BALDO degli UBALDI. — One of the greatest Italian jurists of the Middle Ages, born in Perugia into a noble family (it is uncertain whether in 1319 or 1327), he earned his doctorate in his native city while still very young (according to tradition, at only 17 years of age), being presented by the most illustrious of his teachers, Bartolo da Sassoferrato, though he had also attended the lectures of Giovanni dei Pagliaresi, Francesco Tigrini, and the canonist Federico Petricci.
In 1344 he appears to have already been teaching in Bologna, from where he began his long and eventful academic career, eagerly sought and insistently called by the major universities of the time: he lectured in Perugia perhaps in 1348 and certainly in 1358; then he moved to Florence, where he remained for about seven years, arousing general admiration and even obtaining honorary citizenship of the city; from the last months of 1364 until 1376 he was again teaching civil law at the Perugian Studium; from 1376 to 1379 he taught in Padua; in January 1380 he is found again in Perugia, where he remained at least until February 1390; in Pavia, his final residence, he died on 28 April 1400.
If Bartolo is justly regarded as the greatest jurist of the fourteenth century, his pupil B. surpassed him in the richness of his erudition, legal acumen, and modernity of approach. His broader knowledge of legal literature, which enabled him to write even a treatise *De commentatione famosissimorum doctorum*, his solid grounding in canon law, and his respectable philosophical culture, gave B. a greater abundance of arguments to support his theses, while his speculative intellect led him to make more pronounced use than Bartolo had of dialectic and scholastic subtleties, though this also led him into some of the defects later justly reproached in the *barlozists*; yet it is true that he succeeded in overcoming not a few of the difficulties before which Bartolo had halted, and in bringing the law into a further notable adjustment with the new realities of the times. In this endeavor to surpass Bartolo’s doctrine and in his very temperament as a polemicist, we must see the motivating force behind the criticisms, sometimes even harsh, that B. often directed at his great master, and not out of any envious bitterness that he might have harbored against him, as some believed. Better than an antagonist, he was in fact the integrator of Bartolo’s scientific work.
Adherence to the reality of his century was always alive and operative in B., convinced as he was that laws «in scholis deglutuntur sed in palatio digeruntur». The public law of the time was revealed to him in its innermost essence through his own experience as ambassador, negotiator, and statesman even more than through scholarly speculations; private law, before being derived from the study of texts, was presented to him by court practice and his functions as advocate for the two great guilds of merchants and wool-workers in Perugia, as a blend of various elements—Roman, canon, statutory, and feudal—and also in the newer branches of criminal, commercial, and international law.
From the many academic courses he taught over the years of his long teaching career, and for some subjects repeated several times, there arose the *Commentaria*, his most important work, commentaries that cover the entire *Corpus iuris*, including the feudal books and the Peace of Constance, as well as the Decretals, extensive on some texts, too succinct on others, not always clear to be sure and not without occasional contradictions. From his forensic activity there stemmed thousands of *consilia*, in which the new law found wide acceptance. Completing his vast scholarly output is the genre
Baldo degli Ubaldi — Sixteenth-century copy from a contemporary portrait — Florence, Uffizi Gallery.