Exemptio in Angevin Hungary, 1302–1400: a corpus study

This study follows exemptio into the Angevin kingdom (1302–1400) and asks whether the Árpád-age instrument declined and how it changed. Of 33,518 charters of the kingdom with Slavonia and Croatia, 464 free someone from a jurisdiction, a due or a service. The low overall share (1.4%) is largely an effect of the editions: the period's great regest series summarise charters without the clauses that carry exemptions (0.4%), while the charters whose Latin is printed give 3.0%. Even within Fejér and Smičiklas, however, the share is about half its Árpád-age level (Fejér from 10.4% to 5.5%, Smičiklas from 5.2% to 2.6%). The instrument also changes in kind: taxes and dues (115 charters) and tolls (47) lead, the chamber's profit appears by name, and castle land falls from 98 charters to 30. The places of authentication now issue 16% of exemptions, mostly copies of older grants, and towns double their share to 20%. Exemption becomes a matter of money, of the royal court and of proof. 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 The study has not been peer reviewed.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.