The Charter of Budva – a source of the urban law of medieval Europe

Abstract

The article is devoted to highlighting the sources of codification and analysis of the content of the Charter of Budva – a town located on the shores of the Adriatic Sea. It is emphasized that this Statute was created under the noticeable influence of Venetian law. That is why its content is quite similar to the charters of other Montenegrin towns that were part of the Stato da Mar – one of the possessions of the Venetian Republic, primarily located near the town of Kotor. Certain similarities of the Budva Charter can also be found by comparing it with the charters of cities subordinate to the medieval Genoese Republic, in particular those located on the territory of modern Ukraine.
 It is shown that the text of the Charter, as it has reached our time, was written during the reign of the Serbian king Stefan Uroš IV Dušan in the 14th century. Just like other charters of medieval cities on the southern coast of the Adriatic, the oldest version of the Charter of Budva was written in medieval Latin. This original has not survived to our time, but it was used during the translation into Italian in the 15th century, after Budva came under the rule of Venice (since 1442). Several transcripts have been made from this Italian translation. Six of them have survived to our time.
 It was noted that the Statute of Budva was a complex codification act, which was the result of long-term work and was a collection of norms of state, administrative, civil, criminal and procedural law. Its appearance was preceded by long work on the systematization and generalization of the norms of customary law, the norms of statutes issued by city authorities and state authorities, which included urban lands in one or another period, in particular, the norms of Venetian law, the norms of canon law, and taking into account judicial practice. It is noticeable that during the codification of the Charter of Budva, legal customs were widely used, as well as previous legal norms originating from the bodies of city administration (self-government). Source-based criticism of the Statute provides an opportunity to conclude that over time the law of Budva becomes noticeably more complicated and acquires more and more distinct specific features inherent in the local legal system.