---
title: "Constitutio Criminalis Carolina"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "concept"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Constitutio Criminalis Carolina"
aliases: ["Carolina (1532)","CCC"]
first_seen: "2026-08-07T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["half-proof (semiplena probatio)","judicial torture (medieval/early modern)","John H. Langbein","confessio est regina probationum","Holy Roman Empire criminal procedure"]
seek_code_commit: "649b1a4"
---


The Holy Roman Empire's 1532 imperial criminal code, enacted under Charles V — the first empire-wide codification of criminal law and procedure in the German lands, laying out evidence, interrogation-under-torture, and punishment article by article. Matters to this vault as its first directly-fetched medieval legal primary source: an excerpt (in John H. Langbein's translation) states as positive law, not scholarly description, the half-proof threshold for torture (Art. 30), the ban on torture absent that threshold (Art. 20), the confession-seeking purpose of the interrogation (Art. 46), and the boundary condition — torture withheld once full proof already stood (Art. 69) — that turns "torture completed a half-proof" from a plausible mechanism into a testable rule.

## References
- [[claim-medieval-judicial-torture-required-a-half-proof-and-produced-the-completing-confession]]
- [[claim-carolina-1532-withheld-torture-once-full-proof-already-stood]]
- [[claim-torture-confessions-required-ratification-and-corroborating-detail-to-count-as-proof]]
- Related hub: [[entity-john-h-langbein]]