Attilio Stella

Jean de Blanot, the enigmatic Iacobus Aurelianus, and Jean Blanc de Marseille are the first known French lawyers trained in Italy to have shown interest in one of the most famous custumals in medieval Europe, the Lombard book of fiefs known by the name of Libri Feudorum. Considering that this compilation was increasingly gaining authority in the Italian law schools, this chapter shows how these three lawyers re-elaborated these teachings and compared (or opposed) them to local bodies of norms. By observing how they developed different notions of custom and argued about the validity of the Libri Feudorum outside Lombardy, the chapter unveils the problematic dialectics between Civil law, local custom, and practice, and provides some insights into the making of the ius commune, its practical and historical roots, its geographical dimensions.

The Libri feudorum is a composite law book containing the
customary laws of fiefs held in Lombardy which were codified in
1100–1250. Its function in shaping a late medieval ‘feudal
vocabulary’ and, ultimately, modern models of feudalism was
highlighted by Susan Reynolds and lies at the core of her antifeudalism
paradigm. This paper questions the disjuncture
between social practice and learned law that underlies the
paradigm, by analysing the context and making of the Libri
feudorum and of legal writings associated with it – by Pillius de
Medicina, Iacobus de Ardizone and Jean Blanc. By showing how
practice could shape legal tools used by learned lawyers to frame
fiefs and by reassessing the influence of the Libri feudorum on
practice, the paper challenges the idea that fiefs were the
outcome of professional or academic law and unveils aspects of
the practical nature and intellectual dimension of lawyerly writing.

This contribution offers an updated and commented edition of one of the most discussed treatises in feudal law, transmitted by only one witness (Parma, Biblioteca Palatina, Parm. 1227), the authorship of which is largely hypothetical. Textual and structural analyses of this tradition, compared with MS Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, 2094 and Baldus de Ubaldis’s Lectura Feudorum, aim at proving that the author might be Iacobus Aurelianus, alias Jacques d’Orleans, a French lawyer probably educated in Italy in the mid-thirteenth century whose writings – thirty-odd marginal additiones mostly to feudal law literature – have not been considered as a whole thus far.

https://clicme.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/online-texts/libri-feudorum-vulgata/

This text reproduces the vulgata version of the Libri Feudorum as published in Karl Lehmann’s 1896 edition, with minor typographical improvements. The reproduction is not intended to improve upon Lehmann’s edition or offer an alternative to it. Rather, in the first place it aims to provide an easily accessible research tool for anyone interested in the study of the book. In the second place, this reproduction is part of a broader effort which includes an English translation of the Libri carried out by the CLCLCL team. This online publication, therefore, represents an opportunity for crowdsourcing and we invite our audience to report the existence of translations in any language of portions or the entirety of the text, and likewise to suggest modifications to the Latin text or – once posted – to the English translation.

The Liber Ardizonis is a lost early thirteenth-century readjustment and expansion of the Libri Feudorum – the feudal laws codified in twelfth-century Lombardy – which is credited to the glossator Iacobus de Ardizone de Broilo. Although Iacobus’s Summa Feudorum has long been recognised as an essential source for the study of the Libri Feudorum, until today and with very few exceptions historians have disregarded its manuscript traditions. By relying on new evidence from seven manuscripts of the Summa, the article reappraises a 1910 survey by Emil Seckel on ms Wien 2094 and unveils the relationship between the Liber and the Libri Feudorum before the latter crystallised in its standard edition circulating across Europe (Ch. 2, 9, 10; App. 1). The central section of the article (Ch. 3-9) describes the protracted interweaving of the Summa and the Liber Ardizonis in 1220-40, clarifying some crucial points: it suggests a chronology of Iacobus’s writings (Ch. 5, 8), determines the attribution of the Capitula extraordinaria Iacobi de Ardizone and Baraterii (Ch. 7), and outlines the content and development of the extravagantes collections contained in the Liber Ardizonis (Ch. 8-9; App. 2).

