172 | CHAPTER 6
Andarchius contrived to parlay his learning into employment at the court of
King Sigibert of the Franks (561–75), who used him in the public service
until Andarchius overstepped the mark and came—but it’s a long story—to
a sad end.
After the sixth century the Roman and Germanic populations tended to
merge, and so did their legal systems. Only the Church’s canon law preserved
recognizable elements of the Roman legal heritage. Just how Roman law was
preserved and transmitted in the West between the sixth century and its
eleventh- century revival—whether intact, in epitomes, or in re- expansions—
is now becoming the subject of intensive research.^43 But transmission there
was, especially—albeit indirectly—of the Theodosian code.^44 And this serves—
better than anything in the history of Latin Aristotelianism—to underline
how the West did not entirely lose sight of the Greco-Roman heritage after
the sixth or seventh century. The Augustinian heritage sparked no debate
remotely comparable to the reverberations set off by Chalcedon; nor was
there any vigorous new shoot like Islam. yet the postimperial Latin West can-
not be written out of the First Millennium entirely; and the sphere of law is
one of the areas of its life most susceptible to integration into the wider
picture.
Unlike East Rome, the Latin West does see a new epoch at the beginning
of the Second Millennium, with the rediscovery of the Corpus c. 1070 in
Northern Italy. Thanks to teachers such as Pepo and Irnerius (c. 1050–after
1125), this now became the foundation text for the new law school in Bolo-
gna, which was destined for fame and influence. The Corpus was also crucial
to the reform of the Papacy undertaken by Gregory VII. It has even been ar-
gued that, compared to East Roman lawyers’ ingrained veneration for Justin-
ian’s work, Latin lawyers’ more piecemeal and less obligatory use of it, along-
side local law, was closer to the pragmatic, case- by- case methods of the
imperial jurists—the Digest rather than the Code.^45 Certainly the Digest’s
richness, and approachability compared to the Code and Novels or even the
textbook manner of the Institutes, was fundamental to the revival of Roman
law. But one should not underestimate the religious awe these early Western
scholars felt for everything contained in Justinian’s Corpus.^46
As for the Caliphate, it was until recently deemed “out of the question...
that the early Muslim specialists in religious law should consciously have ad-
43 M. H. Hoeflich and J. M. Grabherr, “The establishment of normative legal texts,” in W. Hart-
mann and K. Pennington (eds), The history of medieval canon law in the classical period, 1140–1234
(Washington, D.C. 2008) 2–3; W. Kaiser, “Nachvergleichungen von Novellen- und Codexzitaten,” ZRG
125 (2008) 603–44; S. J. J. Corcoran, “New subscripts for old rescripts,” ZRG 126 (2009) 401–3; http://
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/history2/volterra/pv2.htm.
44 J. Harries and I. Wood (eds), The Theodosian code (Bristol 2010^2 ) 159–216.
45 Stolte, Acta Byzantina Fennica 2 (2003–4) [6:36] 122–26.
46 P. Stein, Roman law in European history (Cambridge 1999) 43–47.