THE FIRST EDITION OF DANTE'S MONARCHY, a treatise in three books on political topics, written in Latin. The title does not refer generically to every state in which a king is sovereign; it refers instead to the Empire: that one principality that stands above all the others, in relation to that which has a beginning and an end in time (see Mn I II 2). The Monarchy was in fact composed with the intention of defending the rights of the Empire against the claims of the Church and the hostility of the Guelphs

"Very rare original edition. Found together with the book by Andrea Alciati, De foruma Romani...on pages 53-179, obtained by Oporino who dedicated it to Hieronimo Frickero, patrician of Bern. This edition is the first of the "De Monarchia "....". Mambelli 846.

The Monarchy is the second of four treatises dealing with imperial jurisdiction, collected in an octavo volume, published for the first time in October 1559 in Basel by Oporino; on the title page, taken up in the dedicatory letter, however, there is the title De Monarchia [not Monarchia], and it will remain so for subsequent printed editions until 1921. The text is preceded on pp.49-52 by a dedicatory letter from the publisher to Fricker, where it is stated that the author of the treatise is not Dante Alighieri! Recent studies suggest a suggestive hypothesis: Erasmus himself should have edited the edition of the Monarchia, as attested by a letter from a few decades earlier, on the basis of a manuscript in his possession (coming from Mercurino Gattinara) which will then pass a thirty years later in the hands of the editor of the present edition in Basel, perhaps becoming the basic text. The treaty will be printed in October and immediately placed on the Index, together with its publisher, by Paul IV. This is the reason for the small number of copies that have reached us.