BARTOLUS OF SASSOFERRATO AND FREE CITIES

Abstract

‘Well are ye called the Free People.' – Bagheera

BARTOLUS of Sassoferrato (1314–1357) is as famous to legal historians and specialists in the history of political ideas as he is unkown outside those areas of research. His obscurity is owed not to his mind but to his genre: the commentary on Justinian'sCorpus Iuris Civilis, and the occasional monograph of more systematic yet still legalistic lineaments. Of the thousands of lawyers who studied, taught and applied Roman law from its rediscovery in the late eleventh century to the end of the middle ages, there are perhaps three or four who command universal respect, some of whom we shall encounter in what follows. Only Bartolus radiates the nimbus of genius. In the realm of political ideas, he has – perversely, perhaps – best been served by Anglophone historiography, beginning with the classic study published in 1913 by C.N.S. Woolf, continuing by way of Walter Ullmann's numerous articles and most recently subjected to a full-scale analysis by Joseph Canning in his study of the ideas of Bartolus' most famous pupil, Baldus de Ubaldis (d. 1400).