Reception of Byzantine Law in the West? Glossators and Humanists
Until the time of legal humanism Byzantine law led an existence quite separate from Roman law in the west. Yet the almost contemporaneous foundation of a law school in Constantinople in 1045 and the first beginnings in Bologna just a few decades or so later offer tantalizing food for thought.
So far no direct or indirect influence has been proven. The Glossators do not seem to have been the pupils of their Constantinopolitan colleagues. Medieval manuscripts of the Corpus iuris civilis are almost devoid of Greek.A western presence of Greek legal texts and their use by scholars are not attested until the fifteenth century.size=2 face=Arial>50 Even then, we should not think of a ‘reception’ of Byzantine law. What was new was rather an awareness of the opportunity of checking the received text and interpretation of the Corpus iuris civilis of the late Middle Ages against an authentic, earlier tradition of the Corpus in a different political and cultural environment. To be sure, lack of knowledge of all relevant manuscripts and restricted access to those that were known contributed to exploitation of the possibilities that was only gradual and piecemeal. An edition of the most important source, the Basilica cum scholiis, was produced only in 1647;51 its replacement in the nineteenth century by Heimbach52 was still a far cry from a satisfactory critical edition, which did not appear until the twentieth century.53 Already in 1534 Viglius of Aytta had prepared the editio princeps of the Paraphrasis Institutionum of Theophilus; unfortunately, his source was a Venetian manuscript which was not representative of its textual tradition. An edition with full critical apparatus appeared only in 2010.54 But although the means at their disposal were defective, the humanists were on the right track towards fully understanding the textual transmission of the Justinianic texts.
To understand this we have to return to the beginnings of Byzantine law, to the process of appropriation of the Latin texts in a Greek-speaking environment — in short, to the classroom of the first decades after the completion of Justinian’s codification. The antecessores had to begin with and explain a Latin text.
Sometimes they quoted a Latin word or passage; in rare cases they even explicitly pointed out variant readings. A katapoda translation into Greek was an almost direct representation of the Latin sentence over which it had been written. Even a summarizing translation can be a good indirect witness of its source. All these genres have been preserved to a greater or lesser extent in the Byzantine tradition, especially in the scholia on the Basilica. To take full advantage of these sources one needs, of course, to understand their nature and cultural context.The humanists were not ‘receiving’ Byzantine law. On the contrary, they searched for sources containing what was in their view ‘authentic’ Roman law - that is, ‘what Justinian had written’. They thought they found that in ancient manuscripts, especially the Florentine codex of the Digest and in certain Byzantine texts. Byzantine sources, then, were considered useful insofar as they enabled the scholar to come closer to Justinian, bridging a time gap of around i,000 years. Their possibilities still have not been exploited to the full.
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