Adam Contzen — Adamus Contzen on his Latin title pages, sometimes spelled Conzen — was born at Monschau in the Duchy of Jülich in 1571 and entered the Society of Jesus at Trier in 1595. He taught philosophy at Würzburg and from 1610 held the chair of Sacred Scripture at Mainz for more than a decade, writing commentaries on the Gospels and the Epistles of St. Paul and a treatise On the Peace of Germany.
His Ten Books of Politics (Mainz, 1621), a complete Catholic doctrine of the commonwealth written against Machiavelli, so impressed Maximilian I, Elector of Bavaria, that he chose its author as his confessor. From 1623 until his death at Munich in 1635 Contzen served at the Bavarian court, and he set out the same teaching in narrative form in his political novel, the History of King Abissinus.
The Ten Books of Politics are offered here complete, in English for the first time, from the second, enlarged edition of 1629: the causes and form of the commonwealth, religion, the virtues, the education of youth, laws, ecclesiastical and civil magistracy, the power of the state, its internal evils, and war.