If William Durant the Elder ever entertained any plans to play an active role in Gabalitan politics, in the event he never had a chance. After only four years his stay in Mende was cut short by an order from Boniface VIII to return to Italy and resume his previous duties in the papal states for which, it seems, his experience was invaluable. Shortly thereafter, on 1 November 1296, he died without having returned to Mende and was buried in Sta Maria sopra Minerva in Rome. A few weeks later, on 17 December 1296, Boniface VIII appointed his nephew, William Durant the Younger, to succeed him.

WILLIAM DURANT THE YOUNGER (1296–1330)

What we know about William Durant the Younger's early years is similar to what we know about his uncle, and just as scanty. He, too, was born in Puimisson, probably not long after 1266. He, too, must have studied law, but the circumstances of this are unclear. Probably he learned something from his uncle and perhaps he attended one of the centres of legal training in southern France. He may have gone on to a major university, but it is impossible to tell which one.

The two preceding chapters have served two different purposes, one relatively modest, the other more ambitious: first, to give a reasonably full description of the programme to reform the church that William Durant the Younger presented in the second part of his Tractatus Maior; and second, to offer an analysis of this programme according to two different ideas of order, namely, magnus ordo differentie and res publica. This analysis is not yet complete. We have distinguished between ideas of hierarchy and commonwealth and have identified some of the many ways in which they shaped the Tractatus Maior. We have accordingly distinguished two meanings of Durant's conciliar proposal: one was to protect the hierarchical articulation of the church from the power of the papacy by assuring a steady link between the divine reason of the universe and the government of the church; the other was to mediate between the conflicting interests of functionally differentiated sectors of society in order to assure the harmonious cooperation of all for the common good. But we have not yet studied how these conceptions were related to each other.

William Durant the Younger was the author of two equally remarkable documents for the history of political thought: the paréage of Mende and the Tractatus Maior. But whereas he succeeded in putting into effect the ideas that he articulated in the former – succeeded, indeed, in laying down a constitutional regime that would survive intact for almost half a thousand years – he failed completely with the latter. What explains this spectacular success and this no less spectacular defeat? It is not that in the paréage he opted for princely sovereignty whereas in the Tractatus Maior he opted for republican government. Nor is it that the paréage dealt with a local territory whereas the Tractatus Maior dealt with the universal church. It is not even that the circumstances favoured his attempt to subject the nobility of the Gévaudan to his control, but did not favour his attempt to subject the papacy to the will of general councils. It is that he insisted on the authority of law.

There is a sense in which the authority of law is inseparably wedded to republican government, namely, the sense in which the law defines the common good and curbs the capricious will of arbitrary rulers.

This, then, was the argument for reforming the church by general councils that William Durant the Younger presented in the first part of his treatise. It pretended to rest on a coherent vision of law and order – but we have already suggested that beneath this placid surface there was a veritable abyss of doubts. The nature of those doubts still needs to be identified, and the broader programme of reform that was contained in the second part of the Tractatus Maior, as well as its relationship to the conciliar proposal, still need to be considered. These are the tasks to which the following three chapters are dedicated.

Part of the reason why so much uncertainty has beset the study of Durant's intentions is that he never took the time to specify his purpose in any systematic way. He did say that he aimed at a ‘healthy regime for the human race’ and that according to St Paul the powers that be are ordained by God and therefore ought to conform to God's commands. He also made numerous suggestions how to improve this or that aspect of the world.

In 1311, at the council of Vienne, William Durant the Younger, bishop of Mende and count of Gévaudan, demanded a reform of the church ‘in head and members’ – a phrase that would reverberate throughout the later middle ages and which he was among the first to introduce into public debate. The centre-piece of this reform was to consist of the transferral of the responsibility for the law of the church from the papacy to general councils, which would meet at ten-year intervals: ‘Henceforth the church of Rome ought to enact no general laws unless a general council has been convoked, and such a council ought to be convoked every ten years.’ Lest anyone should think that the papacy would still be free to change existing laws by granting dispensations, Durant declared explicitly that the papacy was not to ‘issue any dispensations, privileges, or exemptions contrary to the provident conciliar constitutions of the holy fathers unless a general council has been called.’ In support of these demands he invoked the famous principle that ‘what touches all must, according to the rule of both canon law and civil law, be approved by all in common’.

So far we have considered the diocese of Mende from a local perspective. But ever since the beginning of Stephen's reign the control over the diocese had been passing out of local hands. During the years after the death of Odilo de Mercoeur, it finally passed into the hands of the spiritual and the temporal monarchies. We therefore need to shift our attention toward the growth of central government.

