BULGARO. – He is the most illustrious of the so-called four Bolognese doctors whom tradition holds to have been disciples of Irnerius, the founder of the Studium.
Mentioned for the first time in 1154, he took part in the Diet of Roncaglia in 1158, at the invitation of Barbarossa, to define the imperial regalia and communal rights; he perhaps died in 1166 and was buried in the church of S. Procofo in Bologna.
Very well known to the glossators who followed, among them Azzone and Accursius, B. represents in the history of the Bolognese Studium the scholarly orientation that had its followers precisely in the Bulgarians, opposed to the other, initiated by his contemporary and teaching colleague Martino Gosia and followed by the Gosians: B. seems in his work as an interpreter to have remained more faithful and more closely attached to the letter of the law, whereas Martino, on the contrary, shows a tendency to interpret the texts with greater freedom, making extensive use of criteria of equity, at times even capricious; he thus represents the conservative school in antithesis to Martino’s innovative one.
His extensive legal culture, critical acumen, and elegant diction earned him the epithet os aureum; he had illustrious disciples such as Rogerio, Alberico, and Giovanni Bosiano; various glosses, a commentary on the title De diversis regulis iuris, and a procedural treatise De iudicis have come down to us from him.