty rolls, emphasizing the practices adopted by the English crown’s administrative departments at times of internal and domestic crisis.

Early Fourteenth-Century Iberia

Early fourteenth-century Iberia was a peninsula in chaos, with the kingdoms of both Castile and Portugal brought low by dynastic divisions, with the territorial nobility which was in the ascendant absorbing churchmen into their following. Both kingdoms had at least a century of struggle with the papacy behind them. With the beginnings of recovery in Castile (recently attributed to ‘Molinism’, so-called) hardly under way, secularist churchmen of both kingdoms were roundly denounced by Pope John XXII, while the year 1325, the beginning of the reign of Afonso IV and coming of age of Alfonso XI of Castile (king since the age of 13 months) gave early warning of an independent approach to their relationship with the papacy.

A concepção de trabalho na obra “A Ética Protestante e o Espírito do Capitalismo” e o conceito de trabalho para o franciscanismo à luz de Giorgio Agamben / The conception of work in the work "Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism" and the concept of work for Franciscanism in the light of Giorgio Agamben

O presente artigo tem como característica fundamental a análise do conceito de trabalho na obra A Ética Protestante e o Espírito do Capitalismo e o conceito de trabalho bem como pobreza no debate franciscano ocorrido no século XIII. Com efeito, o debate a cerca das questões proeminentes do espírito do capitalismo nos tempos atuais estão sendo levantadas por muitos estudiosos principalmente na área da filosofia política e da sociologia da religião. De outro modo, é comum entre os filósofos medievais disputas a cerca de problemas sobre questões políticas tais como poder e domínio. De fato, é relevante a investigação de como estas questões acerca do trabalho, poder e domínio nos medievais ressoam ainda nos tempos hodiernos. Pretendemos investigar neste artigo a diferença dos conceitos de trabalho entre o movimento franciscano e o protestantismo. Recorreremos principalmente ao debate sobre a pobreza na escola franciscana de filosofia que ocorreu no século XIII, com João XXII e Guilherme de Ockham. AbstractThis article has as fundamental characteristic the analysis of the concept of work in the work Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism and the concept of work as well as poverty in the Franciscan debate occurred in the thirteenth century. Indeed, the debate about the prominent issues of the spirit of capitalism in the present times is being raised by many scholars mainly in the area of political philosophy and the sociology of religion. Otherwise, it is common among medieval philosophers to quarrel about problems on political issues such as power and domination. Indeed, it is relevant to investigate how these questions about work, power, and dominance in the medieval still resonate in modern times. We intend to investigate in this article the difference of the concepts of work between the Franciscan movement and Protestantism. We will focus mainly on the debate on poverty in the Franciscan school of philosophy that took place in the thirteenth century, with John XXII and Guillaume de Ockham.

William of Ockham (c.1287–1347)

William of Ockham is a major figure in late medieval thought. Many of his ideas were actively – sometimes passionately – discussed in universities all across Europe from the 1320s up to the sixteenth century and even later. Against the background of the extraordinarily creative English intellectual milieu of the early fourteenth century, in which new varieties of logical, mathematical and physical speculation were being explored, Ockham stands out as the main initiator of late scholastic nominalism, a current of thought further exemplified – with important variants – by a host of authors after him, from Adam Wodeham, John Buridan and Albert of Saxony to the school of John Mair far into the sixteenth century. As a Franciscan friar, Ockham taught theology and Aristotelian logic and physics from approximately 1317 to 1324, probably in Oxford and London. He managed to develop in this short period an original and impressive theological and philosophical system. However, his academic career was interrupted by a summons to the Papal Court at Avignon for theological scrutiny of his teachings. Once there, he became involved in the raging quarrel between Pope John XXII and the Minister General of the Franciscan Order, Michael of Cesena, over the poverty of the church. Ockham was eventually excommunicated in 1328. Having fled to Munich, where he put himself under the protection of the Emperor Ludwig of Bavaria, he fiercely continued the antipapal struggle, devoting the rest of his life to the writing of polemical and politically-oriented treatises. Because he never was officially awarded the title of Doctor in Theology, Ockham has been traditionally known as the venerabilis inceptor, the ‘venerable beginner’, a nickname which at the same time draws attention to the seminal character of his thought. As a tribute to the rigour and strength of his arguments, he has also been called the ‘Invincible Doctor’. The core of his thought lies in his qualified approach to the old problem of universals, inherited by the Christian world from the Greeks through Porphyry and Boethius. Ockham’s stand is that only individuals exist, generality being but a matter of signification. This is what we call his nominalism. In the mature version of his theory, species and genera are identified with certain mental qualities called concepts or intentions of the mind. Ontologically, these are individuals too, like everything else: each individual mind has its own individual concepts. Their peculiarity, for Ockham, lies in their representative function: a general concept naturally signifies many different individuals. The concept ‘horse’, for instance, naturally signifies all singular horses and the concept ‘white’ all singular white things. They are not arbitrary or illusory for all that: specific and generic concepts, Ockham thought, are the results of purely natural processes safely grounded in the intuitive acquaintance of individual minds with real singular objects; and these concepts do cut the world at its joints. The upshot of Ockham’s doctrine of universals is that it purports to validate science as objective knowledge of necessary connections, without postulating mysterious universal entities ‘out there’. Thought, in this approach, is treated as a mental language. Not only is it composed of signs, but these mental signs, natural as they are, are also said to combine with each other into propositions, true or false, just as extra-mental linguistic signs do; and in so doing, to follow rules of construction very similar to those of spoken languages. Ockham thus endowed mental discourse with grammatical categories. However, his main innovation in this respect is that he also adapted and transposed to the fine-grained analysis of mental language a relatively new theoretical apparatus that had been emerging in Europe since the twelfth century: the theory of the ‘properties of terms’ – the most important part of the logica modernorum, the ‘logic of the moderns’ – which was originally intended for the semantical analysis of spoken languages. Ockham, in effect (along with some of his contemporaries, such as Walter Burley) promoted this new brand of semantical analysis to the rank of philosophical method par excellence. In a wide variety of philosophical and theological discussions, he made sustained use of the technical notions of ‘signification’, ‘connotation’ and, above all, ‘supposition’ (or reference) and all their cognates. His distinctive contribution to physics, for example, consists mainly in semantical analyses of problematic terms such as ‘void’, ‘space’ or ‘time’, in order to show how, in the end, they refer to nothing but singular substances and qualities. Ockham’s rejection of universals also had a theological aspect: universals, if they existed, would unduly limit God’s omnipotence. On the other hand, he was convinced that pure philosophical reasoning suffices anyway for decisively refuting realism regarding universals, since all its variants turn out to be ultimately self-contradictory, as he endeavoured to show by detailed criticism. On the whole, Ockham traced a sharper dividing line than most Christian scholastics before him between theological speculation based on revealed premises and natural sciences in the Aristotelian sense, which are based on empirical evidence and self-evident principles. He wanted to maintain this clear-cut distinction in principle through all theoretical and practical knowledge, including ethics and political reasoning. In this last field, in particular, to which Ockham devoted thousands of pages in the last decades of his life, he strenuously defended the independence of secular power from ecclesiastical power, stressing whenever he could the autonomy of right reason in human affairs.