Livre de Politiques
Soon after the translation was finished, Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas wrote commentaries on it, trying to illuminate its sometimes obscure meaning and to reconcile it with Christian doctrine.
[5] In this work, he used Aristotelian thought to promote an end to the constant debasement of coinage practiced by King John II to pay for the Hundred Years' War.
At the same time, the merchants of Paris, under their leader Etienne Marcel, tried to limit royal power, especially in financial matters, by having the Estates-General pass the Great Ordinance of 1357.
While the noblemen suppressed the peasants, Charles of Navarre discredited himself by joining ranks with the partly violent merchants of Paris who not long after murdered their leader Marcel.
[6] After this major crisis and after ascending the throne in 1364, Charles V started a cultural programme of scientific writing and translations to support his dynasty's fragile legitimacy and to facilitate governing.
[7] Between 1370 and 1377, at the behest of Charles V, Oresme translated and annotated Aristotle's moral works, namely the Nicomachean Ethics, the Politics, and the pseudo-Aristotelian Economics, into French.
[9] Oresme justified his translation from Latin, the savant language of his time, to the more vulgar Middle French as part of the translatio studii.
[11] Oresme makes use of earlier commentaries written by Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas and Peter of Auvergne, and also quotes Marsilius of Padua's Defensor pacis (1324).
[12] Like his predecessors Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas and Peter of Auvergne (and quite unlike Aristotle), Oresme favours monarchy as the best form of government.
[26] The richly illuminated library copy presented to King Charles V is currently in possession of the Comte de Waziers in Paris and therefore not available to the public.
