JEAN PETIT. 335 the thanks of king and people. Written in the conventional scho- lastic style, the tract was not a mere political pamphlet, but an ar- gument based on premises of general principles. It is a curious coincidence that, nearly three centuries earlier, another Johannes Parvus, better known as John of Salisbury, the worthiest repre- sentative of the highest culture of his day, in a purely specula- tive treatise had laid down the doctrine that a tyrant was to be put to death without mercy. According to the younger Jean Petit, " Any tyrant can and ought properly to be slain by any subject or vassal, and by any means, specially by treachery, not- withstanding any oath or compact, and without awaiting judicial sentence or order." This rather portentous proposition was lim- ited by defining the tyrant to be one who is endeavoring through cupidity, fraud, sorcery, or evil mind to deprive the king of his au- thority, and the subject or vassal is assumed to be one who is in- spired by loyalty, and him the king should cherish and reward. It was not difficult to find Scriptural warrant for such assertion in the slaying of Zimri by Phineas, and of Holofernes by Judith ; but Jean Petit ventured on debatable ground when he declared that St. Michael, without awaiting the divine command and moved only by natural love, slew Satan with eternal death, for which he was rewarded with spiritual wealth as great as he was capable of receiving.* That this was not a mere lawyer's pleading is shown by the fact that it was written in the vernacular and exposed for sale. Doubtless Jean sans Peur circulated it extensively, and it was doubtless convincing to those who were already convinced. It might safely have been allowed to perish in the limbo of forget- fulness, but when, some six years later, the Armagnac faction obtained the upper hand, it was exhumed from the dust as a ready means of attacking the Burgundians. Jean Petit himself, by op- portunely dying some years before, escaped a trial for heresy, but in November, 1313, a national council was assembled in Paris to consider nine propositions extracted from his work. Gerard, Bishop of Paris, and Frere Jean Polet, the inquisitor, summoned the masters of theology of the University to give their opinions,
- Johann. Saresberiens. Polycrat. vm. 17. — D'Argentre I. n. 180-5. — Mon-
strelet, Chroniques, I. 39, 119.
