Ideas of the State in Thirteenth and Fourteenth-Century Commentators on the Roman Law

Abstract

The late thirteenth and fourteenth-century civilians made a distinctive contribution to the theory of the state, because they were seeking to apply a specific juristic language to account for the existence of contemporary territorial states. Fully worked out state concepts are to be found in the works of Bartolus and Baldus, although elements necessary for the construction of a concept of the state exist in earlier Commentators. The theories of Bartolus and Baldus are prime illustrations that the concept of the state is historically fluid: they do not possess our concept of the state; indeed their theories are highly complex, combining aspects which are distinctively late medieval with others which can justifiably be termed elements of a modern idea of the state.