That western Europe would one day discover Justinian’s lawÂbook was to be expected: renewed contact with the Greek world and the Crusades - inter alia to Constantinople - would have seen to that.
And one can suppose that the discovery would have stirred interest and caused academic discussion, compaÂrable to present-day studies of the law of the Egyptian paÂpyri or the Assyrian clay tablets.
It was, however, far from self- evident that the â€?rebirth’ of the Corpus iuris in the twelfth-century School of Bologna would be the start of a triumphal march that would change the legal face of Europe. Why should the discovery of the laws of a bygone civilization affect the West so deeply? And why should the previously unknown lawbook of a Byzantine emperor, who had ruled over a tiny part of the Latin world, change the character of Western law? This hi-jack of medieval European law by Justinian’s Corpus iuris is both so amazing and so important that its causes deserve to be analÂysed in some depth.[96] It is obvious that this romanization — or re-romanization — of western law, which covered eight centuries and numerous countries, was not caused by one single factor: complex influences were at work, which we shall now proceed to analyse.