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Giovanni Botero (c. 1544-1617) was a sixteenth
century Italian thinker, priest, poet, and
diplomat, best known for his 1589 work The Reason
of State. In this work, he argued against the
amoral political philosophy associated with
Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince, not only
because it lacked a Christian foundation, but also
because it simply didn't work. Basing his
political and economic ideas primarily on the
thought of Thomas Aquinas, Botero argued for a
more sophisticated relationship between princes
and their subjects, one that would give the people
more power in the political and economic matters
of the state. In this way, Botero foreshadows the
thought of later liberal thinkers, such as John
Locke, Adam Smith, and Thomas Malthus.  

== Early Years ==

Born around 1544 in the northern Italian
principality of Piedmont, Botero was sent to the
Jesuit college in Palermo at the age of 15. A year
later, he moved to the Roman College, he was
introduced to the teaching of some of the most
influential Catholic thinkers of the sixteenth
century, including Juan Mariana, who, in his On
the King and the Education of the King, would
argue for the popular overthrow of tyrannical
rulers.
 
In 1565, Botero was sent to teach philosophy and
rhetoric at the Jesuit colleges in France, first
in Billom, and then in Paris. The second half of
the sixteenth century saw the kingdom
dramatically, and often violently divided by the
French Wars of Religion. Paris especially was
heating up during Botero's stay there from
1567-1569, and he was recalled to Italy after
getting too caught up in the excitement,
apparently for his involvement in an anti-Spanish
protest.

Botero spent the 1570s drifting from one Jesuit
college to another, Milan, Padua, Genoa, and then
back in Milan. After a doctrinally incorrect
sermon he gave questioning the Pope's temporal
power, he was discharged from the Jesuit order in
1580.

== As Secretary and Diplomat ==

Botero's life took a major turn at this time, when
he was commissioned by Bishop Carlo Borromeo of
Milan as a personal assistant. Borromeo introduced
Botero to the practical side of Church
administration, often socializing with the
nobility of northern Italy, most notably Duke
Carlo Emmanuele I of Savoy. When the Bishop died
in 1584, Botero continued his service to the
family as assistant to Carlo Borromeo's nephew,
Federico. 

Before his work with Federico began, however,
Botero took part in a diplomatic mission to France
on behalf of Carlo Emmanuele. For most of 1585,
Botero was in Paris, discussing affairs of the
day, and perhaps overhearing the conspiratorial
debate on whether the pope would grant license for
the French Duke of Guise, assisted by the Duke of
Savoy and Philip II of Spain, to kill the French
King, so they could then launch a massive
offensive against the French and Swiss Calvinists.
The license was never granted, and the offensive
was postponed and made more modest, but this
conspiracy tells of what kind of political debate
was being had, and just what kind of trouble there
was in 1580s France.

== Works and Thought ==

By the late 1580s, Botero had already published a
few works, most notably an epic-style poem
dedicated to Henry III of France in 1573 and a
Latin commentary on Hebrew Scriptures titled On
Kingly Wisdom in 1583, but his most important
works were yet to come. In 1588, Botero first
published his On the Greatness of Cities.
Foreshadowing the work of Thomas Malthus, here
Botero outlines the generative and nutritive
virtues of a city, the former being the rate of
human reproduction, and the latter being the
ability of the products of the city and its
countryside to maintain the people. Cities grow
when their nutritive virtue is greater than the
generative, but at the inevitible point when these
virtues are inverted, the city begins to die.

In 1589, Botero completed his most famous work,
The Reason of State. In this work, Botero argues
that a prince's power must be based on some form
of consent of his subjects, and princes must make
every effort to win the people's affection and
admiration. This differed from Machivalli's
philosophy in that, it is not sufficient to seem
like a just prince, for one's true nature will
always shine through; one must actually be a just
prince by the advice Botero lays out.

Botero's idea of justness came from his exposure
to Thomist thought and natural law circulating the
Jesuit college system, which had been greatly
influenced by the work of Dominican theologians
Francisco de Vitoria and Domingo de Soto of the
School of Salamanca. Thomas Aquinas had argued
that God infused each individual with certain
natural rights, and by the use of reason, human
beings could come together to create just
societies. Politically, Aquinas imagined that the
people would decide on a suitable king, and invest
him with certain powers to protect them and allow
their prosperity. If the king turned tyrant,
Aquinas argued, the people were within their
natural rights to depose him. This was in direct
opposition to the ideas on the God-given absolute
sovereignty of kings that were being proffered by
protestant theologians in the early sixteenth
century, and by political thinkers like the French
jurist Jean Bodin at the end of the century. 

Indeed, Jean Bodin's Six Books of a Republic was
an important infuence on Botero's writing of the
Reason of State, even if, as with Machiavelli's
Prince, much of that influence was negative. While
Botero disagrees with Bodin's thought on
sovereignty, preferring something more popularly
based, he does agree with some of Bodin's economic
ideas. Nonetheless, Botero's overall conception of
political economy is again more 'liberal' than
that of Bodin, who argued for active participation
by kings in the economy of the country, including
mercantilist policies that would be enacted
wholeheartedly in seventeenth century France by
Louis XIV of France|Louis XIV and Colbert. Bodin
cautioned kings only against trading with their
own subjects; all other economic activity was
allowed. Botero, on the other hand, argued that
there were only three cases where the prince could
take part in trade: 1) if no private citizen could
afford it, 2) if a single private citizen would
grow too powerful by the profits of it, or 3)
there were some shortfall in supply whereby the
prince would have to aid in the distribution of
goods. Ultimately, Botero argued that economic
activity was unbecoming a prince, and that the
people were to be the prime economic mover in the
state.

== Later Works, Life, and Influence ==

Through the 1590s, Botero continued in the employ
of Federico Borromeo, who would become Archbishop
of Milan in 1595. Botero mixed in the high society
of Rome and Milan in these years, and published
another work for which he was to become quite
well-known, the Universal Relations. Released in
four volumes between 1591 and 1598 (a fifth volume
was finally published in the late nineteenth
century), the 'relations' of the title referred to
those of the 'universal' (Catholic) church in
various parts of the world, including France, the
New World, and Asia. Indeed, Botero had always
wanted to be sent on a Jesuit mission abroad, but
was always refused by his superiors. Now that he
was no longer technically a member of the order,
he could only compose a work cataloging the
missions of others.

Finishing his employment with Federico Borromeo in
1599, Botero returned to the House of Savoy, to be
tutor to three sons of Carlo Emmanuele. He would
tour Spain with his three charges from 1603 to
1607, no doubt associating with the closest of
Philip III of Spain|Philip III's advisors, from
whom his ideas would be passed on to Philip IV of
Spain|Philip IV's most trusted policy-maker, the
Count-Duke of Olivares. 

Here is where Botero's work began to have an
influence. Olivares seems to have used Botero's
Reason of State to outline the strategy for
preserving the Spanish Empire in his famous
Memorial on the Union of Arms. There is also
evidence that Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, one of
the staunchest political supporters of Catholic
reform and a leading figure of the Thirty Years'
War, had discussed the Reason of State with his
advisors. Thus, Botero's thought was able to shape
at least some of the policy among the European
states of the very troubled seventeenth century.

Botero's work would also influence the next
generation of political and economic thinkers.
Thomas Mun's liberal mercantilist treatise
England's Treasure by Foreign Trade, written in
1624, but not published until 1664, owes something
to the Reason of State, and there is evidence that
the great Belgian thinker Justus Lipsius read the
Reason of State.