The power to issue "lettres de cachet" was a royal privilege recognized by the French monarchic civil law that developed during the 13th century, as the Capetian monarchy overcame its initial distrust of Roman law. The principle can be traced to a maxim which furnished a text of the "Pandects" of Justinian: in their Latin version, ""Rex solutus est a legibus"", or "The king is released from the laws." "The French legal scholars interpreted the imperial office of the Justinian code in a generic way and arrived at the conclusion that every 'king is an emperor in his own kingdom,' that is, he possesses the prerogatives of legal absolutism that the "Corpus Juris Civilis" attributes to the Roman emperor."