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Nicolaus de Tudeschis (Panormitanus)

Niccolò de' Tudeschi of Catania, 1386–1445. Two books of consilia, 226 opinions, in the Venice edition of 1571.

Life

Nicolaus was born in Catania in 1386. His surname most likely points to a family of German origin that had settled in eastern Sicily and risen into the ruling elite of the town. He entered the Benedictine order young and was sent north to study. With a stipend from the Senate of Catania, granted in 1405 or 1406, he matriculated in the law school of Bologna. Antonius de Butrio and Francesco Zabarella, the leading canonists of the day, may have taught him, but a direct link to Zabarella, who was then teaching in Padua, cannot be proved. He began to teach around 1411, first at Bologna, then at Parma from 1411 to 1418 and at Siena until about 1430. It was in Siena that the commentary on the Decretals of Gregory IX took shape, the work on which his fame rests.1

His family's influence in Catania secured him a canonry of the cathedral in 1415 and, in 1425, the abbacy of Santa Maria di Maniace on the slopes of Etna. He seems to have held the abbey in absence, as a sinecure, but it gave him the name by which the jurists knew him, Abbas modernus or Abbas Siculus. After a short return to Bologna in 1431–32 and a call to Florence, he entered papal service as an auditor of the curia. Pope Eugenius IV sent him to the Council of Basel, where he arrived in March 1433 and defended the pope's position in two sermons before leaving the council. In 1434 King Alfonso V of Aragon, ruler of Sicily, placed him in the vacant see of Palermo over the rights of the cathedral chapter; Eugenius confirmed him on 9 March 1435. From the see comes the name Panormitanus.2

When he returned to Basel in 1436 it was as Alfonso's ambassador, and his role changed. He did not follow the Italian bishops to Ferrara in 1437 but stayed with the council, which with French support affirmed its superiority over the pope. In 1438 he represented it before the Reichstag at Frankfurt. After the council deposed Eugenius and elected Amadeus of Savoy as Felix V, the new pope made him a cardinal in 1440 and asked him to compile the decrees of Constance and Basel into a canonical collection, a task he never seems to have finished. Contemporaries remarked on his changes of side. Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, the later Pius II, wrote that Panormitanus had become the leader of the conciliar party "not through his own wish, but through necessity alone", bound to obey his prince. Knut Wolfgang Nörr and Morimichi Watanabe have shown that his thought on church and council is not fully consistent: he came to Basel a supporter of the papacy and left it an advocate of conciliar supremacy. When Alfonso made peace with Eugenius at Terracina in 1443 he recalled his delegation. Panormitanus returned to Palermo and died there of the plague on 24 February 1445. His tomb, a reused Roman sarcophagus, stands in the crypt of the cathedral.3

Kenneth Pennington calls him "without a doubt the most influential jurist of the fifteenth century", and his conciliar writings were read long afterwards; even Luther admired him. The judgement comes with a caveat that bears on this portal: "Remarkably little has been written about him."4

The consilia

The collection as it is read today was formed in print. The earliest editions, among them Ferrara 1475, contained about 104 to 107 consilia; a second series of 118 followed from Pescia in 1488. Later editions combined the two, and the vulgate text of the sixteenth century therefore contains two books of 108 and 118 opinions. Not all of them are by Panormitanus.5

Among the manuscripts is Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Urb. lat. 1132, a collection whose scribe noted that he copied from the originals and which preserves original subscriptions and seals of Baldus, Benedetto Barzi and Niccolò Tedeschi side by side, a reminder that the opinions of the two jurists presented here travelled in the same channels.6 The manuscript tradition has been examined only in part. Andrea Romano studied Lucca, Biblioteca Capitolare Feliniana 162, a manuscript that belonged to Felinus Sandeus, bishop of Pisa, and contains most of the opinions of both printed series; he dates the opinions of the first series to the years 1425 to 1436. Daniela Novarese found and published an opinion in Palermo written after Nicolaus had become archbishop. Pennington's conclusion is that "as the manuscript tradition is explored, more unedited consilia will undoubtedly be discovered."7 The first series thus belongs largely to his years as a professor in Siena, before his involvement in the politics of the council. Ingrid Baumgärtner has used his opinions, with those of Oldradus de Ponte, Petrus de Ancharano, Martinus Garatus and Alexander Tartagnus, to study the position of the lower clergy in the late Middle Ages, an example of the questions the canonist's consilia can answer.8

