Major contexts for political philosophy in the late Middle Ages can be described in contrasts drawn between the real and the fictive or merely verbal. Civil lawyers, developing an idea of Pope Innocent IV’s, distinguished the fictive legal personality of a political community (a kingdom, say) from its real members when they attempted to accommodate the de facto independence of kingdoms such as England and France from the theoretically universal dominion of the Empire. Reasoning employed here also found application to smaller communities, old and newly formed. For example, a city that actually ran its own affairs had a case for recognition as legitimately free, a ruler to itself, a civitas sibi princeps.
A harsher distinction between real and verbal was made by a henchman of the king of France, addressing Pope Boniface VIII regarding his claims to supreme authority in the bull Unam sanctam (1302): ‘‘Your power is verbal, ours is real.’’ A little later, different assertions of papal unreality were made by rebel Franciscans (including William of Ockham) who accused John XXII of heresy (hence of being a pseudo-pope) for denying the total legal poverty of Christ and his apostles. John in turn accused the friars themselves of practicing a merely fictive poverty. Other disputes about papal reality occurred during the schism of 1378-1417, when as many as three individuals at once claimed to be pope. The conciliar movement managed to negotiate unity in the papacy, but even with the rich resources of medieval corporation theory it remained unclear by the time of John Torquemada’s Summa de ecclesia (1453) what, if any, authority the body of the church had with respect to its papal head.