Late Thirteenth-Century Civilization in Europe
The latter half of the thirteenth century was a crucial period in EuÂropean legal history, as it was in many other domains of civilization on the continent of Europe. The empire put down roots in German lands with the establishment of the long-lasting Hapsburg dynasty by RudolfI, king of Germany from 1273 to 1291.
The French monarchy was put on a more solid footing by Louis IX (d. 1270) and Philip the Fair (d. 1314), while on the Iberian Peninsula the aristocracy grew in power in the great kingdoms of Castile and Aragon.In the cities of north-central Italy the arti—the Italian word for guilds—celebrated their triumph in the formation of the Comune del popolo after bloody struggles with the nobles in the mid-century. In southern Italy the unity of the Kingdom of Sicily was shattered in 1282, when the Sicilian Vespers detached Tinacria (the island of SicÂily) from the continent and from Naples.
In 1265 Thomas Aquinas began writing his Summa Theologica. Around the same time, acquaintance with the major works of ArisÂtotle, in particular, IheMetaphysics (known as “Aristotle major”), was spreading throughout Europe. Aristotle’s works, which arrived in Europe through the Arabs in Spain and the Greeks in Sicily, were translated into Latin beginning around 1230 and soon were introÂduced into high culture throughout the continent. Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265. In 1270 Cino Sighibuldi—a poet, but principally a jurist of genius, known as Cinus of Pistoia—was born in Pistoia.
The works that provided the bulwarks of European culture were the Gospels, the Iibri legates of civil and canon law, Aristotle’s MetaÂphysics, the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, and, somewhat later, Dante’s Divine Comedy. It was a truly and intensely European culture, a culture that overrode frontiers, knew no linguistic barriers, and had no other difficulties linked to the idea of “nation” that was just beginning to surface.
New languages—national languages— were indeed becoming defined, but although they were in current use in everyday life they were no substitute for Latin, which was and conÂtinued to be the linguistic vehicle for the circulation of ideas throughÂout Europe. Almost all the books of the ius commune were written in Latin. It was a living language: it gave the Romance languages their base and even influenced the national languages in Germanic and Slavic lands.The parallel between the vicissitudes of the Latin language and those of the law is striking. As the Latin language offered a unified basis for national languages and provided them with useful theoreti-
cal and practical notions, so did the ius commune, civil and canon. As the national or regional languages were many, so were local laws (the iurapropria). And as the national languages not only recognized the Latin language but accepted it and intermingled with it, so the variÂous iura propria intertwined with the ius commune, from which they might also diverge profoundly, however, just as the Romance lanÂguages split off from Latin.
Thus an understanding of the unity of legal life in Europe requires a grasp of the necessarily dialectical relationship that existed between the unity of a ius commune and the plurality of the iura propria. The latter could not have existed without the one ius commune, and today we cannot relive their history without taking that dialectical relationÂship into account.
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