Virtue, Ambition, and the Balanced Constitution

The turmoil in Europe in the early sixteenth century revealed some of the weaknesses of princely power and imperial authority; it was clear that the much-needed reform and rebalancing could not be enacted solely from above. This chapter focuses on works which called for the promotion of civic virtue and the strengthening of institutions, especially in a time of rapid social, economic, and political upheaval. In Venice, Gasparo Contarini set out an idealized model of mixed government while in the Holy Roman Empire magistrates and officials were encouraged to uphold the common good—often a common good shaped by Protestant thinking. However, the case of Miguel Servetus in Geneva sparked further discussion of the role of the magistrate in upholding religious truth and generated new arguments for toleration. Meanwhile, many writers looked to ancient Greece and Rome for inspiration and advice, and new research by men like Carlo Sigonio revealed that Rome’s political system had itself been affected by social and economic change. In England Sir Thomas Smith drew on some of this research to advocate a broadly based citizenry in which wealth, lineage, and merit were all seen as important qualifications for office-holding.

The Renaissance of Roman Colonization

The colonization policies of Ancient Rome followed a range of legal arrangements concerning property distribution and state formation, documented in fragmented textual and epigraphic sources. Once antiquarian scholars rediscovered and scrutinized these sources in the Renaissance, their analysis of the Roman colonial model formed the intellectual background for modern visions of empire. What does it mean to exercise power at and over distance? This book foregrounds the pioneering contribution to this debate of the great Italian Renaissance scholar Carlo Sigonio (1522/3–84). His comprehensive legal interpretation of Roman society and Roman colonization, which for more than two centuries remained the leading account of Roman history, has been of immense (but long disregarded) significance for the modern understanding of Roman colonial practices and of the legal organization and implications of empire. Bringing together experts on Roman history, the history of classical scholarship, and the history of international law, this book analyses the context, making, and impact of Sigonio’s reconstruction of the Roman colonial model. It shows how his legal interpretation of Roman colonization originated and how it informed the development of legal colonial discourse, from visions of imperial reform and colonial independence in the nascent United States of America, to Enlightenment accounts of property distribution, culminating in a specific juridical strand in twentieth-century Roman historiography. Through a detailed analysis of scholarly and political visions of Roman colonization from the Renaissance until today, this book shows the enduring relevance of legal interpretations of the Roman colonial model for modern experiences of empire.

Roman Colonies and the Distribution of Land before Sigonio

This chapter examines the work of Renaissance historians of Roman colonization before Carlo Sigonio, from Andrea Fiocchi to Niccolò Machiavelli and Onofrio Panvinio. It shows that these earlier scholars, by thinking about Roman colonialism against the backdrop of Hapsburg power in Europe and in the New World, explored the idea of an empire that could be understood not just in terms of power but also in terms of territory, geographical control, and the practical administration of conquered land. Analysing the gradual rediscovery of the ancient Roman empire and its institutions in the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth century, this chapter assesses the most significant advances that Sigonio made in respect to this humanist tradition. Sigonio added a crucial piece of evidence to the discourse on Roman colonial policies and linked historical discussions of agrarian laws and policy to historical accounts of the establishment of colonies.

Church History, Censorship, and Confessionalization

This chapter begins by examining the interrelationship of history and theology. From the Reformation onwards, church history presented a challenge to each confession in its own right. Protestants re-invented the prevailing models of church history; Catholics responded by underlining the uninterrupted continuity of the apostolic traditions. The second section of the chapter concentrates on the genre of papal biography, reviewing the various contemporary authors who wrote on the subject. By editing and continuing the humanist Bartolomeo Platina’s standard papal biographies from the fifteenth century, Panvinio put himself in the position of being considered the most important authority on papal history. The censorship of historical works by Catholic theologians is then discussed by comparing the cases of other important authors including Carlo Sigonio. The chapter investigates the question of the extent to which Panvinio’s unpublished Church History (Historia ecclesiastica) was an expression of the confessionalization of historiography. There follows a discussion of the censorships of several of Panvinio’s works, including that of his history of papal elections carried out by the Spanish jurist Francisco Peña and the German Jesuit Jakob Gretser.

The Monarchical Republic

This chapter examines John Case's Aristotelian commonwealth as a form of monarchical republicanism. It analyzes Case's Sphaera Civitatis, a commentary on Aristotle's Politics that offered an Elizabethan conformist Aristotelianism that plotted a course between the more absolutist theories of Jean Bodin and the republican sympathies of Carlo Sigonio and Piero Vettori. Using a distinction between the form of sovereignty and the administration of government probably drawn from Bodin, Case argued that England was a monarchy with a broad-based administration. The chapter also considers Case's account of citizenship and the distribution of office as social stratification, his rejection of the idea of England as a society of orders, his vision of hierarchy, his treatment of citizenship, and his understanding of magistracy.

A Society of Orders

This chapter examines Sir Thomas Smith's account of political development in the form of a description of the Elizabethan state in his De Republica Anglorum. More specifically, it considers Smith's suggestion that England was a society of orders of the sort that Carlo Sigonio had described with reference to Rome. It shows how Smith situated the “republic of the English” in a scheme of political development, drawing on Sigonio and the humanist lawyer Ulrich Zasius for background. It also discusses Smith's comparison of the English constitution to a moment of balance during the Roman republic after the curial institutions of the tyrants had faded away, but before the popular party gained the upper hand. Finally, it highlights the difference between Smith's understanding of the commonwealth (respublica) and the Marian exiles' understanding of the state.

The Tridentine Ruling on the Vulgate and Ecclesiastical Censorship in the 1580s

Four works by the historian Carlo Sigonio (1523-1584) were made the target of censures by ecclesiastical authorities in the early 1580s. His works were never put on the index of prohibited books, but the censures reveal the mentality and concerns of the censors more clearly than any other surviving documentation from this period. This article examines the censures directed against Sigonio's historical investigation of Old Testament history. By using sources such as the Greek text of the Old Testament, Philo, and Josephus, Sigonio committed the error of Judaizing.