FRANCESCO de MEYRONNES. - Franciscan of the 13th-14th century. According to Roth, F. was born no later than 1288 and died, it seems, no earlier than 1328 in Piacenza. He studied in Paris, where he perhaps heard G. Duns Scotus, whose doctrines he followed. He defended, in particular, the thesis of the Immaculate Conception. Posterity called him Doctor acutus, illuminatus, and also Magister abstractionum.
Felicissimo Tinivella
FRANCESCO I and II Sforza, Dukes of MILAN:
V. FORZA, FAMIGLIA.
FRANCESCO IV of Austria-Este, Duke of MODENA and REGGIO. - Born on Oct. 6, 1799, in Milan, died on Jan. 18, 1846, in Modena, the firstborn son of Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, and of Maria Beatrice, heir to the duchies of Modena, Reggio, Massa, and Carrara. During the Revolution and the Empire he was in exile and in 1812, in Cagliari, married Maria Beatrice of Savoy. With the fall of Napoleon, in 1814 he became Duke of Modena and Reggio. Intelligent and cultured, he governed with prudent energy, demonstrating singular administrative gifts, although from his earliest years his tendency to centralize all power in his own person and to prevent by every means in his state the spread of any innovative concept was evident.
He made no more secret of this after the uprisings of 1820-21 in Naples and Piedmont. He adhered without hesitation to the resolutions of the Congress of Ljubljana and considered the fight against the sects to be the primary purpose of his political activity, establishing a summary tribunal at Rubiera to judge the Carbonari. He conceived his political action as a mission and a crusade. He saw excessive weakness toward revolutionaries everywhere, preached unremitting severity to all other sovereigns of Italy, and anyone who did not heed him was considered by him a traitor to the absolutist cause. He even doubted Card. Spina, the papal plenipotentiary to the Congress of Ljubljana, and accused him in a letter to Pius VII of having expressed liberal sentiments at that convention, because the cardinal had not accepted his thesis that even a person simply suspected of sectarianism should be subject to condemnation, without such suspicion being justified by the necessary proofs. In 1822 he had the priest G. Andreoli condemned to death, as more culpable than the other accused, "because of his status as a priest and a professor, which he used to seduce youth and draw them into the society of the Carbonari to which he belonged."
Firmly convinced that he could nullify the effectiveness of revolutionary ideas through paternalistic reforms, he took care to eliminate through economic provisions (fairly distributed taxes, the sale of grain at a fair price in times of famine, greater impetus to agricultural, industrial, and commercial activities) the causes that could provoke the discontent of his subjects and render them prone to innovations. It has been claimed that he was not indifferent to the prospect of extending his sovereignty over a territory broader than the one he inherited and that he granted his support to Enrico Milsley and Ciro Menotti, who supposedly suggested such a possibility to him; but in any case, it is certain that he was not fully informed by the conspirators of their real political and ideological intentions. The death sentence of Menotti was therefore erroneously judged and evaluated as a vindictive resentment, dictated also by the equivocal position in which the duke would have found himself before Austria and the other Italian states. He considered the alliance between throne and altar to be one of the fundamental conditions for the preservation of established order and always favored the Church, but on some occasions asserted the preeminence of civil power over ecclesiastical power. Among other things, he is responsible for an interesting and symptomatic study of Sardinia, which he carefully traversed and acutely described.