VERBÖCZI, STEFANO. – Hungarian jurist and humanist, born in 1458, died in 1541.
Supreme judge, grand chancellor, and palatine lieutenant of the king, he began his career in the royal chancery under King Mattia Corvino. Under his successors he became the leader of the constitutional party in opposition to the oligarchy of the magnates. In 1519 he was sent by the Hungarian Diet to Venice and Rome to seek aid against the Turks, and in 1521 to the Imperial Diet of Worms. There
he disputed with Martin Luther, as the apostolic nuncio in Vienna reported. A fierce opponent of the “German heresy,” V. was the author of the laws of prosecution of 1523 and 1525 against “omnes Luteranos et ilorum fautores, tanquam hostes sacratissimae Virginis Mariae,” and printed, with a dedication to King Lodovico II, a treatise against Luther’s doctrine, composed by L. Politi. After the defeat suffered by the Turks in 1526, V. promoted the election of a national king (Giovanni Szápolyai), after whose death, at the behest of the widowed queen Isabella, daughter of Bona Sforza, he went to Constantinople to secure the throne for the minor Giovanni Sigismondo Szápolyai. Through V.’s efforts, the elegies of Janus Pannonius, collected by Benedetto Bekényi, saw the light of day in Vienna in 1514.
In Vienna, in 1517, the Tripartitum Opus iuris consuetudinari inclyti regni Hungariae was printed in Latin, through which Roman law became part of the heritage of the Magyar nation. It is more a dissertation than a code: a single textbook for the schools of law; it follows the Justinian Code, the Decree of Gratian, and canon law. The product of an age of transition, it reveals the influence of the humanists and of the natural-law conception, with a tendency to strengthen royal powers in order to protect the lesser and middle nobility against the excessive power of the aristocracy. The ancient doctrine of the Holy Crown, which excludes the intermediary role of the feudal lords, was observed in V.’s interpretation. The Tripartitum, incorporated into the official collection of the laws of Hungary and Transylvania, was applied in the regions belonging to the Habsburgs and in the territory occupied by the Turks.