The Church had long had its own courts and its own law; but the victory of the Hildebrandine system gave a new importance to the Courts Christian and to the Canon Law which they upheld. It was the aim of the Church reformers to draw a hard and fast line between Church and State, and to bind together the scattered and often antagonistic corporations, out of which the Church was constituted, into a single self-governing, self-sufficing, independent body, of which the Pope was the absolute monarch. All through the eleventh century efforts were made by leading ecclesiastical lawyers to do for the law of the Church what was already being done for the law of the State. Italy witnessed most of these attempts, but the canonists of Germany and Gaul were not behindhand, and the most famous of the early compilations, which appeared in 1115, was the work of a north-French churchman, Ivo, Bishop of Chartres, a pupil of Lanfranc of Bec. But these preliminary efforts were superseded by the _Decretum_, or more accurately the _Concordantia discordantium Canonum_, of Gratian, which probably appeared in 1142. Gratian was a monk of the new order of Camaldoli, living in a convent at Bologna. The book which he published was a text-book, the effort of a private student, with no other authority than what it could command from its own merits. But its merits were such that it swept all its predecessors out of the field, and soon won something of the authority that belonged to a definite codification of previous ecclesiastical jurisprudence. It appeared at the right place and at the right moment. From that time onwards the study of Canon Law stood side by side with that of the Civil Law at Bologna, and the town of Irnerius and Gratian became the intellectual centre of the great controversies of Church and State, which then distracted Europe. Before long the Canon Law became as elaborate and comprehensive a system as that Civil Law, which it copied, developed and sometimes reacted against. The canonists became a band of specialists, separated from the civilians on the one hand and the theologians on the other. Just as the practical advantages of the study of Civil Law called away the votaries of the unprofitable secular study of literature, so did the practical uses of Canon Law divert active and ambitious churchmen from the academic study of theology. Law became the attractive science as well for ardent ecclesiastics as for men of the world. If it involved less speculative activity than the studies it superseded, it had the advantage of helping to bridge over the gulf between the little world of isolated students and the broad world of everyday life. As the revival of dialectic renewed men’s interests in abstract science, so did the revival of law broaden men’s practical interests. If in the long-run it gave weapons to Empire as well as to Papacy, the first result was to complete the equipment of the hierarchy for the business of ruling the world.