The King's Man and the King's Household Man in Medieval Hungary, 1100–1400
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This study traces two Latin phrases through the Hungarian royal chancery from the late twelfth century to the end of the fourteenth: homo regius, the king's man sent to execute a mandate, and familiaris regis, the king's household man. Using a corpus of 20,614 charters (8 November 2026 snapshot), it finds 993 officer charters and 85 household-man charters, with only 3 charters containing both phrases. The article traces the procedural roots of the homo regius in Roman mandate law and in canonist executor doctrine, reads the transition from the earlier pristaldus to the new officer through the 1290 coronation decree of Andrew III, and examines the peak of the formula's use under Charles I and Louis I (1301–82). It tests three questions: whether the two figures merged (they did not), whether the king's household men were outsiders (some were, most are unstated), and how the Hungarian raising formula compares with the English dust formula of Henry I's reign (structurally parallel, rhetorically different). 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 AI assistance: the searches, counts and first drafting were done by an AI system (Claude, Anthropic) working on the author's corpus, and every claim, count and reference was checked against the edition it cites and approved by the author 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, 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 The study has not been peer reviewed.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: W7225731189
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