PROLOGUE
Leaving aside the various forms and definitions of justice, about which many authors have written in their sundry ways, it is our intention in this prologue to limit ourselves to considering that particular justice which is the very basis of royal power, in that it punishes evildoers and allows good people to live in peace. In doing this we shall not pretend to create or devise new theories of our own; rather, we shall assemble from certain authors a handful of those views that have appealed to us. Our first aim is to guide our audience[1] into understanding what our narrative is about; our second aim is to follow precisely the order set out in our first prologue.[2]
King Pedro, whose reign we shall now describe, meted out justice, and, as the saints have written, to dispense justice is more pleasing to God than any other worthy action that a monarch can perform. Moreover, since some people wish to know what that virtue consists of and to what extent such virtue, which must be found in a king, is also appropriate in his people, you will now be able to read about it in the straightforward style that corresponds to our understanding of it.
Justice is a virtue which is recognized as embracing all virtues, in the sense that any person who is just is entirely virtuous, because justice, being God’s law, forbids fornication and gluttony, and in its observance we uphold the virtues of chastity and temperance. The same applies also to the other vices and virtues.
This virtue is essential to a king and, indeed, to his subjects, because if the king possesses the virtue of justice he will enact laws so that all should live lawfully and in peace, and his subjects, themselves also just, will observe the laws that he enacts and in their observance will commit no wrong against anyone. Such justice as this can be acquired by anyone of sound judgement. In some instances people are born with a natural sense of justice and enthusiastically put it into practice, even if they are prone to certain vices.
The reason why this virtue is necessary to the prince’s subjects is that it causes them to observe his laws, which should always be framed for the public good. Anyone observing such laws will always act with decorum, because the laws set the rules that subjects must follow. They are the ‘inanimate prince’ [princeps inanimatus], whereas the king is an ‘animate prince’ [princeps animatus], and his laws express with silent voices that which the king declares from his own mouth.[3] This is why justice is most essential, both to his people and to the king, for without it no town or realm can live in harmony. Accordingly, a realm wherein the whole populace are beset with evil cannot survive for long, since, just as the soul sustains the body, and on leaving it the body perishes, in the same way justice sustains kingdoms, and when it abandons them they too perish.
If, therefore, the virtue of justice is essential to the people, it is all the more essential to the king, because, if law governs how a person should behave, then all the more just must be the monarch who enacts it and the judge who administers it. Law is a prince without a soul, as we said earlier, and the prince endows justice and the rule of law with a soul. Just as anything with a soul has the advantage over anything soulless, so the king must occupy a position of excellence over the law, because he must have all the necessary justice and integrity to enforce its execution. Otherwise, his kingdom would present the wretched spectacle of having good laws yet evil practices. Indeed, to harbour doubts on the monarch’s need to value justice is nothing less than to doubt whether rulers need to be straight, for if the ruler lacks rectitude, then nothing right will come of it.
Another reason why justice is most essential in a king is that justice brings beauty to the monarch, endowing him not only with bodily virtue but also with spiritual strength: just as spiritual beauty prevails over that of the body, so justice in a king reigns above the other forms of beauty.
The third reason rests on the perfection of goodness: we say that something is perfect when it is capable of reproducing itself. Accordingly, a thing is described as good from the degree to which its goodness extends to other people, at least in the example it sets, with the result that, when given the power to govern, it is by a man’s deeds that one judges how good he is. It is, therefore, incumbent on kings to act justly, so as to serve the best interests of all their subjects and to cause them no harm, and to strive to ensure that justice is meted out not only to those living in their realm but also to those living beyond its borders. To deny justice to any person is a grave offence both to the sovereign and to his entire realm.
This virtue of justice, which finds few people willing to entertain it, is, as Tully says,[4] the queen and supreme lady of the other virtues. It was King Pedro’s constant practice. Those who wish to ascertain this fact can do so simply by reading his story, and, since he was driven both by noble intent and natural inclination to curb evil deeds, he ruled his country well, despite shortcomings for which he could have been duly penitent. It may thus be assumed that he received the reward of justice, the leaves and fruits of which comprise an honoured repute in this world and eternal rest in the next.
[1] Frequently, in all the chronicles, Lopes uses words implying ‘to hear’ or ‘listeners’ when referring to how the public will react to his accounts. Apart from the occasional public reading that is known to have still been performed at Court in the fifteenth century, this is generally thought to be a literary device to place the chronicles in the old and noble tradition of historiography which, in medieval terms, was intended for oral communication.
[2] Lopes wrote the chronicles of all seven Portuguese kings who preceded King Pedro, going back to the conquests of Count Henry of Burgundy (d. 1112), father of the first King of Portugal, Afonso Henriques. No reliable version of that part of his work has reached us. Here, he is probably mentioning the prologue he placed at its beginning. Sixteenth-century copies of older chronicles of the same kings appear to be partially connected with those earlier chronicles, but they are the result of subsequent interpolations and no longer represent Lopes’s texts. There is still considerable scholarly debate about this.
[3] The Latin references here are derived from Book I, Part II, Chapter XII of the De regimine principum (‘On kingship’) of the theologian Giles of Rome (c.1247-1316). See the translation of Ernst H. Kantorowicz in The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Theology (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981, reprint 1997), p. 134: ‘the king or prince is a kind of Law, and the law is a kind of king or prince. For the Law is a kind of inanimate prince; the prince, however, is a kind of animate Law. And in so far as the animate exceeds the inanimate the king or prince must exceed the Law.’
[4] That is to say, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC), the Roman statesman, orator and writer.