Studying Jurisprudence in terra aliena
Young men from all parts of Italy and from all countries of Christian Europe flocked to Bologna. They came from Sicily and Campania, from Latium and Lombardy; they came across the Alps from France and Germany, the British Isles, and the Iberian Peninsula.
They came because they were attracted by the new science, whether by the image that contemporary preachers gave of it in their harsh and bitter condemnations or by the approval, concealed or open, of both cultivated poets and versifying pedants.Popular wisdom knew and said that jurisprudence was an art that led to power and wealth. The ironic fable of the ass Brunellus,[101] [102] [103] whose credulity led him to lose his tail and who, tailless, became a student, was symbolic of all those who eagerly strove to win honors and wealth through the study of the law, learned to use “words six feet long,” and committed to memory, with immense effort, all of Justinian’s Corpus iurisC, “We do not study vain things,” the young men of the twelfth century scornfully declared when they compared rhetoric and philosophy to the greater worth of jurisprudence.[104] The young were not discouraged by fiery preachers’ bitter accusations or by somber predictions of misfortune from bishops (who had their own interests in mind) and timid country parish priests. They did not fear St. Bernard’s condemnation of people “who long for knowledge in order to sell its fruits for money or honors.”[105] Nor were they shaken by the words of Maurice of Saint-Victor, who declared that jurists “seek knowledge not to become wise but to prostitute The University and the Ius commune 115 themselves venally for men’s praise or for money. Thus, being unworthy of knowledge, they never truly attain it.”[106] The danger of losing one’s soul for all eternity was an insufficient threat. Raymond de Rocosel, the bishop of Lodeve and a mediocre poet, warned students that the threat of losing their lives in the slow voyage that took them, day by day, farther from their paternal house was not worth the risk: “Per mare, per terras, quasi pauper inutilis erras” (like a beggar, good for nothing, will you wander on land and sea).[110] It was common knowledge that brigands infested the highroads. They might easily rob a traveler and take everything he had—books, money, horses, sword, and clothes—and leave him “naked, beaten, and wounded, miserable, discomfited, [and] alone,”[111] to be brought, if he was lucky, to a monastery. It was also known that in the cities general indifference could lead to a miserable life as a beggar. In spite of all this the young abandoned the paternal house and “maternal kisses”[112] and became “pilgrims for love of learning”[113]—the new learning. On the road the student met other students from Sicily or from the far-off British Isles, and they might join forces with chance traveling companions or with experienced and cautious merchants. Such encounters accustomed students to life in common and encouraged a sense of solidarity; as the students talked, they compared habits and customs, and their various “vulgar” tongues were harmonized by the lexical and grammatical vehicle of Latin, a simple, ductile, living language. Thus they helped to forge a cultural unity that was already finding its typical habitat in the cities. 3.