A barbarian king did what Rome couldn't: made conquerors and conquered equal under law. Gundobad's Lex Burgundionum at Lyon didn't just allow Gallo-Romans to keep their own courts—he abolished the legal distinction entirely. Burgundians and Romans faced identical punishments, paid identical fines, testified in the same trials. His nephew would later murder him, but the code survived for centuries. The "barbarian" invasion wasn't civilization's end—sometimes the invaders wrote better laws than the empire they replaced.
March 29, 502
1524 years ago
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