Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

Besides the practical business of mediating and litigating when emperors and popes were at one another’s throats, the great Byzantine emperor Justinian’s Digest had been rediscovered in the 1070s, to great academic excitement among the jurists of northern Italy. As we saw in chapter 3, the Digest had been a towering legal achievement when it was compiled, which along with the codex and Institutes provided an authoritative guide to the entire body of Roman law as it had been understood during the sixth century a.d. Now, at the close of the eleventh century, this vast trove of legal writing offered a tantalizing new basis for thinking about justice and governance. But to make it applicable and useful in the context of a world that had changed