(Re)Births of Peace: Renaissance Revivals of and Departures from Traditions

Rebirths of peace and peacemaking that took place in the Renaissance did not replace medieval ones but synthesized them with classical ideas and ideals which came back into vogue.

Born in Florence during the rise of rich Italian city-states which later spawned humanism, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) was at the cusp of these trends in peace and peacemaking: on the one hand supporting the shift from religious to secular authority over affairs of state and, on the other, expressing an unwavering Christian faith. Though known primar­ily as a poet, he was also a political theorist and peacemaker. In On World-Government, written in 1309 but not published until 1559, he argued that only in peace can humanity reach its full potential and only a global government capable of resolving conflicts between local ones can secure peace. His goal: “that each nation develop its peculiar genius to the fullest extent, and in order to be able to do this, let each nation become a member of a World-State, under the guidance of a Central Court of Justice that will regulate international affairs.” “Justice,” he claimed “has greatest power under a unitary government; the best order of the world therefore demands world-government.”⁷ Just as the protag­onist of his Divine Comedy, Dante was led by the Roman writer Virgil from the warlike pits of hell to the blinding bliss of heaven’s peace, so as a peacemaker he attempted to lead fellow Florentines from conflict to reconciliation.

The ideological differences between the White and Black Parties of Florence originated with the Investiture Controversy in the eleventh century between the Holy Roman Empire and the Catholic Church over the right to appoint bishops and other clergy in service of the State. After civil wars across Europe, an agreement was reached in the Concordat of Worms (1122) that the Emperor could invest bishops with secular author­ity but not religious, which was reserved for the Pope. And on a century, White Florentines still sought to limit Papal powers, Blacks to enlarge them, repeating while prefiguring conflicts that soon swept Europe. Dante, siding with the Whites despite being a devout Catholic, tried to make peace by leading a popular movement that met with provisional success, seeking city-wide reconciliation in expelling members of both parties who advocated the use of violence to settle the ongoing conflict. Aligned with his actions and Augustine before him, Dante had earlier written:

All concord depends on a unity of wills; the best state of humanity is a kind of concord, for as individuals are in excellent health when they enjoy concord in soul and body, and similarly a family, city, or state, so human­ity as a whole.”⁸

When the Whites returned, they booted all the Blacks from the city. When the Pope got word, he threatened military action, so the Whites sent a peace delegation to Rome, including Dante. The Pope, probably aware that Dante had pitched his political treatise to the Emperor’s deaf ear, held him captive as the Blacks retook the city, to which Dante never returned. An admirer from Padua, Petrarch (1304-1374), followed in Dante’s foot­steps as a poet-peacemaker: “I thought myself blameworthy if, in the midst of warlike preparations, I should not have recourse to my one weapon, the pen.”⁹ Petrarch successfully negotiated a truce between Padua and Venice and also participated in other diplomatic missions around Europe, but neither he nor Dante came close to being staunch secular defenders of the peace as another Paduan.

Marsilius (1290-1342) was a soldier of that city before attending the University of Paris, then becoming its rector. While practicing medicine after his short tenure, he wrote one of the most controversial political works of the times, Defender of the Peace (1324). The defender Marsilius had in mind was the secular state, totally severed from and superior to all religious authority. The peace was basically that which Dante had pro­posed: a product of concordant unity and producer of humanity’s great­est achievements. Rather than in, by and for God as Augustine claimed, Marsilius argued that states came about by the application of reason for all to benefit from peace, and in this too he was ahead of his times in pre­saging Enlightenment thinkers such as Immanuel Kant. In his view, it was precisely because religious authorities had meddled in secular affairs that peace was jeopardized. Free from scriptural conjectures that confuse spir­itual and political spheres, only a strong secular authority can legitimately resolve conflicts and maintain peace in and among states. Even coercive force can be used to these ends, he again presciently contended, if it reflects the will of the people whose consent through refined representa­tive legislators ought to be required for both religious and secular deci­sion-making. Of course, the Pope took offense, excommunicated the author and censured the work. Persecuted, Marsilius took refuge with another excommunicate, Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV, to whom the Defender was dedicated because he refused to relinquish power on the Pope’s command. Louis then deposed the Pope and installed a puppet regime including, by sham elections, himself as king of Italy, a mendicant monk as Pope, and Marsilius as vicar of Rome. Though they were soon rooted out by Papal loyalists, Marsilius thus lived to see the most radical points of his political imperatives for peace put into practice, however superficially and temporarily.

Contrasting in some ways with Marsilius was Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), who a hundred years later pioneered a perspective on polit­ical peace and peacemaking now called realpolitik, based on uses of polit­ical power rather than the power of political ideals.

