Marquis

Marquis is one of the ranks assigned to the spirits catalogued in the grimoire tradition, and above all in the Ars Goetia, the first book of the seventeenth-century Lesser Key of Solomon (Lemegeton). It denotes a middle-ranking noble spirit, likewise credited with command over a number of legions.

The ranks of the spirits

The Goetia lists seventy-two spirits and gives most of them a rank, King, Prince, Duke, Marquis, Earl or Count, President, or Knight, borrowed from the feudal and civil offices of the human world, together with the number of legions each is said to command. The scheme draws on earlier sources, notably the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum printed by Johann Weyer in 1577.

The rank is described here as a feature of these documented magical texts, studied as historical literature; the spirits so ranked are not reified.

Marquis traces to Old French marchis, itself from marca, a border march or frontier territory; the parallel German Markgraf, "count of the march," shows the same underlying idea taken up independently in the Holy Roman Empire. Both titles denoted, in their original medieval use, a nobleman entrusted with defending a frontier zone rather than an interior province, a responsibility that in principle carried more independent military authority than an ordinary count's, even though the peerage eventually ranked Marquis just below Duke. The Goetia borrows the word purely for its aristocratic weight, with no trace of the frontier-defence sense that originally gave the title its point.

Sources Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis (The Lesser Key of Solomon)Anonymous (unidentified compiler) with Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors

Marquis is the second largest rank in the catalogue. Fifteen of the seventy-two hold it, commanding 437 legions, with individual counts running from 19 to 50 and clustering more tightly around the middle than any other rank manages.

The title's origin in the human world is specific and military. A marchio was the lord of a march, a border province, and the office was created in the Carolingian empire for exactly the reason such offices are usually created: a frontier needs a commander with more independence than an ordinary count and cannot wait for instructions from the centre. Later European peerages kept the word and lost the frontier, so that marquess or marquis settled into a fixed step of precedence between duke and earl.

The Goetic catalogue takes it at that later value, and the way it does so is worth noticing. The ranks it uses are not scattered at random through the seventy-two. They preserve the order of precedence of a European peerage, king above duke above marquis above earl, with the civil office of president threaded alongside and a single knight at the bottom. Whoever assembled the hierarchy was borrowing a structure and not merely a vocabulary.

The fifteen are Samigina, Amon, Leraje, Naberius, Ronove, Forneus, Marchosias, Phenex, Sabnock, Shax, Orias, Andras, Andrealphus, Cimeies and Decarabia. Ronove is given as a Marquis and a Great Earl together, and is filed here under the first of the two.

Sources Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis (The Lesser Key of Solomon)Anonymous (unidentified compiler) with Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors