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Biography

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Monaldus Iustinopolitanus, also known in Italian as Monaldo da Capodistria, was a Franciscan friar and canonist of the thirteenth century. His Latin epithet indicates origin from Justinopolis, the medieval name of the Istrian city later called Capodistria and now Koper. Almost nothing can be established about his family, the year of his birth, or the circumstances of his entry into the Order of Friars Minor. By the middle of the thirteenth century that order had become a major participant in the schools and pastoral life of the Latin Church, and Monaldus belongs to the generation of Franciscan lectors and practical jurists who sought to make the growing body of papal and conciliar law usable by ordinary clergy.

He is known almost exclusively as the author of the Summa de iure canonico, commonly called the Summa Monaldina. The work is a handbook of canon law compiled for confessors and pastors rather than a speculative treatise. Unlike many contemporary summae that followed the order of Gratian’s Decretum or of the Gregorian decretals, Monaldus arranged his material alphabetically by topic, a practical device that made consultation easier. The compilation draws on Gratian, the Liber Extra of Gregory IX, and other standard sources of thirteenth-century ecclesiastical law. Internal evidence, including the authorities cited and those apparently not yet available to the author, has led specialists to place the composition in the third quarter of the thirteenth century, around the 1270s, though a precise year cannot be fixed from surviving testimony.

The Summa circulated widely in manuscript and remained in use into the later Middle Ages; it was among the legal manuals printed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Its popularity reflects the pastoral needs of an age in which parish clergy and itinerant friars required compact, searchable guides to marriage, penance, benefices, and other frequently encountered legal questions. Monaldus himself does not appear in the records as a bishop, university master of the first rank, or holder of a major curial office. No contemporary vita, necrology with a firm date, or reliable account of his death has come down, and the place of his death and burial are unknown.

There is no verified evidence that Monaldus Iustinopolitanus was ever the object of an official cult, canonization, or beatification, nor is a feast day attached to him in the principal martyrologies. Historical knowledge of the man therefore remains limited to his Istrian origin, his membership in the Franciscan order, and the character and transmission of his alphabetical summa. He stands as a representative, if personally obscure, figure of Franciscan contribution to the practical canon law of the high Middle Ages.

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