a national German criminal code compiled in 1532.
The Carolina was named after Emperor Charles V. In addition to German customary law, in particular the penal code of Bamberg of 1507, the sources used by the compilers of the Carolina were statutes borrowed from Roman law and several Italian legal forms. Striving to unify German law, the code took into consideration the particularist tendencies of the various German lands. Its significance as a national German code was reduced by the qualification that the age-old, inherited, and lawful customs, that is, the privileges of the princes and feudal estates, were to be preserved.
Like the “bloody legislation” in Great Britain, which allowed the persecution of the peasant paupers, the Carolina was harsh toward the poor: malicious vagrants, it said, “should be executed as soon as they are taken to prison regardless of whether they have committed any other deed” (Karolina, Alma-Ata, 1967, pp. 191–92). Legal procedures made up the basic content of the Carolina. The code also defined a broad range of punishable deeds, including state, religious, and purely criminal offenses. It defined such concepts of criminal law as complicity, attempted murder, and aiding and abetting.
Published seven years after the Peasants’ War in Germany, the Carolina placed almost unlimited severity at the basis of criminal justice. For state, religious, property, and many other crimes, it provided for burning at the stake, quartering, breaking on the wheel, hanging, drowning, burying alive, dragging to the place of execution, torture with red-hot tongs, and the cutting off of hands, among other punishments. Judicial discretion was not restricted in any essential way. Questioning under torture was recognized as the normal form of investigation
The Carolina exerted a great influence on German particularist legislation: in some areas it simply was reissued as the locally valid law; in others, it was supplemented and revised. The code was in effect until the end of the 18th century.
Z. M. CHERNILOVSKII