Preface

The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were times thick with events and dominated by several major problems. To the south, in particular on the Iberian Peninsula, the Arabs still pressed at the edges of the continent.

During those same years the great navigators, in a series of adven­turous voyages, pushed ever farther along the west coast of Africa, and between 1497 and 1500 Vasco da Gama circumnavigated the Afri­can continent. In 1492 Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) crossed the Atlantic and made landfall on unknown lands that he thought were the Indies.

Over the course of roughly a century, Europe marked out its con­fines. In 1492, the armies of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon conquered the Kingdom of Granada, the last Arab outpost on Spanish soil; in 1571, a great fleet collected and armed by Philip II in the name of Christ inflicted a ruinous defeat on the Turks at Le­panto, thus putting a definitive stop to an expansion that had been aimed at the heart of the old continent of Europe.

These events helped Europe to acquire a more lucid self-awareness and an awareness of the value of the faith that it knew and practiced; at the same time, comparison with the “infidel” peoples (Arabs and Turks) and with the “savage” populations first of Africa and then of the Americas (the “Indies”) gave Europeans a clearer view of the traits of their own civilization.

Between the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, Europe was a world tormented by doubts and questions that at times could be dra­matic and extreme. The legal field underwent a frontal attack: for cen­turies (at least from Irnerius and Gratian) jurisprudence had tradi­tionally been thought of as one and universal, serving the entire human race; now it was discovered that a large proportion of human­ity had no knowledge of the ius commune, had never had occasion to know it, and was incapable of comprehending either its practice or its spirit.

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