Book I

Compilation of the Decretals of Lord Pope Gregory IX

Book One

Rex pacificus

Gregory,

bishop, servant of the servants of God, to his beloved sons, all the doctors and scholars dwelling at Bologna: greeting and apostolic blessing.

The peace-making King, in his merciful compassion, has ordained that his subjects should be chaste, peaceable, and honorable. But unbridled cupidity, reckless of itself, the rival of peace, the mother of lawsuits, the material of quarrels, daily generates so many new disputes that, unless justice by its own power restrained its attempts and unraveled its entangled questions, the abuse of litigants would extinguish the law of human fellowship, and, a bill of divorce having been given, concord would be exiled beyond the bounds of the world.

Therefore law is promulgated so that harmful appetite may be confined beneath the rule of law, through which the human race is instructed to live honorably, not to injure another, and to render to each person his right.

Indeed, for the common benefit—and especially that of students—we have taken care, through our beloved son Brother Raymond, our chaplain and penitentiary, to have brought together into one volume, with superfluities cut away, the various constitutions and decretal letters of our predecessors that were dispersed among different volumes. Some of these seemed to introduce confusion because of their excessive similarity, some because of contradiction, and others because of their prolixity. Still others circulated outside the aforesaid volumes and, as though uncertain, frequently wavered in judicial proceedings. We have added our own constitutions and decretal letters, through which certain matters that were doubtful in the earlier ones are clarified.

Wishing, therefore, that everyone should use this compilation alone in judicial proceedings and in the schools, we strictly prohibit anyone from presuming to make another without the special authority of the Apostolic See.

Book One