The ‘wise king’ topos in context

It was the German historian Wilhelm Berges who first identified the sapiential royal topos and coined the concept of the ‘ideal of the learned kings’ (Ideal des Gelehrtenkönigs) to refer to it in his seminal study of medieval ‘mirrors of princes’ literature first published in 1938. ¹ Applying the same approach to late medieval political thought, Antony Black coined the expression ‘the sapiential idea’. Black pointed out that:

The case for giving the wise an important place in government was virtually unanswerable given the belief in rationality endemic in European culture, or at least the literate culture which produced political theory. This belief stemmed from Platonism, Stoicism and their Christianised variations which came to dominate the mental perspectives of late Rome, Byzantium and the Early and High Middle Ages in the West. It was the way to keep the myth of the monarch as the seat of wisdom. ²