Chapter L’impero, le libertates e la libertà

Abstract

The author analyzes mature medieval legal thought to highlight, around normative and jurisdictional freedoms, the affirmation of both a doctrine and a practice of the freedom to rule (of the potestas condendi statute) of which the empire constituted the sovereign guarantee of an order anchored to the idea of ​​iurisdictio and the exercise of justice; the "pathologies" of power - the tyrannical degeneration or the evanescence of imperial authority - were therefore included in a Bartolo da Sassoferrato or in a Dante Alighieri (in his treatise on the empire) in the context of a vindication of the public character of freedom as a supreme legal good.