This well-known treatise of St. Thomas Aquinas on the principles of good government was addressed, there seems little doubt, to Hugh II, de Lusignan, king of Cyprus, who died in 1267 at the untimely age of seventeen years. On the death of the promising youth the Saint discontinued his work, when he had reached the fourth chapter of the second book; but the task was completed, not altogether unsuccessfully, by one of his pupils, Ptolemy de Lucca, a Dominican who lived to become bishop of Torcello and died in 1327. St. Thomas included fifteen chapters in his first book, and Ptolemy added twelve more to the second, and completed the whole work by adding two more books, one of twenty-two chapters, the other of twenty-eight, so that of the whole work De Regimine Principum as it appears in the collected works of St. Thomas, Ptolemy’s share is sixty-two chapters out of a total of eighty-one.

I have no intention of giving here a resume of the book whose principles are so well known to students of St. Thomas; I merely wish to indicate the broad historical background in which it was composed.

St. Thomas, we have to remember, was an Italian, and by birth a subject of his distant kinsman, the Emperor Frederic II; being born in the kingdom of Naples, then an appanage of the Imperial a-own. Under Frederic’s harsh rule the Saint lived out his youth, but after joining the Dominicans found peace under the just and therefore tranquil government of St. Lewis IX of France.