BOTERO, GIOVANNI. - Born at Bene Vagienna (province of Cuneo) in 1543 or 1544, he was admitted to the Society of Jesus in 1560 and assigned to teaching in colleges in France and Italy. In 1581 he left the Jesuits on good terms with his superiors, whether for reasons of health or for family reasons, though a particular discomfort of his in living with them is not to be excluded. It appears that he then enrolled in the Congregation of the Oblates of St. Charles Borromeo and was employed as vicar and then as vicar forane of Luino. In 1582 he received his doctorate in theology at the University of Pavia. Two years later he was appointed by St. Charles as parish priest of Limito, near Milan. From 1581 or 1582 he was secretary to St. Charles, who valued his worth and virtue; indeed St. Charles had already made use of him as conclavist in the Conclave of Gregory XIII (1572). In the same year as the great cardinal's death (1585) he received a first assignment from Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy, who sent him to France on an unknown mission. The following year he returned to Milan, in the service of Federigo Borromeo, whose secretary and teacher he was at the same time, accompanying him to Rome. In 1599, having resigned from the service of Card. Federigo with a good remuneration and a canonry at S. Ambrogio in Milan, he agreed to be tutor to the sons of the Duke of Savoy. He died at Turin in 1617.
He wrote on many and varied subjects, in prose and poetry. Assandria lists as many as 33 works and groups of letters, both published and unpublished. To these is to be added a work, until now unknown, De Rege, to which B. makes reference in an unpublished letter in the Vatican archive that is about to be published. Of all his works, however, particular mention should be made of the books Della ragion di Stato and the Relazioni universali, which had very many editions, the latter more than the former. In the Ragion di Stato B. marks one of the most salient moments of the attempt to bring politics and morality, reason of state and ethics, into dialectic; he too, like Machiavelli, is concerned with the manner of conquering and maintaining states: in the conquest of a state, opportunity, the disorders of enemies and the work of others play a part, «but to maintain the acquisition is the fruit of an excellent virtue. One acquires with force, one preserves with wisdom; and force is common to many: wisdom belongs to few» (Della Ragion di Stato, edited by C. Morandi, Bologna 1930, p. 13). B. wavers between the concept of a reason of state understood as a method of acquiring and maintaining the state, and the concept of a reason of state of Machiavellian flavor, equivalent, that is, to the interest and egoism of princes; at times in the end he too recognizes in the state the right to resort in certain cases to violence and simulation. The Relazioni universali are a treatise of political geography, of which it was rightly observed that B., innovating and anticipating his times, strips geography of its empirical notions and considers the various countries as the environment of man, studying man in relation to each of them. Of particular value is considered the Relazione sul mare, in which he wisely summarizes and coordinates the notions of his time on oceanography.