Leges Barbarorum
Leges Barbarorum ( barbarian laws , analogously laws of foreigners or laws of the uneducated ) are a collective term that is no longer used or used in research as a reminiscence for the Germanic legal records of the early Middle Ages. The Leges Barbarorum are mainly attributed to the Franconian period (approx. 500 - 888 AD). Although they continued to apply later, the applicable law was increasingly redesigned in the course of the High Middle Ages . After the beginning of the reception of the learned Roman law in Europe in the 13th century, the humanistic jurists coined this term, on the one hand because of the corrupt Latin leges barbarorum - in comparison with classical Roman legal texts, on the other hand because of the "primitiveness" of the Germanic legal culture compared to that of the to clarify the corpus iuris civilis of Justinian I rediscovered in the High Middle Ages and become authoritative .
The choice of the word barbaric was deliberately derogatory, as the Germanic tribes were viewed as the destroyers of the Roman Empire and ancient culture.