One meaning that attached to the word “sanctuary” in the thirteenth century was that of a refuge for criminals trying to avoid legitimate and illegitimate attempts at vengeance.¹ For a thousand years ecclesiastics had been routinely claiming that churches, because of their holiness, should be recognized as such places. This tradition paralleled an even more ancient tradition among non-Christians that certain sites—temples or designated cities—should be considered sanctuaries. The various secular governments of the Middle Ages that recognized sanctuary developed, by the thirteenth century, an extraordinary body of law on the extent or, put differently, the limits of...

“Of the three great twelfth-century institutions that transformed the whole of European life,” Edward Peters remarked in The Magician, the Witch, and the Law, “the court has been discussed the least. Cities and universities, perhaps because they have survived into the modern world, have undoubtedly received far more attention.”¹ Though courts and court life have been the subject of much distinguished work since 1978, this aperçu, like so many in that wonderfully perceptive and still refreshing book, remains underexploited, not least in relation to heresy. Discussion, of which there has been a great deal, has invariably been conducted on the...

Sir Paul Vinogradoff (1854–1925) nearly a century ago described the twelfth-century renewal of interest in Roman law as a ghost story on the grounds that it dealt with “a second life of Roman law after the demise of the body in which it first saw the light.”¹ Later scholars have questioned Vinogradoff’s metaphor. Did Roman law really disappear from the empire’s former provinces once Germanic kings had replaced Roman governors in the West? Might one not more accurately speak instead of a lingering presence of Roman law, enfeebled perhaps, but still functioning among the “Roman” subjects of Visigothic, Frankish,...

To speak of the legal history of European expansion would seem to express an oxymoron. How could the expansion of Europe and the creation of the great overseas empires of the early modern world have anything to do with legality?¹ While expansion does call up images of heroic feats of arms, it is also true, as the Habsburg experience demonstrates, that empires can begin with fortunate marriages, dowries, and unexpected inheritances. Furthermore, even when conquest leads to the acquisition of new lands, it is only the first stage in the creation of an empire, because an empire is not simply...

By the early thirteenth century the Latin church possessed two collections of papal letters that were in some sense considered to be official. The compilation of letters of Pope Innocent III (1198–1216), prepared by Peter of Benevento in 1209–10, was endorsed by a papal bull from Innocent; the collection of Pope Honorius III’s (1216–27) letters, assembled by the canonist Tancred in 1226, was prefaced by a bull from Honorius. Both collections were responses to the flood of questions and litigation engulfing the courts of the church as the papacy struggled in the first part of the thirteenth...

Medieval scholars of judicial procedure, particularly those concerned with the Early Middle Ages, have in the past two generations brought enormous clarity to our understanding of how the operation of Frankish justice was deeply embedded within the context of Frankish society. A primary goal of this scholarship has been to demonstrate the pragmatic and “rational” nature of early medieval judicial procedure. In the immediate postwar period, scholars such as François Louis Ganshof studied Carolingian justice with an emphasis on rational institutional procedure and institutions.¹ More recent scholarship, drawing on the processural school of legal studies, tends to present Carolingian justice...

In a celebrated and much-quoted passage on treason in England before the late thirteenth century, F. W. Maitland called it “a crime which has a vague circumference, and more than one centre.” Drawing primarily on a close analysis of the Latin legal texts Glanvill and Bracton’s De legibus, as well as on his reading of late Anglo-Saxon law codes, Maitland usefully highlighted the ambiguity of the concept of treason and identified several disparate and equally elusive ideas that were somehow bound up in it. One of these, which he characterized as “primarily indicated by the word betray,” Maitland took to...

Medieval religion acted inherently as a monopoly. For contemporaries this seemed broadly self-evident, a part of the cultural landscape, the Christian church claiming truth in matters divine and human, the Roman church authenticity in upholding it. We today may find those who dissented more interesting, and so seek out evidence of resistance on the micro level even while conceding the macro. But medieval Christendom was defined only in part by notions of center and periphery. This was a socioreligious complex rife with internal rivalries, multilayered and multiregional. That sprang from a fundamental reality. Since the Christian religion laid claim to...

