The Italian scholar Petrarch spent a significant period of time in southeastern France as a boy and a young man.  In 1311, when he was seven years old, he moved to Avignon with his family; in 1312, he moved to the small town of Carpentras and remained there until 1316.  During other periods of his life from the 1330s to the 1350s, he chose to reside in what is now the French department of Vaucluse. 

In a nostalgic 1367 letter to his childhood friend Guido Sette, Petrarch reminiscences about their youthful experiences in France.  This letter, which has been given the title De Mutatione Temporum (On the Changing of the Times) is darkened by Petrarch’s insistence that, even taking into account the tendency of older men to speak as encomiasts of the past, the world he lived in as an adult was definitely worse than the one he inhabited as a boy.  We cannot fault him for this belief, for he was probably correct.  He lived in an age in which the twin spectres of plague (in the form of the Black Death) and war stalked France and Italy, leaving social chaos and economic instability in their wake.

But it is one particular anecdote in the letter that concerns us here.  Petrarch tells Guido Sette that, when living in Vaucluse, he recalls a time when marauding packs of wolves used to terrorize the local townspeople by slaughtering sheep and entering residential houses in search of food.  Petrarch considers this to be an evil omen foreshadowing the arrival of an even more dangerous animal:  man.  On one Christmas Day, a band of destructive thieves raided the town where he resided.  They carried off what they could from local homes, and set fire to the rest.  The son of Petrarch’s estate manager (villicus) had the presence of mind to remove some books that were in Petrarch’s home, and stored them in a local fortified castle. 

The plundering brigands, apparently, believed that the castle was impregnable to assault.  But in fact it was empty and undefended.  Had the bandits chosen to attack the castle, with all the treasure stored within, they would easily have breached its gates.  Only the intervention of Fate prevented them from doing so.  We should be reminded that vellum books were extremely valuable in the Middle Ages.  “Thus by the providence of God,” writes Petrarch, “the books were miraculously saved from their terrible jaws, so that such noble plunder would not fall into such despicable hands.” 

Petrarch goes on to say that nothing can really be hidden from thieves or brigands.  They watch everything, and look for weaknesses constantly.  But they can be deterred by institutions and the actions of men. He condenses these observations into one brilliant sentence, which, perhaps more than any other, demonstrates the old scholar’s critical perspicacity:

There is place so secure, no place so exalted, to which armed ambition and avarice, released from the restraints of the laws, cannot climb [Nullus tam munitus tamque excelsus est locus in quem non scandat armata cupiditas et solute legum vinclis avaritia].

And so do we note this very same truth in our own time.  The hands of injustice, ambition, and greed have ways of thrusting their fingers into every crevice and cranny of our social fabric.  Criminals no longer wear the woolen cloaks of brigands; they modernly appear dressed in suits, reading from teleprompters or speaking before journalists.  Petrarch’s books were only saved by a miracle; but this kind of luck is infrequent, and the exception that only proves the rule.  The proper functioning of a civil state cannot depend on miracles; it must rely on the resilience of institutions staffed and operated by men of strength and moral rectitude.  As Petrarch warns, only legal restraints can keep the predations of the ambitious, the powerful, and the unjust in check.  The same rule applies to relations between states and nations.  When states consider themselves exempt from the obligations of treaties or the normative rules of human decency, institutions are degraded and discredited.  As institutions cease to function, lust and greed are liberated from the bonds of rational restraint, and the inevitable result is chaos and death.   

.

.

Read more on this and related subjects in the new, annotated translation of Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods.