From God’s commission to the will of the ‘princeps’: law, authority and sovereignity in the late medieval political thought

Abstract

Questions related to law and to authority have strongly marked the Westernpolitical medieval thought, and especially the development of the notion ofsovereignty, which can be seen as a point of convergence of the great conflicts ofjurisdiction during the period. The debate on the distribution of jurisdictionsconstituted one of the important moments for the making of the modern idea ofsovereignty. Initially, as the law was taken as given, the meaning of the authorityhad to be necessarily tied to the idea of commission. Authority was an attributeof who could enforce the law on behalf of the divine legislator. Anotherimportant moment was that of the emergence of the problem of the legislativepower, as it is modernly conceived. Jurisdiction, from now on, included also theright to create and to impose the valid norms for the whole community formulatednow by a human legislator. By and by the will of the princeps, which was nolonger limited by reason and morality, should be understood as the creative,transforming and revoking source of the law. To show the general lines of thisprocess is the foremost objective of this article.