From 529 to 534 AD the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I codified and consolidated Roman law up until that time, so that what remained was one-twentieth of the mass of authorized texts from before. As one legal historian wrote, “Justinian consciously seemed again to the golden age of Roman law and aimed to restore it to the peak it had reached three centuries before.” The Justinian Code remained in force within the East until the autumn of the Byzantine Empire. Western Europe, in the meantime, relied on a mix of the Theodosian Code and Germanic customary law till the Justinian Code was rediscovered within the 11th century, and scholars at the University of Bologna used it to interpret their very own legal guidelines. Both these codes influenced heavily not solely the law systems of the countries in continental Europe (e.g. Greece), but in addition the Japanese and Korean authorized traditions.
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