This article aims to analyze the first criminal and procedural code of Latin Europe with a complete, systematic, abstract and dogmatically structured, Latin name by the Holy Roman Emperor Carlos V —Carolus— Constitutio Criminalis Carolina or, in short, Carolina. Some significant features of modernization, characteristic of the age of rebirth and, on the other hand, an enormous cultural difference due to the bestiality and irrationality of the penal law of early modernity will be discovered. It will begin with the theoreticalmethodological introduction. The second subchapter will focus on the relationship between criminal law and the consolidation of the judicial state of internal peace, in the third will deepen the beginnings of the state legislator who transferred the unchangeable celestial law to the human sphere on earth. Fourth, it will discuss the typified crimes and the system of penalties of the Carolina. The fifth section is devoted to the criminal inquisitorial process between magical thinking and procedural safeguards protected by the nullity claim. Sixth, the scope of the three centuries of Carolina will be discussed. In the seventh place, the Carolina will be contextualized in comparative perspective. In the eighth subchapter, we will analyze the not-so-bloody practice of jurisdictional lordships in neighbors’ trials, while the ninth will look at the dark side of witchcraft and erranticide processes. It follows the tenth paragraph on the origins of a kind of constitutional justice based on Carolina. Eleventh, we will ask for the reissue of the logic of the Carolina in the form of the Constitutio Criminalis Teresiana of 1768. Twelfth, the beginnings of the enlightened reform of criminal law at the end of the eighteenth century will be debated, to conclude with some conclusive considerations.