BARTOLO DA SASSOFERRATO. - He is the greatest jurisconsult of the medieval era and certainly one of the highest juridical minds humanity has ever had.
Born in 1313 near Sassoferrato in the Marches and instructed in the first rudiments of grammar by a certain Fra Pietro d'Assisi, B. arrived at Perugia at the age of fourteen, where at the school of Cino da Pistoia he received his first solid juridical formation; in 1333 he moved to Bologna to attend there the lectures of Iacopo Butrigario, of Raniero Arsendi da Forlì and perhaps also of Oldrado da Ponte, and to take his doctorate in the following year, 1334. There followed a period of recollection, which the new doctor spent at S. Vittore near Bologna, dedicated, as he himself would later write, to rethinking what he had learned in school and to investigating more directly the sources of law. It is the study from which he would emerge a master!
Assessor at Todi and perhaps in 1338 at Pisa, he ascended at the end of that year to the chair of the Pisan Studium and was certainly still there in 1342; in 1343 we find him at Perugia (where he would then remain, except perhaps for a further probable stay at Pisa from 1351 to 1353) lecturing on civil law until the year of his death, 1357.
With B. the new study of law, called that of the commentary, from the literary form most commonly used, or Aristotelian and scholastic from the use made of logical and dialectical procedures, achieves full success and through him will impose itself upon posterity.
From the teaching of Cino and from the Perugian tradition stemming from Iacopo da Belviso, B. had learned the French doctrine concerning the adherence of law to the reality of the times, the overcoming of the literal wording of the texts through the search for the ratio of the law itself and the mens of the legislator, the application of scholastic methods of inquiry to the study of law; in the Bolognese school he had deepened the exegesis of the Corpus iuris and derived at once a better knowledge and respect for the work of the glossators and of Accursius. He made treasure of everything: the satisfaction of practical needs is the necessary point of arrival of his labor; the text of the legislative sources, not only Roman but canonical and even statutory, and the interpretation already dating from the gloss, is the point of departure and the indispensable support of his reasoning; the scholastic method is the instrument that allows him to arrive at the new construction. And he makes use of everything appropriately, with a marvelous sense of balance, with a simple and correct argumentation, with a clear and concise expression, with a constructive capacity more unique than rare.
From the intense labor and the scientific production of B., so abundant despite the still young age at which death overtook him, no few of the fundamental lines will be marked of that dogmatics by which modern law differs from Roman and ancient law; through him new directions and principles, before him only enunciated, will find definitive formulation; from his doctrines the commentators who will follow him will take their cue, greatest among all the disciple Baldo degli Ubaldi, for some of the major conquests of the new juridical school.
In the ample lectures on the Old Digest, on the Infortiatum and on the New, on the Code, on the Three Books and on the Authentic, the exegesis of the texts develops, conducted with a vast range of opinions and considerations; in the more than four hundred consilia that have come down to us in print and in the numerous others still unpublished, and in the quaestiones, the practical intent that constantly inspires and gives particular value to Bartolian science has full manifestation; in the rich series of some forty treatises stand out the vastness of his culture and the singular faculties of synthesis of his intellect, with the most disparate institutions and subjects that are found examined therein, disentangled, recomposed into unity, in dogmatic formulations often so original as to represent a clear separation from the ancient doctrine and truly the beginning of a new epoch in the life of law.
Of the greatness of B. his contemporaries were already aware, from the commune of Perugia, which granted him in 1348 true and original Perugian citizenship merely to keep him at its Studium, to the emperor Charles IV, who in 1355 created him counselor, familiar domestic and imperial table companion, granted him the imperial blazon itself of the red lion with two tails on a field of gold and the right to supply the defect of age for minors under 25 and that of legitimating students; but of his deserved glory the best witnesses were posterity, who exalted his name as a terrestre numen of the laws, who welcomed his doctrines in every civilized country, who continued to illustrate his thought from university chairs of Bartolism until the fall of the eighteenth century.