Cinus ofPistoia

Cinus of Pistoia was a contemporary of Dante Alighieri. He was born around 1270 and died in 1336.^[196] His thought was fertile, rich in fantasy and wisdom, and he was capable of extremely clear and inci­sive expression.

Cinus made use of all the most vital experiences of the culture of his twelfth- and thirteenth-century predecessors. He had the soul of a poet and his poetry had met with some success, but he soon devoted himself entirely to the study of jurisprudence, beginning with a criti­cal review of the Corpus iuris civilis and the Magnaglossa that supple­mented it. Under the guidance of an excellent master, Dinus of Mu- gello, and at his suggestion, Cinus decided to test the limits of this heritage. The Roman laws were admittedly a corpus, and Justinian’s authority was indisputable and Accursius’s merits Uncontestable, but legislators and interpreters were human—like all humans, their mem­ories were fallible and they might make mistakes or contradict them­selves. Even Accursius, who could not be expected to remember ev­erything, had written glosses that contradicted one another. Cinus expressed these thoughts in a brief preface to a short compilation that he wrote as a school exercise during the very first years of his scholas­tic training, but, because his remarks were extracted from the laws of Justinian, they applied not only to the interpreters (Accursius in this instance) but to the legislators as well.^[197]

Thanks to Dinus of Mugello and Lambertinus de Ramponibus (another of his masters), Cinus knew statutory and customary law and knew how to exploit them.

Cinus had thoroughly absorbed the lessons of two French scholars, Jacques de Revigny and Pierre de Belleperche, whom he had very probably heard in France and seen again in Bologna. Thus it is sure that he had contacts with French circles that may have helped him learn how to apply syllogisms and modi arguendi to extract a norm from the Corpus with simplicity and clarity.

Cinus’s major work was his Lectura super Codice, written between 1312 and 1314. He also wrote valuable though lesser and unfortunately fragmentary Iecturae on CxcDigcstum vetus, at least two of which were written some years later.^[198]

Several tendencies are visible in the many topics that Cinus treated in his works. He used dialectic, but he was aware that every via brocar- dica was dubious and dangerous because it might have consequences contrary to good sense, truth, and justice. For that reason Cinus shrewdly avoided letting himself be swayed or misled by the iron grip of an abstract logic or by the canonized forms of expression that logic often implied. Thus at times his argumentation seems quite free, as when he dared to dispute a quaestio without the usual opposition of arguments pro and con, or when he suggested somewhat brusquely that his listener use his own head (“Tu cogitabis”). These liberties attracted the criticism of a young and pedantic professor, Jacobus Buttrigarius Junior, who cared more for the proper respect of hal­lowed techniques and forms of argumentation than for using his own head.^[199]

In Cinus’s thought, dialectic was simply one instrument that the human mind could make use of, but it must not be allowed to condi­tion, much less dominate, men’s minds. The central problem for which dialectic was a means and an instrument was the discovery of truth and justice, which could be accomplished by following a tradi­tion of thought continuously consolidated and enriched over two centuries.

What was new in Cinus was the breadth of his discourse, which no longer kept strictly to the norms of Roman law, as with the glossa­tors, but considered all legal norms—those of the highest imperial and pontifical authorities and those of the governing forces of king­doms, communes, and seigniories. As an interpreter of norms and rules (praecepta) Cinus granted himself great liberty and indepen­dence, as if he could and must judge whether or not each norm con­formed to aequitas. In this process of judgment he made use of all the argumentative possibilities offered by the extremely rich range of weapons in dialectic’s kit—but he simply made use of them and did not allow himself to be submerged by them.

Cinus was sincerely sensitive to motivation, which he viewed in its full religious dimension, and he frequently accused statutory disposi­tions of being iniquitous and tyrannical. He thought the field of local law was the most fertile for this sort of abuse, thanks to the variety of its decisions and the fact that many of them regulated personal and particular interests. “A man,” he stated, “a Lucchese, captain of the people in Pistoia, stood in the middle of the City Hall and sold him­self like a prostitute in the middle of a brothel.” This politician was not the object of public scorn, however, but “was reputed sapiens [wise] in Lucca, as a skillful thief might be in a band of thieves.”^[201] Cinus’s opinions had a clear and consistent set of moral values, espe­cially those concerning the ius proprium.

Cinus’s vision of the relationship between ius commune and ius pro­prium was marked by this particular aversion to the ius proprium, which he saw as normally iniquitous and the product of thieves and sharpers. The decisive factor in this relationship was how well each set of norms reflected equity, and here the ius commune always proved superior. In all his discussion of their relationship, the ius proprium always came second for Cinus. Following a logical scheme current at the time, the ius proprium was an accidental, occasional, hence very changeable law, whereas the ius commune was the law par excellence; it was stable to the point of seeming eternal, and it was just. The ius proprium was only an “accessory” law; the ius commune was the “prin­cipal” law. But the justice intrinsic to that same ius commune was just as relative and problematical as it was in every human action and ev­ery human work in comparison to the supernatural, to the values of the faith, and to divine Will.

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