BALDO DEGLI UBALDI. - One of the greatest Italian jurists of the Middle Ages, b. in Perugia to a noble family (it is doubtful whether in 1319 or in 1327), he took his doctorate in his own city while still very young (according to tradition, at only 17 years of age), being presented by the most illustrious of his masters, Bartolus of Sassoferrato, but after having also followed the courses of Giovanni dei Pagliaresi, of Francesco Tigrini and of the canonist Federico Petricci.
In 1344 he appears to have already held a chair at Bologna, whence he began his long and eventful academic career, sought after and insistently summoned by the major Studia of the age: he lectured at Perugia perhaps in 1348 and certainly in 1358; then he moved on to Florence, where he remained for about seven years, arousing general admiration to such a degree as to obtain the honorary citizenship of the city; from the last months of 1364 until 1376 he is again at the ordinary civil lectureship in the Studium of Perugia; from 1376 to 1379 he teaches at Padua; in Jan. 1380 we find him again at Perugia, where he remains at least until Feb. 1390; at Pavia, his last residence, he dies on 28 Apr. 1400.
If Bartolus is rightly regarded as the greatest jurist of the fourteenth century, his disciple B. surpassed him in richness of erudition, juridical acumen, and modernity of attitude. The broader knowledge of juridical literature, which enabled him to write also a treatise De commemoratione famosissimorum doctorum, his good canonistic preparation and a fair philosophical culture, gave B. a greater abundance of arguments in support of his theses, while his intellect, speculative by nature, induced him to make more pronounced use than Bartolus had done of dialectic and of scholastic subtleties, to the point of making him fall, moreover, into some of the defects that were later rightly reproached to the Bartolists; but it is also true that he succeeds in overcoming not a few of the difficulties before which Bartolus had come to a halt, and in bringing about a further notable adaptation of law to the new reality of the times. In this intent of surpassing Bartolian doctrine and in his own temperament as a polemicist is to be seen the inspiring motive of the criticisms, at times even harsh, that B. often directs at his great master, and not out of an envious bitterness that he harbored against him, as some believed. Better than an antagonist, he is in fact the integrator of Bartolus's scientific work.
Adherence to the reality of his century is always alive and operative in B., convinced as he was that laws «in scholis deglutiuntur sed in palatio digeruntur». The public law of the time is made known to him in its intimate essence through his own experience as ambassador, as negotiator, as a man of government even more than through scientific lucubrations; private law, before through the study of texts, is presented to him by curial practice and by his functions as advocate of the two great guilds of the merchants and of the wool in Perugia, as a mixture of various Roman, canonical, statutory and feudal elements, and also in the new branches of criminal, commercial and international law.
From the many academic courses held in the various years of his long teaching, and for certain subjects repeated several times, are born the Commentaria, his most important work, commentaries that touch the whole Corpus iuris, including the books of the fiefs and the Peace of Constance and likewise the Decretals, ample with regard to some texts, too succinct for others, not always clear to tell the truth and not without contradictions at times. From his forensic activity originate thousands of consilia in which the new law finds wide acceptance. His vast scientific production is completed by the literary genre of treatises, numerous and concerning the most varied subjects: pacts, witnesses, notaries, the syndicate, the constituted, the inventory, the auction, questions, prisons, exceptions, the right of protimesis.
Bibliography
Giuseppe Ermini