Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/427

 THE MEDIEVAL REVIVAL OF LEARNING 377 came to the court of the Norman ruler of southern Italy, Robert Guiscard, at Salerno. Later he retired to the famous monastery of Monte Cassino, founded by St. Benedict him- self, and there he died in 1087. During this residence in Italy he composed several medical treatises in Latin which were in large measure merely translations of the works of Arabian physicians, but which none the less helped to in- crease the knowledge of the Christian West where Constan- tinus Africanus was henceforth a much-cited authority. His presence at Salerno also proved a stimulus to a school of medicine which had already existed there on a small scale among the monks and which now for a time became the most famous in the Latin world. A legal revival on a much larger scale in northern Italy soon followed that in medicine in the south. The rush of law students to Bologna at the very end of the Revival of i eleventh century was an intellectual movement iJ^* J contemporaneous with the First Crusade. Some Bologna i acquaintance with Justinian's law books seems to have sur- only at the close of the eleventh century that the old Roman law proper, set forth in the Digest, began to be studied with scientific thoroughness by students from all over Europe, who flocked to the law school at Bologna presided over by the great Irnerius. He was the first of a group or series of men known as the ''glossators" or commentators upon the Roman law, from the glosses or marginal notes which they made in their copies of the Digest. From 1 100 on the Roman or civil law (ius civilis) became an increasingly important force in western Europe. We have already noted its influ- ence at the Diet of Roncaglia held by Frederick Barbarossa. Those who had studied law at Bologna or Pavia found lucra- tive posts open to them in both Church and State, for canon as well as civil law was taught. It was a Bolognese professor, the monk Gratian, who about the middle of the twelfth century made a compilation of the canon law which hence- forth superseded the older collections as the standard work. The original title of his book was The Harmony of Conflicting
 * vived in Italy through the early Middle Ages, but it was