Verbőczi, Stephen

VERBŐCZI, STEPHEN. - Hungarian jurist and humanist, b. 1458, d. 1541.

Supreme judge, grand chancellor, palatine lieutenant of the king, he began his career in the royal chancery under King Matthias Corvinus. Under his successors he became the head of the constitutional party in opposition to the oligarchy of the magnates. He was sent by the Hungarian Diet, in 1519, to Venice and to Rome to request aid against the Turks, and in 1521 to the Imperial Diet of Worms. There he disputed with Martin Luther, as the apostolic nuncio of Vienna reported. A bitter opponent of the "German heresy," V. was the architect of the laws of prosecution of 1523 and 1525 against "omnes Luteranos et ilorum fautores, tanquam hostes sacratissimae Virginis Mariae," and he printed, with a dedication to King Louis II, a treatise against Luther's doctrine, composed by L. Politi. After the defeat suffered at the hands of the Turks in 1526, V. promoted the election of a national king (John Szápolyai), after whose death, on the commission of the widowed queen Isabella, daughter of Bona Sforza, he went to Constantinople to secure the throne for the underage John Sigismund Szápolyai. Through V.'s efforts the elegies of Janus Pannonius, collected by Benedetto Bekényi, saw the light in 1514, in Vienna.

In Vienna in 1517 there was printed in Latin the Tripartitum Opus iuris consuetudinari inclyti regni Hungariae, through which Roman law entered into the heritage of the Magyar nation. It is more a dissertation than a code: a unique textbook for the schools of law; it follows the Justinian code, the Decree of Gratian, canon law. The fruit of an age of transition, in it one perceives 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 overweening power of the aristocracy. The ancient doctrine of the Holy Crown, which excludes the intermediary of the feudatories, has been observed in V.'s interpretation. The Tripartitum, inserted into the official collection of the laws of Hungary and of Transylvania, was applied in the regions belonging to the Habsburgs and in the territory occupied by the Turks.

Stefano Markus