4289–4294 AM · 529 CE — 534 CE · world history
The Code of Justinian
A thousand years of Roman law are gathered into one code, fit for the court and for the school.
By the sixth century Roman law is a mountain of contradictory decrees and jurists' opinions, nearly impossible to navigate. Justinian charges a commission under Tribonian to bring it all together: the laws in force into the Codex, extracts from the jurists into the Digest, a textbook for the schools into the Institutes, new decrees into the Novels. The work takes several years; the obsolete is discarded, the disputed corrected, the older collections lose their force. Six centuries later this code will be read anew at Bologna, and it will become the foundation of law for nearly all of continental Europe.
Sources
Documents of the period
- inscriptions and coinage of the Roman Empire — the Corpus iuris civilis itself: the Code, the Digest, the Institutes
Scholarship
- Procopius of Caesarea and the Byzantine chronicles — the age of codification as seen by a contemporary
Basis: documents and evidence.