Printed editions

Panormitanus was one of the printers' authors. Colli counts eleven incunable editions of his consilia between 1475 and 1500, and places him with Bartolus and Paulus de Castro among the bestsellers whose collections the presses of Venice, Milan and Pavia reprinted in the later 1480s, while the Pescia edition of 1488 was one of only two first editions of those years to bring new texts to market. The sequence runs from the two Ferrara editions of 1475, one of them the collection of 104 opinions compiled by Ludovicus Bologninus, professor of civil law there, which closes with three opinions by other jurists, through an undated Strasbourg edition and Cologne 1477, Venice 1480 and 1486, to the second series printed at Pescia in 1488 and reprinted at Venice in 1491 as Consilia secundi voluminis, and a Venice edition of 1500 that already added the quaestiones. Unlike Baldus's, the collection also crossed the Alps early.5 In the sixteenth century, when the printing of medieval consilia had largely passed to reprints of a few bestsellers, his belonged to that small group, with dozens of editions, usually together with the quaestiones, on their own or as the closing volume of the collected works issued at Venice in 1570–71, 1581–82, 1605 and 1617.9

The Venice edition of the Commentaria of 1570–71, dedicated by Leonardus a Lege to Carlo Borromeo, archbishop of Milan, prints the consilia in the ninth part of its fourth volume, together with the quaestiones, a Practica and a Repertorium: the first book on folios 2r to 86v, the second on folios 87r to 194v, each with marginal commentary and the repertories added by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century editors.10 That is the text presented here, transcribed from the Houghton Library copy that the Ames Foundation at Harvard Law School has digitised and described, and divided into its 226 opinions, 108 in the first book and 118 in the second, with the numbering of the print. The portal starts from this edition because the printed tradition is the best recorded part of the transmission: the incunables are catalogued in the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke, the sixteenth-century editions in Pennington's list, the 1570–71 volumes are online in full. The manuscripts, which have hardly been studied, are the next step, and the searchable text of the vulgate is the instrument for comparing them.

Manuscripts

No author's archive comparable to that of Baldus is known for Panormitanus, and the manuscript tradition of his consilia has not been surveyed as a whole. Pennington lists six witnesses. Lucca, Biblioteca Capitolare Feliniana 162, from the library of Felinus Sandeus, contains most of the opinions of both printed series and is the manuscript on which Romano's dating rests. Vatican City, BAV, Urb lat. 1132 is a large collection of consilia of many jurists into which original subscriptions and seals of Tedeschi, Baldus and Benedetto Barzi were bound; it is digitised. Cambrai, Bibliothèque municipale 207, a fifteenth-century paper volume catalogued as a collection of treatises on the Great Schism, is digitised in full by the IRHT. Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional 2139 (fols. 52v–65v and 73r–78v), Turin, Biblioteca Nazionale G.II.21 (fols. 21–457) and Palermo, Biblioteca Comunale 3.Qq.C.45, the last with the opinion written as archbishop that Novarese published, complete the list.11