This paper consists in a critical edition of 23 documents (1166-1183), stored in Fondo Veneto I within the Secret Vatican Archive, amongst the papers of the church of S. Giorgio in Braida of Verona, published here as an integration of Andrea Gloria’s Codice diplomatico padovano (1877-1881). Counting on more than 1900 documents and covering a chronology from 6th century to 1183, the Codice is nowadays the most complete collection concerning Padua and its territory in the Middle Ages. Fondo Veneto is a documentary resource including pre-1668 documentation of more than 40 ecclesiastical bodies located in the Serenissima Republic territory. Originally stored in Venice , this corpus was transferred to Vatican City in 1836. This paper’s introduction, besides offering a brief historical contextualization of these 23 documents, passes through different themes, such as the edition of the Codice, the historical and archivistic circumstances of Fondo Veneto and S. Giorgio in Braida, the notarial praxis and the role of notaries in rural areas.

The paper will offer a reassessment of the origins, circulation, and influence of the Summa feudorum (1230ca.-1250ca.) of Iacobus de Ardizone from Verona (1200ca.-1254/56). The Summa is a renowned treatise based on a pre-Vulgate version of the Libri feudorum on which Ardizone himself had been working.
Legal historians (from Laspeyres to Giordanengo), mostly relying on printed editions, have generally placed the writing of the Summa in the 1230s or the 1240s. Through compared analysis of some available manuscripts (Paris BNF Lat.4604, Urgell Arx.Cap.2042, Wien ÖNB.Cod.2094), I will highlight the actual writing process and disclose subsequently some trajectories from practice and custom, observed ‘in the field’ by the author, to the latest versions of the treatise. Moving from ideas supplied by the Roman legal doctrine, Iacobus de Ardizone produced one of the clearest and earliest examples of explicit inclusion of local customs and city statutes as normative sources in a legal treatise.
Finally, I will suggest a chronology of Ardizone’s work on the Libri Feudorum, and on other minor works, reassessing his influence on other authors – such as Jean Blanc de Marseille (whom he met in Bologna), Jacques d’Orléans, and Baldus de Ubaldis.

This paper aims at assessing the role of the Augustinian and secular canons in the land exploitation and deforestation of the Venetian state in the 14-16th centuries. I will first introduce the institutional development of the Augustinian church of St Giorgio in Braida of Verona (11-17th centuries), related to the shifts of territorial powers, from the city commune, to the Scaliger’s and the Venetian domination. I will focus on the 1380-1440 conjuncture, when the church lost its autonomy and became part of the Secular Congregation of St Giorgio in Alga of Venice.
I will then analyse the false privileges produced by the rural communities of Verona and Vicenza in the late 15th century aimed at controlling woods and pastures, which mostly belonged to ecclesiastical lords. Rural élites generally fulfilled such targets with the collusion of urban functionaries, and with the silent complicity of the Venetian government. This was also the case of the wood of Sabbion, in the open Veronese plains, where in 1497 some local families were able to seize it from St Giorgio’s canons, who had possessed it for centuries. From the 12th century on, this wood appears both as a material asset, being the basic source of sustenance of the community, and an immaterial one, a symbol of power, an object of social competition and political bargaining. Nonetheless, while the term ‘nemus’ recurs constantly still in the records and quarrels of the 15-17th century, woods are absent from any known coeval cartography: Thus, documentary and environmental discourses took two different paths.
I will highlight in the local context the ambiguous relations between written sources and environmental development, the changing role of ecclesiastic properties in the process of land exploitation and redistribution of agrarian and sheep-farming production, the socio-cultural implications of deforestation for local communities.

By examining contextual examples of vassalage rituals and customs in the 12-13th-century Italy, it is possible to reassess the origins and the implications of the literature expressing the “law of fiefs”, from the Lombard Libri Feudorum incorporated in the medieval editions of the Justinian Code as the ‘decima collatio’, to the feudal treatises flourishing from the 13th century on. Still in the mid-13th century, the Summa feudorum (1228?-1255) of Iacobus de Ardizzone de Broilo from Verona, appears as intimately connected to local, pre-existing customs of the author’s native city, and not just to the academic milieu of the Bolognese jurists, as might be sustained by S. Reynolds. Through a compared analysis of the Summa, the Veronese seigniorial court records attended by Iacobus, and the practices developed by generations of vassals, I will show how this opus took significant inspiration from rituals of local power and from customs of fiefs that were less a product of notarial and judicial praxis than the outcome of contextual social practices. Through other examples, I will prove that, for at least one century after the first recension of the Lombard "consuetudines feudorum", local customs have been constantly and directly influencing the production of feudal law. It is therefore possible to reconsider feudalism not only as an analytical concept, a political system, or as a ‘legal fiction’ (Brown, Reynolds): we can bring the phenomenon back to its own social tissue, to social practice, to the legal procedure influencing the jurists.

