Defensor Pacis

Marsilius of Padua is one of the few truly revolutionary figures in the history of political philosophy. The first to propound the separation of Church and State, he is considered the precursor to subsequent political thinkers, from Machiavelli to Marx.;The Marsilian revolution consisted not only in a radical change in the theory of the relations between religion and politics that culminated in the Protestant Reformation and other central developments of the modern era, but, even more importantl