ECONOMIC CAUSES
Around the twelfth century Europe entered a new phase in its economic development, marked by greater productivity, urbanÂization, the rise of a market and money economy, industrial and commercial expansion, increased circulation of goods, persons and services, sophisticated banking and a lively international trade.
Italy took the lead and the rest of Europe followed: in the later Middle Ages the early-medieval model looked more and more archaic and — sooner in southern and western, more slowly in central and eastern Europe - receded into the past. The feudal world of priests, manorial lords and rural serfs had gone or was on the way out. The new urban money economy created a favourable environment for the study of Roman law. Urbanization allowed the concentration of large communities of doctors and students in universities, which were invariably located in cities and towns, whereas higher productivity and monetary expansion freed a larger proportion of the population from labour on the land. Moreover, the expansion of trade and industry led to a heightened interest in the workings of contract (sale, barter, credit, delivery of goods, correct pricing and so on), whereas the urban population looked for more peaceful and efficient forms of dispute settlement than the judicial combat favoured by the knights in earlier days. The Corpus iuris was the product of a highly developed cosmopolitan economy and was clearly more suited to the emerging West of the later Middle Ages than the customs of the closed agricultural and manorial world of the motte-and-bailey castle.That a developed economy was favourable for the emerging Law Faculties does not mean, however, that it needed them. Urbanization had not waited for the Schools to take off and the success of the new international market-economy would have been real even without the rediscovered Corpus iuris. Irnerius and the Four Doctors did not gloss the lawbook because the Italian merchants asked them to. All over Europe the expansion of commerce took place without Justinian and the merchants developed their own mercantile customs, which were applied in their own commercial courts, notably in the great international fairs of Champagne. It is no coincidence that when French comÂmercial customary law was eventually codified under Louis XIV, the Ordinance on Commerce of ι 673 was mainly the work, not of a learned lawyer but of a merchant, Jacques Savary.[105] For centuries, therefore, commercial life and the teaching of the Schools went their own separate ways and the Latin-speaking clerics who agonized over divisible and indivisible obligations lived in another world than the clients of the Piepowder courts. It was only after the School of the Commentators had turned its attention to the practical needs of its own time that the ius commune became directly relevant and eventually affected the contracts and obligations current in every-day life.