158 benjamin arbel
“according to custom.” Several decades had to pass, however, before a
committee of 12 local inhabitants was charged to collect “the customs of
the Empire of Romania,” which had to be sent to Venice and serve for
preparing a legal code that would be approved by the Senate. This project
was completed in 1453, and the same code was also introduced into other
Aegean islands, the Peloponnese and Corfu, where it was only abolished
by Napoleon.107
In the 15th-century pacts of submission signed with the Dalmatian
towns, Venice also recognized local statutes and customs, subject to con-
firmation by the Venetian Senate. The statutes of the Dalmatian com-
munes were, at least partly, similar to those which had regulated local
life during the former period Venetian rule, which ended in 1358 with
the Hungarian occupation. Thus in Zara, the Venetian magistrates were
assisted by four local ones in civil cases. In criminal cases, as everywhere
else, the Venetian magistrates had an exclusive right to decide.108
In Cyprus as well, local legal customs and judicial institutions (except
for the haute cour, abolished by Venice owing to its political role) were
left intact. Venice saw fit to codify ancient Cypriot customs, by printing in
Venice in 1535 the Assises of the old High Court and those of the burghers,
to avoid confusion in the colonial administration of justice.109 In Fama-
gusta, the Republic was even ready to recognize the statues that regulated
life in that town during its occupation by Genoa (1373–1464).110 Venetian
governors were required to apply Venetian legal principles whenever
Cypriot laws did not offer a clear solution and, in the lack of solution in
Venetian laws, to exercise their own discretion (arbitrium).111 This arbi-
trium was a cardinal element in a gradual and continuous impregnation of
local law by Venetian judicial practice, which was characterized by great
pragmatism and flexibility.112
107 Jacoby, La féodalité, pp. 95–113, 211, 258–59, 268–270, 303–308; Cozzi, “La politica
del diritto,” pp. 35–36; Spyros Asonitis, “L’introduzione delle Assise di Romania a Corfù,”
in Massimo Costantini and Aliki Nikiforou, eds., Levenate veneziano. Aspetti di storia delle
Isole Ione al tempo della Serenissima (Rome, 1996), pp. 59–75.
108 Gaetano Cozzi, “Politica, società, Istituzioni,” in Gaetano Cozzi and Michael
Knapton, La Repubblica di Venezia, nell’età moderna. Dalla guerra di Chioggia al 1517 (Turin,
1986), pp. 195–201.
109 Cozzi, “La politica del diritto,” pp. 39–42.
110 Benjamin Arbel, “L’eredità genovese a Cipro, 1464–1571,” in Laura Balletto, ed.,
Oriente e Occidente fra medioevo ed età moderna. Studi in onore di Geo Pistarino, 2 vols
(Genoa, 1997), 1:21–40, repr. in Arbel, Cyprus, article no. XIII.
111 Arbel, “Η Κύπρος,” p. 462.
112 For the difficulties involved in using arbitrium, see O’Connell, Men of Empire, p. 80.