The aim of this paper is to expose the first results of a research concerning transhumant pastoralism in twelfth-fourteenth centuries in the valley of Illasi, in the lower Lessinia (Verona). Historians and social scientists have already proven how the social group of "shepherds" has often been the object of distrust and transfer by popular and urban dominant culture. The main cause of this attitude seems to be the seasonal nomadism, a habit that radically opposes the modern idea of a merely settled civilisation. Very interesting details about their material culture (as seasonal migrations, boundary practices and exploitation of communal properties) emerged from a careful perusal of unpublished documentation of the Vatican Archives. Although until the thirteenth century we have nearly no trace of these usages, this does not entail that they were not practised. On the contrary, in their first documented appearances, they seem to be well deep-rooted and several testimonies show their presence since at least several decades. Broadening the chronology beyond the short-term period, it is moreover possible to analyse the process of dislocation of these activities toward the higher mountains, due to the strong demographical increase of the lower valley until the second half of the fourteenth century. The growth of population
pointed out by the present research partially contradicts what demographic historians believed, that is an opposite trend starting exactly from the middle of the century.

By outlining some approaches to Law and Custom adopted by social and legal theories, I aim to clarify the process of codification of feudal law in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Italy, when literacy began to influence significantly the legal system. I will depict the entanglement of the production of legal knowledge with (local) social practices, written and unwritten sources of normativity, and different institutional frameworks. The case study will consist in a comparison of the re-contextualisation(s) carried out by some Italian feudal lawyers (such as Obertus de Orto, Pillius de Medicina, and Iacobus de Ardizone) on Imperial laws - as Frederick Barbarossa’s ordinances of Roncaglia (1158) -, and on matters as the ‘feudal oath’ and the ‘feudal services’. I will thus examine the making of the Libri feudorum and further secondary legal literature, from the mid-twelfth to the late thirteenth century, trying to reassess the function of locality, customs, and social practice as unsuspected shaping forces of codified law.

Resumiendo los enfoques sobre los conceptos de ley y costumbre adoptados por distintas disciplinas – sociología del derecho, antropología jurídica, historia del derecho –, este seminario  se propone clarificar el proceso de codificación del derecho feudal en los siglos XII y XIII, periodo en el cual la alfabetización de los sistemas jurídicos europeos recibió un aporte fundamental de parte de los juristas entrenados en las universidades italianas y francesas.
Se intentará mostrar el entrelazamiento de la producción de “saber jurídico”, las prácticas sociales locales, las normas escritas u orales, y los distintos marcos institucionales. El estudio de caso será una comparación de las recontextualizaciones del concepto de costumbre realizadas por los juristas italianos y franceses (Oberto de Orto, Azo, Iacobus de Ardizone, Jacques de Revigny) en distintos marcos culturales e institucionales.
Se examinará finalmente el proceso de codificación de los Libri feudorum de Lombardía, que fueron incluidos en el Corpus Iuris Civilis a mediados del siglo XIII, y la producción de tratados de derecho feudal en relación con específicas prácticas de poder y costumbres locales, interpretadas como componentes todavía inexplorados del derecho codificado.

