 Interest in the doctrines of Byzantine lawyers came when—around the year 1070—a copy of the "Digest" of Emperor Justinian I found its way into northern Italy.Scholars in the emerging University of Bologna, who previously had access to only a limited portion of the Justinianic code, sparked an intellectual rediscovery of Roman law through the teaching of law based on Byzantine law texts.Courts gradually applied Byzantine law—as taught in Bologna (and soon elsewhere)—first as law "in subsidium" to be applied when there was no local statute or custom in point, and later because judicial officers (judges, magistrates, assessors) felt that its refined legal concepts were more apt to solve complex cases than the customary laws of western and central Europe.