BARTOLO da SASSOFERRATO. — He is the greatest jurist of the medieval period and certainly one of the most outstanding legal minds humanity has ever produced.
Born in 1313 near Sassoferrato in the Marches, and instructed in his early grammatical studies by a certain Fra Pietro d'Assisi, B. arrived in Perugia at the age of fourteen, where at the school of Cino da Pistoia he received his first solid legal training; in 1333 he moved to Bologna to attend the lectures of Iacopo Buttigario, Raniero Arsendi da Forlì, and perhaps also Oldrado da Ponte, and to earn his doctorate the following year, 1334. This was followed by a period of reflection, which the newly minted doctor spent in San Vittore near Bologna, dedicated, as he would later write, to re-examining what he had learned in school and to further investigating the sources of law directly. It was from this study that he emerged as a master!
Assessor in Todi and perhaps in Pisa in 1338, by the end of that year he had ascended the chair of the Pisan Studium and was certainly still there in 1342; in 1343 we find him in Perugia (where he would remain, except perhaps for another probable stay in Pisa from 1351 to 1353), lecturing on civil law until the year of his death, 1357.
With B., the new method of legal study, known as the *commentary*, from the literary form most commonly used, or *Aristotelian* and *scholastic* from the use of logical and dialectical procedures, achieved full success and would be imposed on posterity.
From the teaching of Cino and the Perugian tradition stemming from Iacopo da Belviso, B. had learned the French doctrine regarding the adherence of law to the reality of the times, the overcoming of the literal wording of texts through the search for the *ratio* of the law itself and the *mens* of the legislator, and the application of scholastic methods of inquiry to the study of law; in the Bolognese school he had deepened his exegesis of the *Corpus iuris* and gained a better understanding and appreciation, at the same time, of the work of the glossators and of Accursio. He made all of this his own: the satisfaction of practical needs is the necessary endpoint of his labor; the text of the legislative sources, not only Roman but also canon and statutory, and the interpretation already provided by the gloss, is the starting point and indispensable support of his reasoning; the scholastic method is the tool that enables him to arrive at his new constructions. And he made use of all of this opportunely, with a marvelous sense of balance, with simple and correct reasoning, with clear and concise expression, and with a constructive ability more unique than rare.
From his intense work and scientific output, so abundant despite the still young age at which death overtook him, would emerge not a few of the fundamental lines of that evolution by which modern law differentiates itself from Roman and ancient law; for him, new directions and principles, hitherto only enunciated, would find definitive formulation; from his doctrines would spring the commentaries that followed him, the greatest of all being his pupil Baldo degli Ubaldi, for some of the major achievements of the new legal school.
In his extensive lectures on the *Digestum Vetus*, the *Infortiatum*, and the *Digestum Novum*, on the *Codex*, the * Tres Libri*, and the *Authenticum*, he developed an exegesis of the texts conducted with a broad range of opinions and considerations; in the more than four hundred consilia that have come down to us in print and in the many others still unpublished, and in the *quaestiones*, the practical intent that constantly inspired and gave particular value to Bartolist science is fully manifested; in the rich series of some forty treatises, his vast culture and the singular synthesizing faculties of his intellect are revealed, with the most disparate institutions and topics examined, analyzed, and recomposed into a unity, in doctrinal formulations often so original as to represent a clear departure from ancient doctrine and the true beginning of a new era in the life of the law.
B.'s greatness was recognized even by his contemporaries, from the commune of Perugia, which in 1348 granted him true and original Perugian citizenship precisely to retain him at its Studium, to Emperor Charles IV, who in 1355 appointed him imperial councilor, familiar domesticus, and imperial commissioner, granted him the very imperial blazon of the red double-tailed lion on a gold field, and the right to supplement the defect of age for minors under 25 and to legitimize students; but the best witnesses to his well-deserved glory were posterity, who exalted his name as a terrestrial numen of the laws, who adopted his doctrines in every civilized country, and who continued to illustrate his thought from the university chairs of Bartolism until the close of the eighteenth century.