Signoria ecclesiastica e comunità rurali nel medioevo (secoli XII-XIII). San Giorgio in Braida di Verona e i villaggi del Fiumenovo
[Ecclesiastical Lordship and Rural Communities in the Middle Ages (Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries). San Giorgio in Braida of Verona and the Villages of the Fiumenovo]

As explained in the introductory section, the thesis examines the dialectic between rural lordship, urban institutions and rural communities in twelfth- and thirteenth-century communal Italy, and aims at a better understanding of the relationships between Italian city-states and their districts. The main aim is the reassessment of the grand narrative of the “conquest of the contado” by the city institutions, by means of a case study on the Augustinian Canons regulars of St Giorgio in Braida of Verona and a micro-historical analysis of three sample villages from the district of Verona, made possible by the availability of the Fondo Veneto I (Archivum Secretum Vaticanum) for the first time in digital format, recently acquired by the Department of History of Verona. The documentation of St Giorgio amounts to more than 6,000 parchments of Fondo Veneto I (almost all digitised) and around three hundred units among registers, accounting books and judicial booklets, stored in Fondo Veneto II, which I analysed in loco at the Vatican Archives.
The first section offers, in light of such massive documentation, a wide institutional history of the Canons of St Giorgio, and their progressive entanglement with regional and city-state elites and polities, culminating in the direct involvement of the church in the regional conflicts of the early thirteenth century, whose outcomes – the defeat of their leaders, the marquises of Este, and the concomitant success of Ezzelino da Romano – led to the inexorable political, although not patrimonial, decline of the institution.
After an outline on the origins of the church – born in 1046 under the private patronage of Cadalus, the future anti-Pope Honorius II –, I illustrate the political solidarity, in the early twelfth century, of the Augustinian churches of the Mark of Verona and of their respective patrons – stressing the unsuspectedly early active role of the marquises of Este, the main non-urban political force of the region. In fact, the marquises could maintain the leadership over this network of churches and rural castellanies, bestowed upon their capitanei, until the mature communal age in the early thirteenth century.
From around the mid-twelfth century, the municipal ruling classes of Verona, through multifaceted strategies – matrimonial pacts with rural lords, patronage and control over ecclesiastical lords and lands, agreements with rural elites, violent confiscations – entered these power relations in the countryside, trying to achieve firm political control by building a strong institutional framework. This policy is embodied in the activity of the urban magistrates, omnipresent – either as private professionals or as communal officials – in any jurisdictional act in the countryside. St Giorgio canons, lords in considerable portions of the districts of Verona and Vicenza, provide a clear insight of the function of the professional lawyers in the making of the city-state not only as depositories of legal expertise, but also as active political agents, only less visible in the sources than the turbulent class of urban knights, the milites.
The second section is devoted to the case studies, Cologna, Zimella, and Sabbion, villages subject to St Giorgio to varying degrees, all located in the Fiumenovo, a micro-region between the counties of Verona, Vicenza, and Padua, which since the late twelfth century was included in the Veronese communal district.
After an exercise of ‘regressive method’ in environmental history – conducted comparing toponymic analysis, early modern cartography, and modern aerial photography –, I tackle the development of land exploitation, constantly catalysed by the urban market even in the seigniorial lands, and land market, theoretically controlled by the lords, which were actually incapable of limiting the illicit land trades of seigniorial lands among their subjects. This incapability is a sign of the scarce involvement of the lords in the mechanisms of agrarian production, as well as in the actual development of the channels of local social mobility. Land, other key resources such as mills, and local offices – even the seigniorial ones –, became, through differentiated channels, in effect a monopoly under prominent local kin groups that owned local power more effectively than the lords. Finally, the case of Sabbion, the most documented village, provided insights of the development of an elite of vassals of the urban canons over four generations, exemplifying the decline of vassalage as a channel of social mobility before the mid-thirteenth century.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, during the emergence of the Italian communes, rural communities, increasingly populated and organised, became crucial actors in the relationship between city communes and rural lords, mostly thanks to the establishment of new local élites. The book offers a critical and comparative reassessment of this threefold dialectic in light of the rich documentation concerning the village of Sabbion, near Cologna Veneta, in the eastern outskirts of the Veronese contado. This documentation has been preserved in the archives of San Giorgio in Braida of Verona, holder of the lordship over Sabbion, and enabled a detailed comparative analysis of the principal socio-economic and political changes of a small and relatively homogeneous society, of the forms of local power, of the community's agency.