Germany. Even in Italy his legislation did not maintain itself in general dominance, especially in the north where the Lombard law narrowed its application. Moreover, throughout the peninsula, the Pandects quickly became as if they were not, and fell into desuetude, if that can be said of a work which had not come into use. This body of jurisprudential law was beyond the legal sense of those monarchically-minded and barbarizing centuries, which knew law only as the command of a royal lawgiver. The Codex and the Novellae were of this nature. They, and not the Digest, represent the influence upon Italy of Justinian's legislation until the renewed interest in jurisprudence brought the Pandects to the front at the close of the eleventh century. But Codex and Novellae were too bulky for a period that needed to have its intellectual labours made easy. From the first, the Novellae were chiefly known and used in the condensed form given them in the excellent Epitome of Jutianus, apparently a Byzantine of the last part of Justinian's reign.[1] The cutting down and epitomizing of the Codex is more obscure; probably it began at once; the incomplete or condensed forms were those in common use.[2]
It is, however, with the Theodosian Code and certain survivals of the works of the great jurists that we have immediately to do. For these were the sources of the codes enacted by Gothic and Burgundian kings for their Roman or Gallo-Roman subjects. Apparently the earliest of them was prepared soon after the year 502, at the command of Gondebaud, King of the Burgundians. This, which later was dubbed the Papianus,[3] was the work of a skilled Roman lawyer, and seems quite as much a text-book as a code. It set forth the law of the topics important for the Roman provincials living in the Burgundian kingdom, not merely making extracts from its sources, but stating their contents and referring to them as authorities. These sources
- ↑ Juliani epitome Latina Novellarum Justiniani, ed. by G. Haenel (Leipzig, 1873).
- ↑ Conrat, Ges. der Quellen und Lit. des röm. Rechts, pp. 48-59, and 161 sqq.; Mommsen, Zeitschrift für Rechtsges. 21 (1900), Roman. Abteilung, pp. 150-155.
- ↑ Ed. by Bluhme, Mon. Germ. leges, iii. 579-630. Cf. Tardif, Sources du droit français, 124-128. A code of Burgundian law had already been made.
