Justinian's Code

The story

A thousand years of laws, all mixed up

When Justinian became emperor, in AD 527, the laws at Constantinople were a real maze. For almost a thousand years the Romans had been producing rules: laws voted by the people and the Senate, decrees of the emperors, answers given by jurists to people who asked for an opinion. There were thousands of texts, written in different periods, often contradicting one another. A judge who had to decide a case might not know which rule was still valid, and a lawyer could quote a law that nobody remembered any more. Justinian decided to put things in order. The aim was political as well as practical: an emperor who gathers the laws of Rome shows that he is the true heir of the Romans.

Tribonian's work

The head of the undertaking was Tribonian, a jurist from Pamphylia, a region of present-day Turkey. He held a very high office, that of quaestor of the sacred palace, responsible for justice in the empire. With him worked a commission of jurists, divided into sub-commissions. For the Digest, the largest part, there were sixteen compilers: Tribonian himself, professors of law from Constantinople and from Berytus (now Beirut) and eleven lawyers.

The work went forward in several stages. With the constitution that begins with the words “Haec quae necessario” (at that time laws were referred to by their first Latin words), in 528 the emperor appointed the commission; in 529, with the constitution “Summa rei publicae”, he presented the Code, a collection of imperial constitutions, that is, of the laws issued by the emperors, from Hadrian onwards. In 530, with the constitution “Deo auctore”, the Digest was begun. On 16 December 533 the Digest was promulgated, and it came into force two weeks later, on 30 December. The same year the Institutes appeared. In 534 a second, updated edition of the Code was published, replacing the first.

The four parts

The Code, in Latin, brought together the laws of the emperors. The Digest, also called the Pandects, was a great anthology: in fifty books, divided into titles, with the subject given at the start of each, it collected passages taken from the works of the Roman jurists of the past, such as Ulpian, who is the most quoted. The compilers chose more than nine thousand passages, taken from almost two thousand books. We have to imagine an enormous task, done without computers, cutting and stitching pages of ancient authors.

The Institutes were a textbook in four books, written for law students and modelled on an older textbook by the jurist Gaius. It was the first book a young man opened at the beginning of his studies. The Digest, instead, was studied in the following years. The Novels, finally, were the new laws that Justinian issued after the Code, until his death in 565. Many were written in Greek, because by then people spoke Greek at Constantinople, and some in Latin.

An unusual ban

Justinian wanted this collection to be the only valid law. For this reason contradictory or no longer used laws were removed, and jurists were no longer allowed to interpret freely. According to what we read in the entry on the Digest, anyone who rewrote the text of the law was punished, while word-for-word translations into Greek were allowed because they did not change the meaning.

The rediscovery at Bologna

In the West, after the collapse of the empire, Justinian's Corpus was little used. In the 12th century, at Bologna, a teacher named Irnerius began to study it and explain it to his students, writing small notes in the margins of the text, called glosses. For this reason he and his pupils are called the glossators. The name “Corpus iuris civilis”, that is, “body of civil law”, spread much later, with the edition by the Frenchman Denis Godefroy, printed at Geneva in 1583.

A monument that lasts

For centuries, until the early 19th century, Justinian's Roman law was the basis of a common law for the whole of Europe: in each country local laws were applied, but judges and professors reasoned with the ideas of the Corpus. Then, with the Napoleonic Code, each country had a code of its own. But many ideas in those codes come from Roman law: property, contract, the will, the distinction between persons and things.

Tribonian did not see the end of Justinian's reign: he died in 542, perhaps because of the plague epidemic that struck Constantinople. But his work, wanted by the emperor and completed in less than ten years, is one of the great monuments of antiquity that Europe has inherited.