From the twelfth to the eighteenth century, Justinian law and canon law were the two pillars of the European legal system, flanked by the Iura Propria.
In the second half of the seventeenth century, a true revolution in the field of law takes place: De Luca, author of the monumental treatise Theatrum veritatis et iustitiae, publishes in 1673 Il dottor volgare, using for the first time the vernacular in place of Latin as the language of the legal science. The vernacular thus becomes a fundamental instrument for the dissemination of the law.
From the sixteenth century, thanks both to public and private initiative, several collections of legal acts issued by the different kings, are compiled with the purpose of reordering an increasingly confusing, dispersed and cumbersome legal system.
Even when they bear the title of "code", such works have nothing in common with the code in the modern sense, or with organic legal systems. They are simple consolidations, collections of acts of law that, while trying to systematize the subject treated, they do not exhaust the discipline and indeed have shortcomings that make it necessary to resort to other sources of law, such as the Corpus Iuris Civilis.
Only at the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the Napoleonic Code, the first collections of laws drafted in an organic and comprehensive manner and dedicated to the individual branches of law (civil, criminal, commercial, etc.) are published and are therefore able to embrace each discipline in its completeness and complexity without the need for integration with external sources.
With the Napoleonic Code, adopted by the vast majority of the European countries, the system of competing sources that had characterised European law for seven centuries eventually collapses.