Notes

  1. Kenneth Pennington, "Nicolaus de Tudeschis (Panormitanus)", in Orazio Condorelli (ed.), Niccolò Tedeschi (Abbas Panormitanus) e i suoi Commentaria in Decretales (Rome: Il Cigno Galileo Galilei, 2000), pp. 9–36, section I. Pennington bases the biography on Charles Lefebvre, "Panormitain", Dictionnaire de droit canonique 6 (1957), 1195–1215; Knut Wolfgang Nörr, Kirche und Konzil bei Nicolaus de Tudeschis (Panormitanus) (Cologne and Graz: Böhlau, 1964); and Peter Landau, "Nikolaus de Tudeschis (Panormitanus, 1386–1445)", in Michael Stolleis (ed.), Juristen. Ein biographisches Lexikon (Munich, 1995), pp. 458–459. Bibliography: Pennington 2000, Lefebvre 1957, Nörr 1964, Landau 1995 ↩
  2. Pennington, "Nicolaus de Tudeschis", section I. Bibliography: Pennington 2000 ↩
  3. Pennington, "Nicolaus de Tudeschis", section I, quoting Piccolomini's De gestis concilii Basiliensis; Nörr, Kirche und Konzil; Morimichi Watanabe, "Authority and Consent in Church Government", Journal of the History of Ideas 33 (1972), pp. 217–236; Antony Black, Monarchy and Community: Political Ideas in the Later Conciliar Controversy 1430–1450 (Cambridge, 1970). Bibliography: Pennington 2000, Piccolomini 1967, Nörr 1964, Watanabe 1972, Black 1970 ↩
  4. Pennington, "Nicolaus de Tudeschis", section I and n. 3. For a recent overview see R. H. Helmholz, "Niccolò dei Tedeschi (Panormitanus) (1386–1445)", in Orazio Condorelli and Rafael Domingo (eds.), Law and the Christian Tradition in Italy: The Legacy of the Great Jurists (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. 216–229. Bibliography: Pennington 2000, Helmholz 2020 ↩
  5. Pennington, "Nicolaus de Tudeschis", section II.6, with the list of incunable editions, and the fuller list in the Bio-Bibliographical Guide to Medieval and Early Modern Jurists, entry Nicolaus de Tudeschis: Ferrara, Andreas Belfortis, 1475 (GW M47750); Ferrara, Petrus de Aranceyo and Johannes de Tornaco, 1475 (Hain *12345, GW M47753); [Strasbourg, Heinrich Eggestein, undated] (GW M47759); Cologne, Johann Koelhoff, 1477 (GW M47756); Venice 1480 (GW M47764); Venice 1486 (Hain *12348, GW M47773); Pescia 1488 (Hain *12352, GW M47780); Venice, Jacobus de Paganinis, 1491 (Hain *12353, GW M47782); Lyon, Johann Siber, 1500 (Quaestiones et disputationes, with the Consilia, GW M48058). Colli, "Consilia dei giuristi medievali e produzione libraria", in Mario Ascheri, Ingrid Baumgärtner and Julius Kirshner (eds.), Legal Consulting in the Civil Law Tradition (Berkeley, 1999), pp. 173–225, counts eleven editions. Bibliography: Pennington 2000, Report No. r450, Tudeschis 22.II.1475, Tudeschis 9.V.1475, Tudeschis [nach 10.X.1474], Tudeschis 1.X.1477, Tudeschis 1480, Tudeschis 14.XII.1486, Tudeschis 2.IX.1488, Tudeschis 7.IV.1491, Tudeschis 4.VIII. und 18.VIII.1500, Colli 1999 ↩
  6. Giovanna Murano, "I consilia giuridici dalla tradizione manoscritta alla stampa", Reti Medievali Rivista 15/1 (2014), pp. 241–277; the manuscript is also in Pennington's list, "Nicolaus de Tudeschis", section II.6. Bibliography: Murano 2014, Pennington 2000 ↩
  7. Pennington, "Nicolaus de Tudeschis", section II.6; Andrea Romano, "Un consilium di Gualtiero Paternò conservato nel ms. 162 della Biblioteca Capitolare Feliniana di Lucca", in Giovanna Motta (ed.), Studi dedicati a Carmelo Trasselli (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 1983), pp. 583–600; Daniela Novarese, "'De aqua sancti Cosmani'. Quattro consigli inediti di Niccolò Tedeschi, Gualtiero Paternò e Paolo Mazzone", Rivista di storia del diritto italiano 64 (1991), pp. 99–155. Bibliography: Pennington 2000, Romano 1983, Novarese 1991 ↩
  8. Ingrid Baumgärtner, "'Quidam presbiter beneficialis': Der niedere Klerus in den Rechtsgutachten des späten Mittelalters", Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Kanonistische Abteilung 112 (1995), pp. 189–224. Bibliography: Baumgärtner 1995 ↩
  9. Colli, "Consilia dei giuristi medievali", on the sixteenth-century market; Bio-Bibliographical Guide, entry Nicolaus de Tudeschis, no. 05, listing the editions of 1539, Venice 1581–82, 1605 and 1617 and noting that the quaestiones were usually printed with the consilia; Pennington, "Nicolaus de Tudeschis", section II.6. Bibliography: Colli 1999, Report No. r450, Pennington 2000 ↩
  10. Ames Foundation, Harvard Law School, Abbatis Panormitani Commentaria (Venice, 1570–71), digitised from Houghton Library IC.T2286.B571c, metadata and table of contents (2017), with the dedication by Leonardus a Lege. Bibliography: Panormitanus "metadata" (Abbatis Panormi 2017 ↩
  11. Pennington, "Nicolaus de Tudeschis", section II.6; Murano, "I consilia giuridici"; Cambrai, Le Labo (Bibliothèque municipale), Ms. 207, record in Biblissima with the IRHT digitisation, after Auguste Molinier, Catalogue général des manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques de France, vol. 17: Cambrai (Paris, 1891), pp. 65–66. Which items of the Cambrai volume are Panormitanus's consilia is not stated in the catalogue record. Bibliography: Pennington 2000, Murano 2014, Ms. 207 15th century, Molinier 1891 ↩