When in 1326 Louis of Bavaria saw the arrival in Nuremberg of the two authors of the book dedicated to him, startled by the boldness of their political and religious theories, he was at first inclined to treat them as heretics. He soon changed his mind, however, and, admitting them to the circle of his intimates, loaded them with favours. Having become one of the chief inspirers of the imperial policy, Marsilius accompanied Louis of Bavaria to Italy, where he preached or circulated written attacks against the pope, especially at Milan, and where he came within the sight of the realization of his wildest utopias. To see a king of the Romans crowned emperor at Rome, not by the pope, but by those who claimed to be the delegates of the people (Jan. 17, 1328), to see John XXII. deposed by the head of the Empire (April 18), and a mendicant friar, Pietro de Corbara, raised by an imperial decree to the throne of St Peter (as Nicholas V.) after a sham of a popular election (May 12), all this was merely the application of principles laid down in the Defensor pacis. The two authors of this book played a most active part in the Roman Revolution. Marsilius, appointed imperial vicar, abused his power to persecute the clergy who had remained faithful to John XXII. In recompense for his services, he seems to have been appointed archbishop of Milan, while his collaborator, John of Jandun, obtained from Louis of Bavaria the bishopric of Ferrara.
Marsilius of Padua also composed a treatise De translatione imperii romani, which is merely a rearrangement of a work of Landolfo Colonna, De jurisdictione imperatoris in causa matrimoniali, intended to prove the exclusive jurisdiction of the emperor in matrimonial affairs, or rather, to justify the intervention of Louis of Bavaria, who, in the interests of his policy, had just annulled the marriage of the son of the king of Bohemia and the countess of Tirol. But, above all, in an unpublished work preserved at Oxford, the Defensor minor, Marsilius completed and elaborated in a curious manner certain points in the doctrine laid down in the Defensor pacis. In it he deals with ecclesiastical jurisdiction, penances, indulgences, crusades and pilgrimages, vows, excommunication, the pope and the council, marriage and divorce. Here his democratic theory still more clearly leads up to a proclamation of the imperial omnipotence.
Marsilius of Padua does not seem to have lived long after 1342. But the scandal provoked by his Defensor pacis, condemned by the court of Avignon in 1326, lasted much longer. Benedict XII. and Clement VI. censured it in turn; Louis of Bavaria disowned it. Translated into French, then into Italian (14th century) and into English (16th century), it was known by Wycliffe and Luther, and was not without an influence on the Reform movement.
See J. Sullivan, American Historical Review, vol. ii. (1896-1897), and English Historical Review for April 1905; Histoire littéraire de la France (1906), xxxiii. 528-623; Sigmund Riezler, Die literarischen Widersacher der Päpste zur Zeit Ludwig des Baiers (Leipzig, 1874).
There are numerous manuscripts of the Defensor pacis extant. We will here mention only one edition, that given by Goldast, in 1614, in vol. i. of his Monarchia sacri imperii; an unpublished last chapter was published by Karl Müller, in 1883, in the Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen, pp. 923-925.
Count Lützow in The Life and Times of Master John Hus (London and New York, 1909), pp. 5-9, gives a good abstract of the Defensor pacis and the relations of Marsilius to other precursors of the Reformation.
(N. V.)
MARSIVAN, or Merzifun (anc. Phazemon?), a town in the Amasia sanjak of the Sivas vilayet of Asia Minor, situated at the foot of the Tavshan Dagh. Pop. about 20,000, two-thirds Mussulman. It is a centre of American missionary and educational enterprise, and the seat of Anatolia College, a theological seminary, and schools which were partly destroyed in the anti-Armenian riots of 1893 and 1895. There is also a Jesuit school. Marsivan is an unusually European place both in its aspect and the commodities procurable in the bazaar.