Exemptio in medieval Transylvania, 1100–1400: a corpus study
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This study asks what exemptio meant in Transylvania, governed by its own voivode within the kingdom of Hungary, from 1100 to 1400. Of 9,991 charters, 274 free someone from a jurisdiction, a due or a service. Transylvania follows the kingdom's course, with higher shares before 1302 (between 4.4% and 8.2% by reign) and lower after (1.8% to 3.3%); the Saxons' Urkundenbuch, which prints the Latin, finds 9.5%. Exemption here could confirm the liberties of a whole people: the Saxons' privileges free them from dues, from lodging the king and from army service, which is named in eleven Transylvanian exemptions against ten in the far larger Árpád-age kingdom. The voivode is both a judge one is freed from and a grantor (14 charters), and the places of authentication issue 15% of exemptions, much as in Angevin Hungary. The archive's record of the Andreanum (1224) must be mended before it can be counted as the Saxons' charter. This study is a corpus study: it counts and reads what a large body of edited medieval documents says about one concept, and sets that against modern scholarship. It was prepared with software and AI assistance. The counts, tables, charts and first draft were generated by a program (publisher.py) from the author's corpus, without a language model. The search rules, the concept's introductory paragraphs and the interpretive paragraphs were written with the help of an AI system (Claude, Anthropic), and a random sample of the matches was read in full to measure how many are true instances (section 2). The author read and approved the text before publication. Readings of the Latin marked as preliminary have not yet had a specialist's close reading. The counts depend on what the editions print and how their editors summarised it: editions are uneven by region and decade, modern summaries carry their editors' interpretations, and OCR may miss or misread words, so the numbers show proportions and trends, not totals. The study has not been peer reviewed. Corrections are welcome and will be published as new versions of this record.
Author: Safta, Mihai
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225591013