[400] “Ecclesia vivit lege Romana,” Lex Ribuaria, 58. This was universally recognized, although the individual clericus might remain amenable to the law of his birth.
[401] For these matters see primarily the sixteenth book of the Theodosian Code, and book i. chap. 27. Also the suspected Constitutiones Sirmondianae attached to that Code. Justinian’s Codex and Novellae add much. Zorn, in his Kirchenrecht, p. 29 sqq., gives a convenient synopsis of the matter.
[402] One observes that the opening chapter of Justinian’s Digest speaks of jurisprudentia as knowledge of divine as well as human matters.
[403] Decretum, i. dist. viii. c. i.
[404] Decretum, i. dist. ix. c. xi.; see ibid. dist. xiii., opening.
[405] Tardif, Sources du droit canonique, p. 175 sqq., has been chiefly followed here.
[406] On the above matters see (with the authorities and bibliographies therein given) Maasen, Geschichte der Quellen, etc., der canonischen Rechts (Bd. i., to the middle of the ninth century); Tardif, Sources du droit canonique (Paris, 1887); Zorn, Lehrbuch des Kirchenrechts (Stuttgart, 1888); Gerlach, Lehrbuch des catholischen Kirchenrechts (5th edition, Paderborn, 1890); Hinschius, Decretales pseudo-Isidorianae (Leipzig, 1863); Corpus juris canonici, ed. by Friedberg (Leipzig, 1879-1881).
[407] Jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts embraced marriage and divorce, wills and inheritance, and, by virtue of their surveillance of usury and vows and oaths, practically the whole relationship between debtor and creditor.
[408] Volume ii. of R. W. and A. J. Carlyle’s History of Mediaeval Political Theory in the West (1909) maintains that the statements of papal pretensions which were incorporated in the recognized collections of Decretals were less extreme than those emanating from the papacy under stress of controversy.
[409] See Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Ages, trans. by Maitland (Cambridge, 1900), p. 22 sqq. and notes. I would express my indebtedness to this book for these pages on mediaeval political theories. Dunning’s History of Political Theories is a convenient outline; Carlyle’s History of Mediaeval Political Theory gives the sources carefully.