John of Salisbury studied in Paris under Abelard and others, spent a decade as secretary to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and in 1170 was present when Thomas Becket was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral. From that witness he went on to become Bishop of Chartres. His Policraticus — the first comprehensive work of political philosophy in the medieval Latin West — argues that the prince is the servant of the common good, subject to law, bound by justice. A tyrant, he said, may be killed. This was not casual opinion but careful argument from ancient sources: he had read Cicero, Plutarch, and Frontinus with the thoroughness of a scholar who loved those texts for their own sake as well as for what they proved. His Metalogicon defends the study of logic and letters as the foundation of all wisdom. He was learned, humane, occasionally witty, and quietly radical beneath the scholarship.
Crossed to France at nineteen and studied under the century's best teachers — Abelard on the Mont Sainte-Geneviève among them — leaving in the Metalogicon the finest surviving eyewitness account of the twelfth-century schools.
Words
“Between a tyrant and a prince there is this single difference: the prince obeys the law, and rules the people by its dictates, accounting himself their servant.”