292 HISTORY OF ROMAN LAW 



systems must deal with two classes of Western states: first, those 

 in which this law has survived down to our own time as the result 

 either of inheritance or of what the Germans call "reception"; 

 secondly, those like England or the American Commonwealth in 

 which pure Roman law has been rejected. 



There are indeed vast regions in which other venerable bodies 

 of law, such as the Chinese and the Muslim, have long held sway, 

 but these we may here disregard, since their history has kept aloof 

 from that of Western law. We may sometimes have felt with Gibbon 

 "the hasty wish of exchanging our elaborate jurisprudence for the 

 simple and summary decree of a Turkish cadhi," but further than 

 this we have never gone. And the Eastern nations, with the single 

 recent exception of Japan, have on their part done nothing to put 

 themselves in touch with our Western legal systems. The only 

 direct effect they ever had upon these was to destroy the Eastern 

 Empire, and with it the Roman law which had flourished at Con- 

 stantinople for more than a thousand years. We may therefore 

 confine our inquiry to the two groups of Western states already 

 mentioned. 



Sweeping generalizations are in history even more odious than 

 comparisons, but I think there is one that can safely be made as to 

 the group of states which, like France and Germany, have either 

 inherited or " received " the Roman law. It is that in those states, 

 wherever that law was not an actual relic of Roman rule, its suprem- 

 acy has finally been recognized, not through conquest or compulsion, 

 but owing to the attraction of its intrinsic excellence. The reception 

 of Roman law in Germany in 1495 has been regarded as a case of 

 official compulsion. Recent research, however, has shown that the 

 vocabularius iuris utriusque, the collectio terminum legalium, and 

 other popular encyclopedias of Roman law had a great manuscript 

 circulation in Germany for more than a century before the reception, 

 and that one of them went through fifty-two printed editions in the 

 fifty years between 1473 and 1523. 1 Hence it appears that when 

 Berthold of Mainz proposed the establishment of the Reichskam- 

 rnergcricht, with its civilian doctors as judges, his action was only 

 the outcome of a movement which had long been in silent preparation. 



The peaceful reconquest of the European continent by Roman 

 law began with that revival of its study in the Italian universities 

 at the end of the eleventh century, which was one of the greatest 

 eruptions of intellectual energy that the world has ever seen. It 

 may perhaps best be compared to that enthusiasm for the natural 

 sciences which began at the end of the eighteenth century, which 

 Taine has described as one of the factors in the French Revolution, 

 and in the midst of which we still live. As biology and physics now 

 1 Seckel, Gesch. beider Rechte im Mittelalter, p. 59. 



