VERBÓCZI, STEFANO. - Hungarian jurist and humanist, b. 1458, d. 1541.
Supreme judge, grand chancellor, palatine lieutenant of the king, he began his career in the royal chancellery under King Matthias Corvinus. Under his successors he became the leader of the constitutional party in opposition to the oligarchy of the magnates. In 1519 the Hungarian Diet sent him 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 reported by the apostolic nuncio of Vienna. A staunch opponent of the “German heresy,” V. was the architect of the proscription laws of 1523 and 1525 against “omnes Luteranos et illorum fautores, tanquam hostes sacratissimae Virginis Mariae,” and printed, with a dedication to King Louis 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 (John Szápolyai), and after the latter’s death, at the behest 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, were published in Vienna in 1514.
In Vienna in 1517 the Tripartitum Opus iuris consuetudinari inclyti regni Hungariae was printed in Latin, through which Roman law entered the patrimony of the Magyar nation. It is more a dissertation than a code: a unique textbook for law schools; it follows the Justinianic Code, Gratian’s Decretum, and canon law. A product of a transitional era, it shows the influence of humanists and of the natural law conception, with a tendency to strengthen royal powers 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 role of feudal lords, was observed in V.’s interpretation. The Tripartitum, included in the official collection of laws of Hungary and Transylvania, was applied in the regions belonging to the Habsburgs and in the territory occupied by the Turks.