The name is absent

Lawyers and Church in Renaissance 141
flocked from all parts of Italy and from the north to the great
universities where a tradition of legal instruction had existed
from the beginning. At Bologna, at Padua, at Pavia, at the
University of Pisa, reconstituted after 1472, the lawyers en-
joyed the greatest position and had by far the largest num-
ber of followers. To take but one example from the Univer-
sity of Pisa, in the official rolls of the university we find that
from 1472 until 1525 there were but thirteen appointments
in theology whereas there were over three hundred appoint-
ments to Iectirreships in the canon law and still more in the
civil law. The effort to secure the services of the most emi-
nent professors of civil and canon law became even more
intense than it had been in the preceding period. We find the
Republic of Florence intervening, for example, to prevent
Bartolommeo Sozzini from leaving the University of Pisa to
accept an appointment at Padua under the authority of
Venice. In the first decade of the sixteenth century Filippo
Decio became an object of contention not only between the
Italian powers but also between the King of France and the
Republic of Venice. The French king was willing to risk a
diplomatic incident with Venice in order to get the services
of Decio. Furthermore the great figures in the profession
were paid sums altogether out of proportion to what was
earned by anyone else in academic life. Thus Filippo Decio’s
salary rose to the unheard-of figure of one thousand florins
annually in order to retain his services at Florence against
invitations from Venice and Milan. His prestige derived in
part from the fact that a legal education was regarded as a
practical necessity for anyone who aspired to have a career in
the affairs of Church or State, whether or not he hoped to
become a practising lawyer. When the son of Lorenzo di
Medici had become a Cardinal, his father was advised to

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