The Corpus Juris Civilis
A thousand years of Roman law is edited into a single coherent code.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 5 years
- Known to
- ± 1 year
- Era
- Post-Classical, Holocene
Justinian commissions jurists in 529 CE to reduce the accumulated mass of Roman law — contradictory, scattered across centuries of imperial rulings and juristic commentary — into an ordered and authoritative body. The result is the Digest, Code, Institutes and Novels. Rediscovered in eleventh-century Italy, it becomes the foundation of legal education across Europe and the basis of the civil law tradition that governs most of the world today.