Roberto Sabatino Lopez (October 8, 1910 – July 6, 1986) was an Italian-born American historian of medieval European economic history.

[1] From 1942 to 1944 Lopez worked for Voice of America and in the Italian section of the Office of War Information in New York City.

There he met his future wife, Claude-Anne Kirschen, a wartime refugee from Belgium who had come to New York with her family in 1940.

[1] At Yale, in 1962 Lopez founded the interdisciplinary graduate program in Medieval Studies, and served as its chairman for many years.

[2] Lopez trained a number of distinguished medieval scholars, among them David Herlihy, Edward M. Peters,[3] and Patrick J. Geary.

He said it was first based in the Italo-Byzantine eastern Mediterranean, but eventually extended to the Italian city-states and through the rest of Europe.

He was affiliated with the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and his advice was sought on the tenure cases of Israeli medievalists.