This famous, perhaps all too famous, _Glossa ordinaria_ was a digest and, as it proved, a final one, of the glosses of his predecessors and contemporaries. He drew not only from their glosses, but also on their _Summae_ and other writings. He added a good deal of his own. Great as was the feat, the somewhat deadened talent of a compiler shows in the result, which flattened out the individual labours of so many jurists. It came at once into general use in the courts and outside of them; for it was a complete commentary on the Justinianean law, so compendious and convenient that there was no further need of the glosses of earlier men. This book marked the turning-point of the Bologna school, after which its productivity lessened. Its work was done: _Codex_, _Novels_, and above all the _Pandects_ were rescued from oblivion, and fully expounded, so far as the matter in them was still of interest. When the labours of the school had been conveniently heaped together in one huge _Glossa_, there was no vital inducement to do this work again. The school of the glossators was _functus officio_. Naturally with the lessening of the call, productivity diminished. Little was left to do save to gloss the glosses, an epigonic labour which would not attract men of talent. Moreover, treating the older glosses, instead of the original text, as the matter to be interpreted was unfavourable to progress in the understanding of the latter. Yet, for a little, the breath of life was still to stir in the school of the glossators. There was a man of fame, a humanist indeed, named Cino, whose beautiful tomb still draws the lover of things lovely to Pistoia. Cino was also a jurist, and it came to him to be the teacher of one whose name is second to none among the legists of the Middle Ages. This was Bartolus, born probably in the year 1314 at Sassoferrato in the duchy of Urbino. He was a scholar, learned in geometry and Hebrew, also a man of affairs. He taught the law at Pisa and Perugia, and in the last-named town he died in 1357, not yet forty-four years old. Bartolus wrote and compiled full commentaries on the entire _Corpus juris civilis_; and yet he produced no work differing in kind from works of his predecessors. Moreover, between him and the body of the law rose the great mass of gloss and comment already in existence, through which he did not always penetrate to the veritable _Corpus_. Yet his labours were inspired with the energy of a vigorous nature, and he put fresh thoughts into his commentaries.[398]