Ulrich Zasius

File:Portret van Ulrich Zasius Huldrichus Zasius Constantiensis (titel op object), RP-P-OB-31.459.jpg

Ulrich Zasius.

Ulrich Zasius (1461 – 24 November 1535) was a German jurist and humanist.

Born Ulrich Zäsy, he later adopted the latinized name Huldrichus or Udalricus Zasius. Zasius is one of the most important legal scholars at the turn of the Middle Ages and modern times, and maintained correspondence with many well-known humanists of his time, especially with Erasmus of Rotterdam, whom he first met in person in 1518.

Biography

Zasius was born at Konstanz (current Baden-Württemberg) in 1461. After attending the cathedral school in Konstanz, he attended the University of Tübingen in 1481. After two years of study in Tübingen, where he was enrolled in the Faculty of Arts and graduated with the degree of Baccalaureus, he entered the service of the Bishop of Konstanz in 1483 as a court clerk and notary. In 1489 he became town clerk in Baden, Switzerland. In 1494, he was called to the office of Municipal clerk in the city of Freiburg im Breisgau. He remained on friendly terms with his successor Kaspar Frey throughout his life. Zasius remained in Freiburg until his death. As town clerk, Zasius reorganized the records and bookkeeping of the town and, in this context, for the first time also created a Zugurteilsbuch (book of court decisions), in which the court decisions made by the council were to be entered in the future and were indeed entered until 1609. However, Zasius soon gave up the office of town clerk and took over the management of the Latin school in 1496. It was not until 1499, i.e. at the age of 40 - by then he was married and the father of several children - that he matriculated at the law faculty. In 1501, he was awarded a doctor legum degree and from 1502 he was the city's clerk and legal advisor. In 1502, Zasius was entrusted with the reform of the city law.

In 1505, he became a professor of law at the University of Freiburg, and his students during this time included the prominent Catholic theologian Johannes Eck. As such, he developed a lively teaching and research activity. He soon became widely known as the author of works written mostly in Ciceronian polished Latin. "Let us count ourselves lucky to have found the teacher whom France admires, whom Italy marvels at, whom Spain glorifies, and whom the Germans love." An enthusiastic student once wrote. Emperor Maximilian appointed him imperial councilor in 1508.

In 1521 his son Johann Ulrich Zasius was born.

Humanistic jurisprudence

Ulrich Zasius played a significant role as a precursor of legal humanism, which represents a departure from the ossified scholasticism that was also common in jurisprudence. In jurisprudence, this upheaval is described with the catchword "mos Gallicus" (French custom) in distinction from the "mos Italicus" (Italian custom). The "mos Italicus" refers to the old method of interpreting the often incomplete and inauthentic Roman and canonical legal texts by adapting them to Italian customs and practices, as had already been done since the 12th century by the glossators and commentators. To this end, the authors then went into lengthy deliberations that were not very conducive to the practical application of the law. The novelty of the method of the "mos Gallicus" lies first of all in the fact that the authentic iustinian legal sources are restored through textual criticism, in order to ultimately explore classical law with them.

What is new above all, however, is that the interpretation of these texts is no longer carried out out of touch with life as l'art pour l'art as in scholasticism, but with historical understanding and oriented to the new image of man of the Renaissance. Zasius was still attached to the "mos Italicus" - for him, too, the Digestes (i.e. the advanced textbook of compiled Roman law) were leges sacrae, i.e. sacred and thus inviolable laws. On February 14, 1517, Zasius wrote to his friend Claudius Cantiuncula:

"Barbarism has overgrown the good old trunk of Roman law like a snake and covers it so much that it would be necessary to remove it together with the deep-rooted roots. But to tear these out without injuring the trunk itself, I shy away from, lest I do more harm."

Zasius, however, was one of those who began to free the Roman sources from the tendrils of useless controversies and to make them useful for the practical application of law. Thus, in his Lucubrationes, published in 1518, he writes things that are still valid for today:

"It would be of use, indeed a necessity, to shorten those lengthy commentaries which explain little but obscure all the more, which every insightful person easily recognizes if he only opens them. For they are overloaded with a load of contentions, and often display more ostentatious erudition than true doctrine."

Together with the Italian jurist Andreas Alciatus (1492-1550), who worked in the same direction, and the French jurist Gulielmus Budaeus (1467-1540), Zasius formed what was then widely called the legal "triumvirate" of the time (according to Erasmus). But many authors of the so-called Spanish late scholasticism, such as Diego de Covarubias y Leyva, were also committed to the spirit of legal humanism.

One of his most famous students was the Frankfurt jurist Johann Fichard.

Freiburg city law

Zasius' practical sense of law proved itself in a special way in the reorganization of the Freiburg city law of 1520, which is essentially his work. It was considered a well-done fusion of Roman and German law, and was praised as a legislative masterpiece of its time. It was the basis of an independent order of the legal and judicial system of the city of Freiburg, which had an effect into the 19th century, and thus also the authoritative source of law for the sayings of the Freiburg High Court, the forerunner of the present Freiburg Regional Court. Even beyond Freiburg, it served as a model for other city and country laws.

Zasius, a proponent of the theory that Jews were slaves of Christians, and who recommended in the style of Luther to "cast out such fierce beasts" and to "let that disgusting excrement sink into darkness," also explicitly discriminated against Jews in the New City Law. Thus, they were not allowed to bear witness in legal matters and had no fellowship with Freiburg citizens. This was made difficult anyway after the city council's decision of 1401 "that no Jew in Fribourg should ever be a Jew," and was now punished in the city law with two silver marks and, in case of repetition, with the expulsion of the citizen.

Reception

When Zasius died on November 24, 1535, at the age of 74, the city erected an epitaph for him in the choir gallery of the cathedral, which is still there today. The inscription, written in exuberant Latin, praises him as the most widely known legal scholar of his time, as a unique ornament of the university and as the creator of the new city law. In 1868, the sculptor Wilhelm Walliser also created a fountain monument to Zasius, which was erected in front of what was then the Berthold-Gymnasium.

There is a street named after him in the Freiburg district of Wiehre and in the Konstanz district of Paradies.

Erasmus of Rotterdam, who had fled from Basel to Freiburg during the troubled times of the Basel Reformation and then lived in Freiburg for six years, namely from 1529 to 1535, wrote about him to his friend, the Nuremberg jurist and humanist Willibald Pirckheimer on July 15, 1529: "I have yet to see anything in Germany that I admired as much as the character of Ulrich Zasius. This man deserves immortality!"

Works

File:Zasius, Ulrich – Enarratio in titulum Institutionum de actionibus, 1548 – BEIC 10956351.tif

Enarratio in titulum Institutionum de actionibus, 1548

Notes

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: 

Further reading

• Steven Rowan: Ulrich Zasius : a jurist in the German Renaissance, 1461-1535, Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 1987. (Ius commune. Sonderhefte : Studien zur europäischen Rechtsgeschichte ; 31)
• Roderich von Stintzing: Ulrich Zasius : ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Rechtswissenschaft im Zeitalter der Reformation, Basel, Schweighauser, 1857.