The recovery of the Digest

Two manuscripts of the Digest seem to have been discovered in the eleventh century: one called Littera Florentina or Codex Florentinus (also known as Littera Pisana) and the other called Codex Secundus.

The revival of Roman law 89 comprises 907 sheets and was written in Byzantine-Ravenna uncials. It was produced in the East, perhaps in Constantinople, in the middle of the sixth century. The Codex Florentinus might have been kept in Amalfi (then a part of the Byzantine territory in Italy). In any case, it eventually passed to Pisa and was thus known during the Middle Ages as Littera Pisana. The Codex Florentinus was transferred to Florence as a prize of war in 1406 and has been kept in the Laurentian Library in Florence since 1782. All surviving manuscripts of the Digest come from it. The Codex Secundus was the ancestor of all the copies of the Digest made in Bologna, the university city in which Roman law was first studied. Unfortunately, the Codex Secundus did not survive.

Although the major law school of the eleventh century was that of Pavia, the professors and jurists of that city gave special attention not to the Digest but to a collection known as the Book of Pavia (Liber Papiensis), which combines Lombard and Frankish laws. The University of Pavia, however, was the first to use the method of glosses (brief notations of the meaning of a word) to explain the law. This method was imported to Bologna to analyze and study the civil law, that is, the Roman law of Justinian’s Corpus Iuris.

Bologna became the first academic center specifically focused on the study of Roman law, and by the end of the twelfth century the Bologna School of Law held a preeminent position. Thousands of students from around Europe attended lectures there, participated in legal discussions, and received a rigorous education based on the special legal techniques developed at the law school. Law students learned a legal method, a legal grammar, rather than the specific laws to be applied in concrete cases.

The rediscovery of the Digest is not historically isolated. It has to be understood in the context of a European cultural resurgence, closely related to the birth of the medieval universities, the rise of self-governing towns, the increase in maritime and overland trade, and a general economic revival. Prominent European law centers included Bologna (founded in 1088), Sala­manca (1218), Paris (1219), Padua (1222), Naples (1224), Toulouse (1229), Oxford (about 1240), Orleans (about 1260), Coimbra (1290), Cambridge (1318), Prague (1348), Krakow (1364), Vienna (1365), and Heidelberg (1385), among others.

Western scholars were intellectually stimulated by the critical reading or discovery of important ancient works such as the Aristotelian canon or the writings of Plato, and many of them were to different degrees involved in the battle between imperialists (who affirmed the emperor’s supremacy over the pope) and papalists (who affirmed the pope’s supremacy). Meanwhile, the idea of the restoration of the Empire (renovatio imperii) and the conviction of the fundamental continuity of Roman law and heritage under the Holy Roman Empire was prevalent at the end of the eleventh century.