Siete Partidas

The Siete Partidas was a comprehensive Castilian legal code commissioned by King Alfonso X of Castile and compiled between 1256 and 1265 by a commission of jurists working under his direction, blending Justinian Roman law, canon law and feudal law with some influence from Islamic legal tradition. Originally titled the Libro de las Leyes, the Book of Laws, it acquired its familiar name in the fourteenth century from its seven-part structure, each part beginning with a letter of Alfonso's own name. Its 182 titles, comprising several thousand individual laws in total, cover constitutional, civil, commercial, criminal and family law, and the work is regarded as the high point of the reception of Roman and canon legal tradition in medieval Spain. Its influence proved extraordinarily durable: the Partidas remained in force across much of Spanish America until the codification movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and its provisions shaped early law in former Spanish territories such as Louisiana and Texas.