Derecho y práctica legal en las comunas urbanas italianas del siglo XII: el caso de pisa

Abstract

Pisa was an atypical city in 12th-century Italy; it was large and commercially prosperous, with precocious urban institutions, and, above all, it adopted Roman law with more commitment than any other polity in the century. This article looks at the way Pisa absorbed Roman law, in its two Constituta, promulgated in 1160, and in the complex array of Roman actions, which where received into the Pisan communal court system from 1159 onwards. The Pisans seem in fact to have had the capacity to use almost the whole of the Corpus Iuris Civilis in their disputing with little obvious difficulty. A series of case studies are discussed, in order to see what effect this had on Pisan conceptions of the way law and society interrelate. Here, it becomes clearer that Pisa had not become Romanised in more than a few respects. In particular, Pisans evidently believed, like their contemporaries in the rest of Italy, that violent defence of one's possessions in itself proved right. Cases often cite such violence: sometimes it is even justified with Roman-style arguments, although Roman law was entirely opposed to such attitudes. This may help to show how an otherwise typical city could have absorbed Roman law in the first place: by adapting it to local presuppositions.