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Procuratores e advocati nei documenti di Tomasino de Savere, notaio di Ragusa

Development of the written legal culture on the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea in late antiquity followed general lines of development as it happened in the neighbouring cities on the Apennine Peninsula. However, sometime around 8th century a break in that development happened, mostly due to the influx of Slavic peoples from the East whose legal culture was still mainly oral. There is some scarce evidence of notary documents from the 11th century, but not before the middle of the 12th century and onwards did notaries and their documents become a continuous and an indispensable part of legal life on the Eastern Adriatic. Similarly as elsewhere, development and spread of the written legal culture led by notaries happened mostly in urban centres and in the beginning was associated with the Catholic Church and the clergy. Being a scarce and an exclusive part of the population that was literate and educated, priests, deacons, etc. were the only ones able to perform duties of notaries. Situation in Ragusa, first a communitas and later a maritime republic and arguably the most developed city on the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea, followed those same lines of development. However, a change (for the better) in that development happened when local government in Ragusa invited Tomasino de Savere to perform duties of notarius and scriba (cancellarius) in 1277 or 1278. Around that time commercial activities of the city flourished, and communication with the centres of legal and economic development on the Apennine Peninsula, as well as with trading outposts in the hinterland, were very intense. In addition, local statute from 1275 provided that every transaction above a certain value (10 yperperi) had to be accompanied by a document drawn up by a notary. Apparently, services of the local clergy could not follow the demand satisfactorily, and a highly educated (Tomasino de Savere is titled magister in the sources) layman had to be called in from northern Italy. Tomasino de Savere is remarkable not only for being the first lay and highly educated notary in Ragusa, but also for being a very meticulous and conscientious professional. He left behind a very detailed and systematic collection of his documents, which led some authors to consider him the founder of the Ragusan archives. Those documents represent a highly valuable insight into legal and economic life of the late 13th century Ragusa, which may be considered a turning point in its development and an introduction into further progress of the 14th century. However, they are also an indispensable tool to determine the level of the transmission of the more sophisticated legal concepts and a more developed written legal culture from the centres of legal learning in northern Italy into more peripheral areas, such as the Eastern Adriatic. The aim of this paper is to analyse the mentioned transmission through the study of the procuratores and advocati in the documents of Tomasino de Savere. Generally, procuratores and advocati existed in different periods of Roman law and their role throughout centuries differed. Their functions assumed the final form in post-classical Roman law and in Justinian’s codification in the 6th century. In that form the main function of a procurator was to act in the stead of another person, which included representation in procedure. On the other hand, the main role of an advocatus was to provide professional legal help. Although it was not rare that someone’s advocatus was concurrently the same person’s procurator, generally they were considered disparate professions, with specialised professional associations, different social background and education, etc. The separation of their functions was retained in the medieval treatment of the Justinianic sources, which led to a continued differentiation of their functions and role on a theoretical and regulatory level (especially in ordines iudiciarii of the Romano-canonical procedure). While in some more complex legal systems this division persisted, in others their functions were sometimes interchanged. Amongst the numerous documents that Tomasino de Savere left behind, a lot of them deal exactly with the problems of representation and agency, and refer explicitly to procuratores or advocati. Formulas that he used testify to their functions, corroborated by the descriptions of situations in which their services were used. A systematic and dogmatic analysis of this issue in the documents may serve a manifold purpose. It may help explain and determine the spread of academic and written legal culture from the centres to the periphery of the Mediterranean at the time on a particular example, and also highlight and explain the role of the notaries in that process. Thus, it may also be a contribution to the understanding of the development of notary services on the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea. In addition, it may provide an insight into the economic and legal life of the medieval city of Ragusa through the lenses of agency and representation in procedure as one of the principal means of functioning of economically developed societies. In that way, it may also indicate the level of this society’s acceptance of the highly developed legal concepts of Roman law and Roman legal tradition and economic circumstances that necessitated their application. Finally, it may help the understanding of the academic legal treatment of the functions of procuratores and advocati, as well as the nuances of the application of respective rules to all the diverse situations that arose in practice. Thus, it may also be a contribution to the issue of development of the role and functions of procuratores and advocati in the Roman legal tradition generally.

procuratores, advocati, Tomasino de Savere, notaio, diritto romano

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