mirror for princes

mirror for princes, genre of advice literature that outlines basic principles of conduct for rulers and of the structure and purpose of secular power, often in relation either to a transcendental source of power or to abstract legal norms. As a genre, the mirror for princes has its roots in the writings of the ancient Greek historian Xenophon. It flourished in western Europe beginning in the early Middle Ages as well as in the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic world.

In the Islamic world, mirrors for princes emphasized pragmatic guidance and the administrative and procedural aspects of governance while stressing the role of rulers as moral exemplars. Those texts were, to a greater degree than in the West, manuals of effective governance. They consequently encompassed a wider range of themes and sources, and their influence on Western thought becomes clearly visible in works from the 13th century onward. Islamic mirrors for princes also drew on a variety of pre-Islamic traditions and, with their often strictly regional focus, similarly foreshadowed later developments in the West.

Byzantine texts, split between being collections of maxims and examples and providing individualized advice to specific rulers, reflected the situation in eastern Europe for much of the 10th through the 13th century and drew on similar sources of ancient and early Christian thinking about power.

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In the West, mirrors for princes emerged with the acceptance of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th century and include, for instance, Book V of St. Augustine’s The City of God (5th century), which linked the office of emperor to the maintenance of a moral society and sought to exemplify the duties of royal lordship and the responsibility of the ruler for the moral welfare of his subjects. It should be considered alongside St. Gregory I’s Pastoral Care (6th century): though centred on the role of bishops, rather than secular lords, Gregory’s emphasis on humility as a key virtue of those holding worldly power, on the moral temptations of secular might, and on the need to provide moral leadership by example made it a key reference point for future writers.

A series of writings produced in 7th-century Iberia and Ireland were also influential, foremost among them St. Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, which contains classic definitions of royal power: rex a rectum agere (“[the word] king derives from acting righteously”) and non regit qui non corrigit (“he does not rule who does not correct”). Those definitions formed the basis for most medieval thinking about kingship. A widely copied treatise on virtues and vices by the so-called Pseudo-Cyprianus, an otherwise unknown Irish writer, established a clear link between moral and political authority and explained how the personal moral shortcomings of individual rulers influenced the fortunes of their people—an explanation that assigned responsibility to rulers for floods, famines, and foreign invasions (as divine punishment for a ruler’s failure to abide by a strict moral code). In the 9th century On the Royal Office by Jonas of Orléans, which centres on the community of the faithful and draws on Isidore and Pseudo-Cyprianus, offered a clear distinction between the tyrant and the just ruler in relation to their engagement with the moral imperatives of a Christian community.

Beginning in the 10th century, however, few mirrors for princes were written. Instead, political theories were formulated in historical writings, often aimed at royal patrons and designed to offer a series of models of respectively good and bad political behaviour. Political theories were also expressed in so-called coronation orders, accounts of the liturgy celebrated during a ruler’s coronation, and in a rich genre of advice literature that took the form of letters.

Mirrors for princes experienced a revival in the 12th century, most famously in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, which applied Classical concepts of the structure of society (specifically, the realm resembling a body) and discussed the right to resistance (the murder of tyrants) but which was still deeply rooted in familiar models of royal power. The same is true of such texts as Godfrey of Viterbo’s Mirror of Kings, Helinand of Froidmont’s On the Government of Princes, and Gerald of Wales’s Book on the Education of a Prince, all written between about 1180 and 1220.

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It was the beginning reception of Aristotle in the 13th century, however, that profoundly transformed theoretical writings about kingship. Much of that revival centred on the court of Louis IX of France, with Gilbert of Tournai’s Education of Princes and Kings and Vincent of Beauvais’s On the Moral Education of a Prince (both c. 1259). The Aristotelian influence, mediated via translations of a different Islamic tradition of kings’ mirrors (including the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum), became apparent not so much in the content of those texts as in their structure and presentation, which became more thematic and abstract, drawing less on historical, biblical, or exegetical precedent.

That approach changed with what are perhaps the two most-famous examples of the genre, St. Thomas Aquinas’s On the Government of Princes (c. 1265) and Giles of Rome’s book of the same name (c. 1277–79; though known best by its Latin title, De regimine principum). Giles’s became the most widely copied mirror for princes of the Middle Ages. Those two texts combined the thinking that appeared in previous ones with references to natural and feudal law, elaborated the right of resistance, and stressed the responsibility of the ruler to work for the common good. The increasingly “national” focus of the texts (commissioned by or written for specific rulers of specific states rather than as general academic treatises) led to a flowering of vernacular texts that began in the 13th century, with either translations of Giles’s text or independent works appearing in Old Norse (c. 1255), Castilian (1292–93), and Catalan (1327–30). That new development also corresponded to a desacralization of theoretical writing, which then drew increasingly on Roman law rather than theology, fed into the humanist writings of Petrarch (14th century), and was aimed at rulers of smaller territorial entities such as Austria, Brabant, Holland, and Florence. The Western tradition of mirrors for princes laid the foundations for later Renaissance theories of politics and political theory and thus for modern political science.