The Carta de Logu was a

legal code A code of law, also called a law code or legal code, is a systematic collection of statutes. It is a type of legislation that purports to exhaustively cover a complete system of laws or a particular area of law as it existed at the time the co ...

of the Judicate of Arborea, written in the

Sardinian language Sardinian or Sard ( , , , , or , ) is a Romance languages, Romance language spoken by the Sardinians on the Western Mediterranean island of Sardinia. The original character of the Sardinian language among the Romance idioms has long been know ...

and promulgated by the Eleanor of Arborea in 1392. It was in force in

Sardinia Sardinia ( ; ; ) is the Mediterranean islands#By area, second-largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, after Sicily, and one of the Regions of Italy, twenty regions of Italy. It is located west of the Italian Peninsula, north of Tunisia an ...

until it was superseded by the code of King Charles Felix in April 1827. The Carta was a work of great importance in Sardinian history and in European Juridic history as a whole. It was an organic, coherent, and systematic work of legislation encompassing the civil and penal law. The history of the drafting of the Carta is unknown, but the Carta itself provides an excellent glimpse into the ethnological and

linguistic Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

situation of late medieval Sardinia. In the Carta there is the modernizing of certain norms and the juridical wisdom that contains elements of the Roman-canonical tradition, the Byzantine one, the Bolognese jurisprudence and the thought of the

glossator The scholars of the 11th- and 12th-century legal schools in Italy, France and Germany are identified as glossators in a specific sense. They studied Roman law based on the '' Digesta'', the ''Codex'' of Justinian, the ''Authenticum'' (an abridged ...

s of the Catalan court culture, but above all the local juridical elaboration of the Sardinian customs made by Sardinian municipal law.Raimondo Carta Raspi, ''Mariano IV of Arborea'', Il Nuraghe, Cagliari 1934. Raimondo Carta Raspi, ''History of Sardinia'', Mursia, Milan 1981. One notable provision of the Code is that it gave daughters and sons the same inheritance rights. As well, it also declared that rape could be recompensed through marriage only if the woman who was raped agreed to marry her rapist, and even if she did the Code declared that the rapist still had to either pay a large fine to the Senate or have his foot cut off (his choice). If she did not agree to marry him, he had to give her a dowry that suited her social status, so that she could marry someone else, and he still had to either pay a large fine to the Senate or have his foot cut off (his choice). As well, these punishments were not affected by whether or not the woman in question was betrothed. The Code also caused Eleanor of Arborea to be remembered as one of the first lawmakers to set up the condition of reciprocity when dealing with foreigners, as well as the crime of misfeasance.

Sources

Bibliography

*Birocchi, I. and Mattone A. ''La carta de logu d'Arborea nella storia del diritto medievale e moderno''. Laterza: 2004.

External links

Text at Istar, Arborean Historic Center
Legal codes History of Sardinia {{Italy-hist-stub