The Discovery of the Pandects. of the same period availed themselves of the writings of the ancient civilians; and the Decretum Canonum, compiled by Ivo of Chartres, which is the earliest work of im portance extant on the subject of canon law, makes specific mention of the remodelled system of Justinian; and even in the pre ceding century the attention of the learned had been particularly directed to his compil ations by the publication of the work entitled "Petri Exceptiones Legum Romanorum," which is entirely made up of extracts from them. The discovery of the Pandects, therefore, was rather the effect than the cause of the revival of the study of civil law. This memorable event is supposed to have taken place about the year 1135. That the Pandects were partially known before this period is a fact perfectly well authenticated; but there is no reason to doubt that the par ticular copy which was the means of bringing the work into general notice was first dis covered, or rather that the discovery of it was first made public, some time in the early part of the twelfth century. There is not so much dispute concerning the period, as about the manner in which the work was brought to light. This, indeed, has given rise to much controversy. According to the popu lar story, the precious manuscript was found by the soldiers of Lothaire the Second, at the sacking of the town of Amalfi, and, being rescued by them from the spoil, it was after wards bestowed on the citizens of Pisa, as a reward for the assistance they had afforded to the besiegers. It is to be remarked, however, that the contemporary chroniclers, who have recorded the siege of Amalfi, make no men tion whatever of the finding of a manuscript; and, indeed, that the whole account appears, for the first time, in the work of a Pisan poet, who wrote fully two hundred years after the event. Thus it is evident that the testimony on which the story rests, if this be entitled at all to the name of testimony, is of the very weakest description. On the ground of probability, its support is still more slight. For
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it can scarcely be credited that, amidst the plunder of a captured town, a barbarous and illiterate soldiery should have carefully pre served from among the spoils what to them must have been nothing more than a mere bundle of parchment. It certainly is by no means improbable that the copy of the Pan dects may have been brought to Pisa from Amalfi, since we know that the latter town, as well as the former, kept up some com mercial intercourse with the East, whence, doubtless, the manuscript was originally im ported; but this must have happened before the siege. The more feasible supposition, however, appears to be that it was brought direct from Constantinople or elsewhere, and that it remained for some time, perhaps for centuries, forgotten there, until the reawak ened interest and the more general know ledge diffused by Irneriusand his disciples led to its discovery. The parchment on which it is written is of a peculiarly even texture and color; cir cumstances that have occasioned the loss of the most precious relics of the wisdom of an tiquity, since it was the common practice of those ignorant and barbarous ages to oblit erate the characters thus transcribed, in order that the cleansed skin might receive the im pression of some monkish legend or bulky treatise of scholastic divinity. Within com paratively recent years, Cicero's treatise, De República, some of the books of Livy, and other classical works, supposed to be losttbeyond recovery, have been found lurking under certain barbarous productions of the Middle Ages which had been written on the same parchment; and these codices palimpsesti, as they are called, have within the present cen tury furnished to our very imperfect collec tion of the works of the ancient lawyers the addition of the invaluable institutes of Gaius, besides some fragments of lesser note. Many of the works we now possess had remained for years, possibly ages, neglected and for gotten among the voluminous parchments of convents and monasteries, simply because