This matter is so broad and has received so much attention that it is neither possible nor necessary for us to deal with it in much detail. We do, however, need to identify two of its basic features. One was that the demise of the Hohenstaufen freed the papacy from the long-standing burden of war with the emperor and thus enabled it to resume vigorous leadership of the Christian commonwealth. The other was that in so doing it entered into an ever closer partnership with the most Christian king of France. It was the French whom the papacy called upon to pacify the lands of the Hohenstaufen in southern Italy; Frenchmen ascended to the papal throne; and general councils met in France.

The ‘great order of difference’ dominates Durant's ideas about reform, but it is insufficient for a complete interpretation of the Tractatus Maior. Side by side with exemplary efficiency and obedience to law one finds ideas about the proper way to organize a body politic that no interpretative artifice can fit into the notion of hierarchy and that give a different meaning to Durant's conciliar demand. These ideas are no more systematically elaborated than the great order of difference itself. Sometimes they appear in the form of asides that seem to leap from the page as foreign elements in the surrounding congeries of medieval jurisprudence. At other times they take the form of suggestions which in spite of their apparent harmony with hierarchical assumptions leave the reader with a nagging feeling that they lead in an entirely different direction. Only rarely do they occur as straightforward statements of principle. Fortunately for our purposes those rare occasions leave no doubt that the treatise embodies an idea of political organization which does not merely modulate the themes of hierarchy – it is opposed to them in principle. This idea of order is republican.

The purpose of the preceding chapters has been to define the context in which William Durant the Younger composed the Tractatus Maior. Generally speaking, that context consisted of the relation between local government and central government; but it brought together actors of different social origins with varying ideas of social order who added a considerable measure of complexity to the underlying pattern. Over a period of about 200 years the situation in the Gévaudan thus underwent a series of permutations, none of which abolished entirely what had come before but each of which added another layer of motives and memories. Indeed, the changes were so profound that one may wonder if the relationship between Aldebert de Tournel and Louis VII was at all comparable with that between William Durant and Philip IV. It may therefore be useful to summarize these developments and state a few conclusions.

The story we have told involved three main participants – the bishop, the local nobility, and the rulers of church and state – and it unfolded in three phases. During the first phase, the bishop took the lead by introducing reform to the Gévaudan in an attempt to shake off his dependence on the laity and to establish himself as sole lord of ‘the entire bishopric of Gévaudan’.

When the council of Vienne was over William Durant the Younger found himself in a precarious position. He had launched an attack on papal government whose viability depended upon a fortuitous combination of circumstances beyond his control that had quickly passed away. Whereas Pope Clement V had regained a position from which the plenitude of power could be exercised with confidence, his own project of restoring hierarchy through councils had miscarried. The justice on which, as he believed, it had been founded was now a justice without weight.

In this way the seeds of William Durant the Younger's decline were sown. But that did not become apparent until some years thereafter. The disagreement with Clement may have been deep in principle – and we can only guess how deep – but it was manifested only briefly. Soon after the council was over Clement granted Durant a number of favours. While this was only a common courtesy which was also bestowed on other participants in the council, it does indicate that their relationship had not been disturbed in any lasting way. These were also the years when his local opponents were finally and decisively subjected to his control, while his association with the monarchy was blossoming.

When Durant arrived in Vienne he may have thought that the chances of restoring true concord in the church were still good. The papacy had not yet completely recovered from the defeat it had suffered at Anagni, and Pope Clement V seemed weak. Philip IV, meanwhile, had kept the promise of the paréage, and the nobility of the Gévaudan was losing its independence. Assured of royal friendship, convinced of papal weakness, and ready to address a European audience, Durant set out to promote a lasting constitutional rearrangement of the church which he hoped would arrest the deterioration of the world, restore the bishops' honour, and realize the common good.

He was to be disappointed. If Anagni had demonstrated anything at all, it was that the pope had little hope of conducting any stable policy, much less an independent one, if he continued to be locked in battle with the most powerful monarchy in Europe. Friendly relations with the king of France had to be restored.

Mende was the capital of a large and ancient diocese in the southern parts of the Massif Central that coincided with the county of Gévaudan. Situated on the river Lot, about ten miles to the west of its springs and ten miles to the northwest of Mont Lozère – at well over 5,500 feet the highest elevation between the Rhône and the Atlantic coast – it dominated the easternmost extension of a long and tortuous valley that slowly descends in a western direction until it opens onto the plains of Aquitaine where, a few miles to the west of Agen, the Lot merges into the Garonne. Roughly speaking, the county has the shape of an oval with a radius varying from about twenty to thirty miles that is cut in half by the Lot and has its centre in Mende itself. The northern half is composed of two mountainous plateaus joined in the middle by a ridge that is formed by the Monts d'Aubrac in the northwest and the Montagnes de la Margeride in the north and northeast.