BARTOLO da SASSOFERRATO. — He is the greatest jurist of the medieval age and certainly one of the loftiest juridical minds that humanity has ever possessed.
Born in 1313 near Sassoferrato in the Marches and instructed in the 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 legal training; in 1333 he went to Bologna to attend the lectures of Iacopo Butrigario, Raniero Arsendi da Forlì and perhaps also Oldrado da Ponte, and to receive his doctorate in the following year, 1334. A period of reflection followed, which the newly graduated doctor spent at S. Vittore near Bologna, devoted, as he himself would later write, to reconsidering what he had learned at school and to investigating the sources of law more directly. This was the study from which he would emerge a master!
Assessor at Todi and perhaps at Pisa in 1338, at the end of that year he took up the chair at the Pisan Studio and was certainly still there in 1342; in 1343 we find him teaching at Perugia, where he would remain, except perhaps for another probable stay in Pisa from 1351 to 1353, engaged in lecturing on civil law until the year of his death, 1357.
With B., the new study of law, called the school of commentary after the literary form most commonly used, or Aristotelian and scholastic because of its employment of logical and dialectical procedures, achieved full success and, through him, imposed itself upon posterity.
From the teaching of Cino and the Perugian tradition deriving from Iacopo da Belviso, B. had learned the French doctrine concerning the adherence of law to the realities of the times, the transcendence 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; at the Bolognese school he had deepened his exegesis of the Corpus iuris and gained a better knowledge and appreciation than before of the work of the glossators and Accursius. He made use of everything: the satisfaction of practical needs is the necessary goal of his efforts; the text of the legislative sources, not only Roman but also canonical and statutory, together with the interpretation already dating from the gloss, is the starting point and indispensable support of his reasoning; the scholastic method is the instrument that enables him to arrive at the new construction. And he makes appropriate use of everything, with a marvellous sense of balance, with simple and correct argumentation, with clear and concise expression, and with a constructive capacity rarer than almost any other.
From B.’s intensive work and scholarly production, so abundant despite the still youthful age at which death overtook him, would be traced not a few of the fundamental lines of that dogmatics by which modern law differs from Roman and ancient law; through him, new directions and principles, before his time merely enunciated, would find definitive formulation; from his doctrines the commentators who followed him, foremost among them his disciple Baldo degli Ubaldi, would draw inspiration for some of the major achievements of the new legal school.
In the extensive readings on the Old Digest, the Infortiatum and the New Digest, the Code, the Three Books and the Authenticum, the exegesis of the texts developed, conducted with a broad range of opinions and considerations; in the more than four hundred consilia that have come down to us in printed form, and in the many others that nevertheless remain unpublished, as well as in the quaestiones, the practical purpose that constantly inspired and gave particular value to Bartolian scholarship found full expression; in the rich series of approximately forty treatises, the breadth of his culture and the singular synthesizing powers of his intellect stand out, with the most disparate institutions and subjects examined, disentangled and recomposed into a unity, in dogmatic constructions 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.
B.’s greatness was already recognized by his contemporaries, from the commune of Perugia, which in 1348 granted him genuine and original Perugian citizenship in order to retain him at its Studio, to the Emperor Carlo IV, who in 1355 made him imperial counsellor, domestic familiar and table companion, granted him the imperial coat of arms itself, the red two-tailed lion on a field of gold, and gave him the right to remedy the defect of age in persons under twenty-five and to legitimize students; but the best witnesses to his deserved glory were posterity, which exalted his name as the terrestre numen of the laws, welcomed his doctrines in every civilized country, and continued to expound his thought from the university chairs of Bartolism until the end of the eighteenth century.