Francesco Patrizi of Siena (Franciscus Patricius Senensis) (1413–1494) was the most important political philosopher of the Italian Renaissance before the generation of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) and Francesco Guicciardini (1483-1540). He was the principal exponent of the humanist tradition of ‘virtue politics.’ He was the first Western political philosopher since antiquity to devote sustained attention to the question of how a republic devoted to liberty and equality could uphold meritocratic principles in government—how it could ensure that its rulers and political class generally were public-spirited, well-educated men of virtue and wisdom. He was the first political philosopher since Aristotle to devote sustained attention to citizenship (in both its republican and royal varieties), and the first to explore the potential of a planned urban environment to shape civic values and facilitate a free way of life. He was also the pioneer of a new ‘historico-prudential’ approach to political thought that applied the study of the humanities, above all history, to the reform of republican and royal institutions.
He acted as governor of Foligno, then in the Papal States, for several years from 1461. Pius II, who was a personal friend, appointed him bishop of Gaeta in the same year.
Significance
Though almost unknown today, Patrizi’s influence in the later Renaissance, as shown by the printing history of his works, was enormous. In the sixteenth century his political writings were published more often than either More’s Utopia or Erasmus’ Education of a Christian Prince. Printings of Machiavelli’s three great political treatises—The Prince, the Discourses, and The Art of War—slightly outnumbered the printings of Patrizi’s two major works, How to Found a Republic and On Kingship. But on the evidence of their printing history, Patrizi was arguably more influential among the more highly educated. Editions of Machiavelli were mostly in Italian, a European language of culture by the later sixteenth century, but Patrizi’s works were far better known in Latin, the international language of scholarship. They were also translated into Italian, French, Spanish and German, and epitomes of his works circulated in Latin, French, and English.
One reason for Patrizi’s popularity was his extraordinary learning. Patrizi was the first political theorist in European history to have access to almost the entire corpus of ancient Greek political thought and history we possess today. A highly accomplished Hellenist himself, he was able to study and synthesize the newly available Greek literature that was rapidly filling the shelves of Italian libraries during the quattrocento, both in the original and in new Latin translations made by his fellow humanists. Medieval scholastics had been able to study Aristotle’s Politics after the Dominican friar William of Moerbeke translated it into Latin around 1260, and the encounter with Aristotle made a deep impression on theorists from Thomas Aquinas to Marsilius of Padua. But the translation movement of the Renaissance vastly extended the Latin West’s access to the heritage of ancient Greece. The medievals had not possessed any of the political works of Plato, Xenophon, Isocrates, Polybius, Dio Chrysostom, or Plutarch. They had no access to the political history of the Greeks written by Herodotus, Thucydides, or Xenophon, or to the Greek historians of the Roman Empire such as Polybius, Appian, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Diodorus Siculus, and Arrian. Patrizi read and excerpted all these authors, and many other Greek and Latin writers as well.