It took modern American society from the late 1960s to the turn of the millennium to come up with a term for the person with whom one lives outside marriage, finally settling on “partner.” Medieval society, on the other hand, did have a term: the woman in such a relationship was a concubina, the man a concubinarius. Medieval society acknowledged these people’s existence and had a known category into which to fit them, even if it did not encourage such unions. Unlike the corresponding relationship in the late twentieth century, the union had a legal status, albeit a complex one....

Although the legal and spiritual privileges theoretically accorded to crucesignati have long been mapped out, their practical implementation in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries remains far less explored.¹ Enforcing the privileges claimed by individual crusaders required the collaboration and interaction of multiple ecclesiastical and secular authorities during a period marked by crucial developments in governmental apparatuses, law, and church-state relations. Often presented as an exceptional and urgent project that ought to have enabled secular and ecclesiastical authorities to put aside traditional rivalries and long-simmering conflicts to cooperate in defending Christendom, the organization of the crusade tested the effectiveness...

In March 1308, masters of theology at the University of Paris responded to a series of questions posed by the king, Philip the Fair, regarding the nature and extent of royal judicial authority over the Templars. At first glance it seems strange that the king consulted theologians on such a matter rather than doctors of canon law, who would seem to be the appropriate body to address questions concerning secular power over ecclesiastical persons and orders. That question has rarely been posed, probably because historians have assumed that the theologians at Paris in the course of the thirteenth century had...

On 3 November 1395, a Venetian mint worker named Giovanni Plaxentio, who went by the nickname Mazorana, was brought before doge Antonio Venier and confessed to making Venetian torneselli of pure copper in his home.¹ Though it may seem inconceivable to anyone who has visited the crowded island city, Mazorana had set up his own mint in his home, where he and two associates beat out ingots of copper with hammers, cut them into circular blanks, and stamped them with dies he stole from the mint. By the time the Signori di Notte (Officers of the Night Watch) entered his...

Two historical episodes of enduring significance loom large in the last quarter of the eleventh century: the investiture controversy between the German emperor Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII and the launching of the first crusade by Pope Urban II. Following Carl Erdmann’s pioneering study on the origins of the idea of crusade, historians have long noted the connection between the rise of a Christian notion of holy war during the pontificate of Gregory VII and the advent of the crusades.¹ The subject of medieval law and the illicit offers an opportunity to briefly consider a parallel theme also emanating...

The Dominican Tommaso di Antonio da Siena (Thomas Caffarini) arrived in Venice after pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1394 and began his assigned task of composing a rule for Dominican penitents (his Tractatus, then folded into the bull Sedis apostolicae by Innocent VII on 26 June 1405).¹ Thomas also translated and glossed exempla featuring celebrated Italian saints: Catherine of Siena (1347–80), Giovanna of Orvieto (1264–1304), and Margherita of Città di Castello (1287–1320). He added one original work to this corpus, the legenda of his friend Maria of Venice.² This work, crucial to his project, featured a...

Natural magic was considered a legitimate science in the Middle Ages, one that had as its object the hidden properties and powers of the cosmos. It was sanctioned by the Gospel itself, which told of Magi who sought out the infant Jesus through their reading of the heavens, and who were venerated as the Three Kings of Cologne. Magic, of course, was often put to bad purposes and its practitioners denounced as malefactors, malefici, and their deeds as maleficia. But fault was found even with some magic practices intended as beneficia (benefits). Canon law provided little guidance on the subject...

As Edward Peters makes clear in the introduction to this volume, the growth of law in medieval society, and the definitions of licit and illicit that followed from it, influenced developments in widely disparate areas of medieval life and culture: from governmental, church, and academic structures, to social, familial, and gender relations, to forms of belief, behavior, and thought.¹ I hope to illustrate law’s great reach by examining a case of its extension into the rarefied realm of scholastic natural philosophy. One can argue that on the most general level there are deep connections between the recognition of law as...