The Education of a Christian Prince

The Education of a Christian Prince (Institutio Principis Christiani) is a treatise by Desiderius Erasmus belonging to the Renaissance genre of the mirror for princes. Its aim is to guide a ruler toward becoming a good Christian prince: a just and benevolent governor who relies on virtue rather than force.

Erasmus wrote the work in 1516, when its dedicatee, Prince Charles, later the Emperor Charles V, was sixteen. It was published in 1532. It appeared in the same year Thomas More finished his Utopia and only three years after Machiavelli had written The Prince, though Machiavelli's book was not printed until sixteen years later. The two works are often compared. Machiavelli argued that, to maintain control through political force, it was safer for a prince to be feared than loved; Erasmus preferred that the prince be loved, and advocated a broad education as the means to govern justly and avoid becoming a source of oppression. The text also served a personal purpose: it helped secure Erasmus a post as tutor to the prince. He later became tutor to Charles's brother Ferdinand and an honorary counselor to the emperor.

The treatise holds that teachers should be of gentle temperament and have an unimpeachable moral character, and that a good education should embrace all the liberal arts. Like the Roman educator Quintilian, Erasmus opposes corporal punishment for unruly pupils and stresses that each student must be treated as an individual. Throughout, he tries to reconcile the authors of antiquity with the Christian ethics of his own time, drawing on thinkers such as Plato, Seneca and Plutarch within a vision centered on Christ and on inner faith rather than external rites. His rhetoric draws on the classical tradition, from Isocrates to Cicero, and follows the model of moral counsel addressed to a ruler.

The work was read as an example of humanist pedagogy and of the philosophia Christi, the path Erasmus had already developed in earlier writings such as the Enchiridion. Its influence persisted in discussions of princely education and in the conviction that power should be exercised with virtue and intellectual formation.