Indulgențe acordate bisericilor parohiale ale coloniștilor sași din Transilvania secolelor XIV–XV

Indulgences are the product of the medieval devoutness. The abuses committed with their help in the early Modern Age led to their commercialization being banned by the Council of Trent. The present paper aims first to clarify the theory of indulgences in a historical context, and then to provide a brief analysis of the known indulgences granted to the Saxon churches in Transylvania in the 13th–15th centuries. Indulgences were born out of the need to document the performance of repentance by a monk or cleric in place of the sinner who, because of the large number of his sins and the necessary acts of penance, was unable to perform all the repentance personally. The one who took this task and burden upon himself in the form of officiating masses and saying prayers had to be compensated. In the early days of the indulgences, compensation took the form of monetary donations for the building and equipping of churches. Throughout the Middle Ages it was believed that a hierarch who had several clerics under him could offer more Masses for the performance of penance and the possibility of more sins being included in the process. With the so-called teaching of the thesaurus ecclesiae an unlimited fund of merits of Jesus Christ and the saints was established from which indulgences could be granted to sinners. The Pope has the right to administer the merits accumulated in this thesaurus. Satisfaction by the merits in the treasury and their monopolization through the church hierarchy laid the basis for subsequent abuses of indulgences. On Fundus Regius there were three kinds of indulgences: those granted for the construction and equipment of churches, those granted in the jubilee year 1400 – a common phenomenon of the Kingdom of Hungary – as well as those granted to the confraternities of clerics. The conclusions of this paper are that by consulting indulgences it is possible to follow the state of construction of churches and convents and by renewing them to observe that the local population really used this possibility to express their piety. The last indulgence granted on Fundus regius was issued in 1520. In conclusion, these were not the cause of the 1545 reform.