History II / Byzantium: the Empire That Kept the Name
Practice question · Fill in the blanks

Complete the account of Justinian’s legal work and its afterlife.

Justinian ordered the compilation of the ______, whose four parts include the Code, the ______ of juristic opinion, the Institutes and the later Novels. Because it was preserved in the East, it became the channel through which Roman ______ reached the medieval West, where it was taught from the eleventh century at ______.

Word bank: Corpus Iuris Civilis · Digest · law · Bologna · Novellae · Ravenna

Hints
  1. The compilation’s second part gathers the opinions of classical jurists.
  2. The western law school that recovered it grew into the first university.
Show the answer

Justinian ordered the compilation of the Corpus Iuris Civilis, whose four parts include the Code, the Digest of juristic opinion, the Institutes and the later Novels. Because it was preserved in the East, it became the channel through which Roman law reached the medieval West, where it was taught from the eleventh century at Bologna.

Why

The transmission is the point. Justinian’s commission preserved a body of classical jurisprudence that would otherwise have been lost entirely, and its rediscovery in eleventh-century Italy gave medieval Europe a technical vocabulary for sovereignty, contract and property that canon and royal lawyers both took over.

Read the lesson: Byzantium: the Empire That Kept the Name →

Practise Byzantium: the Empire That Kept the Name

The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History II is free to start.

More questions on Byzantium: the Empire That Kept the Name