Jacques Cujas e la lettera scomparsa. Una vicenda tra apocrifia e storia

In 1570, Jacques Cujas published Books IX-XI of the Observationes et emendationes, which included a previously unpublished letter from Emperor Justinian addressed to General Narses, the patrician tasked with reorganizing the territory in Italy following the definitive defeat of Totila. Through this measure, a beneficium in the strict sense, the emperor ordered Narses to restore the Titiones brothers, in reward for their heroic military service in the Gothic War, to their former estates in northern Italy, which had been unlawfully occupied following the settlement of Germanic peoples, expressly waiving any and all legal norms, including the longissimi temporis praescriptio. However, the document has to date been omitted from modern editions of the Corpus Iuris Civilis, because it is considered, due to certain anomalies, a mere scholarly exercise from the humanist era-and thus a forgery-aimed at ennobling the Vercelli-based Tizzoni family by invoking ancient origins. From this small book, however, the soundness of Cujas's insights and the veracity of the substantive core of the decree emerge, as an example of pragmatica sanctio. The Justinian beneficium, despite some possible interpolations and its certain subsequent reuse, in fact exhibits an intrinsic legal and historical coherence fully compatible with the practices of the Constantinopolitan chancellery of the 6th century AD and with the imperial will for an administrative reorganization of Italy and its landholdings following the dramatic and devastating Greek-Gothic wars.