REFLECTIONS OF ROMAN CONCEPT OF SORCERY TO MEDIEVAL STATUTORY LAW ON EASTERN ADRIATIC COAST
REFLECTIONS OF ROMAN CONCEPT OF SORCERY TO MEDIEVAL STATUTORY LAW ON EASTERN ADRIATIC COAST

Summary/Abstract: Sorcerous acts and behaves in Roman law were in reach of iniuria, a type of a private delict. From its beginnings to the classical and postclassical period of Roman law it was an exclusively lay category to which the law paid attention because it was considered as injurious for other people and their property. The Romans believed that resort to some hidden and irrational forces could result with concrete damages, for which the perpetrator should be persecuted and ultimately punished. The same legal approach was adopted in the southern Europe in the early and high Middle Ages. It was first elaborated by the Bologna jurist and simultaneously accepted to different statutory regimes of the great states and empires of the time, including the Venetian statutory regimes. The same rationale of the Roman legal approach can be clearly discerned in the statutory regimes in the Istrian and Dalmatian communes. For this, the paper at hand examines reflections of the Roman concept of iniuria (specifically the sorcery) to legal perception of such acts in the communes of the eastern Adriatic in the Middle Ages. The intention of the authors of the paper is to examine connections between the Roman law and the communal statutory laws that in the legal matters related to sorcery apparently adopted the Roman paradigms. The special emphasis is put on relation of such acts to Church jurisdiction.2

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