There are two ways of contending, one in accordance with the laws, the other by force; the first of which is proper to men, the second to beasts. But since the first method is often ineffectual, it becomes necessary to resort to the second. A Prince should, therefore, understand well how to use well both the man and the beast.¹⁰

By cruelty alone, however, rulers are not able to “maintain their position even in peaceful times, not to speak of the perilous times of war.”¹¹ Peace is not an ultimate goal, nor is war always to be avoided; both are simply conditions to which rulers must react to be effective. But Machiavelli’s masterwork is actually the Discourses on Livy, considered the first modern instruction manual and manifesto for republicanism. Based on the Roman model, with an eye to the Florentine city-state of which Machiavelli wrote a history, Machiavelli argued that the most peaceful form of government is that in which the powerful are checked in popular elections. So while totalitarian tactics are often traced to Machiavelli, his lifelong commit­ment to republican values ought not to be overlooked.

Returning now to the trend from which the Renaissance or “rebirth” gets its name, the revival of classical traditions in philosophy and literature predictably also took place in peace writings, and at the forefront was Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536). Raised and educated in a monastery, Erasmus took his vows, was ordained as a Catholic priest, then accepted a clerical position offered by a bishop. On paid leave, made permanent by the Pope, he studied theology at the University of Paris, then worked as a travelling independent scholar and creative writer, a career which put him in contact with the greatest minds and powers of his times. In opposition to Machiavelli, in The Education of the Prince (1516) he argues that rulers should be classically trained, biblically guided model citizens who are loved by their subjects to be most effective in making and maintaining peace within as well as between their kingdoms. In On the War against the Turks, regarding European retaliation in response to Sultan Suleiman’s attack on Vienna (1529), Erasmus urges that “no matter how serious nor how just the cause, war must not be undertaken unless all possible remedies have been exhausted and it has become inevitable.”¹⁴ Rather than stereotyping Turks as warmongers and using Islam as an excuse for war, he urges Christians to overcome their own warlike tendencies and religious intoler­ance. In his collection of classical quotes and commentaries, the Adages, the longest is on “War is sweet to the inexperienced.” This anti-war tirade aimed at deterring readers is perhaps the most gruesome depiction and scathing critique of warfare of its time.

Erasmus dedicated this last book to a collaborator, Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), who put forth an idealist perspective on peace along both Platonic and monastic lines. Son of a judge, More studied at Oxford, worked his way up England’s civil service and became Lord Chancellor, the second-highest position in the land. However, symptomatically of the times, he was in the end beheaded by order of King Henry VIII on trumped-up charges, really for publically shunning the royal divorce and remarriage in his Catholic stance against Protestantism. The Church, in a now-rare non-violent act of retaliation, canonized More as the patron saint of lawyers. More began writing his most famous work, Utopia (1515, coining the word), during his early continental diplomatic trips. The book’s title and name of the state it describes is a pun on the Greek words for “no-place” and “good-place,” hinting that Utopian peace and prosperity are both perfect and impossible. In Utopian religious disputes “no other force but that of persuasion” is used, never mixed with “reproaches nor violence,” unlike in Europe at the time.¹⁶ The differences between Utopians and his contemporaries More illustrates in pointedly unsubtle ways neither start nor end there. Had the latter been more like the former, More and unnumbered other Renaissance writers critical of un-peaceful power-wielders might not have died as they did.

In Part I, More meets the only person to have visited Utopia, who cri­tiques present-day European states in which war is prevalent because of greed, and greed is prevalent because of private property, resulting in laws that are unjust or improperly applied, punishments ineffective or dispro­portionate, crimes caused by poverty due to mismanagement or miseduca­tion, and religious differences spurred or settled by military might. Part II describes Utopia, where peace prevails because property is held in common, surplus production by hard work and thrift is used as a safety net or for trade, public officials are periodically elected, and people can choose pro­fessions and faiths. Although loathed by Utopians, war is far from unknown to them because of warlike neighbors. So they practice Spartan discipline to prepare for unexpected attacks and maintain social order. Prior to war, Utopians “pray, first for peace,” then for war “without the effusion of much blood on either side.”¹⁷ They pay mercenaries, but under strict rules strongly reminiscent of Cicero, Augustine and Erasmus: “to defend them­selves, or their friends, from any unjust aggressors,” to “assist an oppressed nation in shaking off the yoke of tyranny,” and in offensive wars only when “they had found that all demands of reparation were rejected, so that a war was unavoidable.”¹⁸ Utopianism in different forms and degrees has been a mainstay of modern peace traditions, as have institutions that make their first prominent appearance in modern history of peace during the Renaissance, universities, transformed from keepers of the bellicose status quo into breeding grounds for peace thinkers and activists alike.