In Perpetuum: The Perpetual Grant in Medieval Hungary and Transylvania, 1100–1400

This study traces the language of perpetual holding in about 20,000 Latin charters from the Kingdom of Hungary, Slavonia and Transylvania between 1100 and 1400, and places it against Roman and canon law. A clause of perpetual holding rises from about two in five surviving grants and sales before 1205 to about seven in ten by the 1310s, then falls to under half by the 1380s, far more sharply in Transylvania. The words also changed meaning. Roman perpetuity depended on rent and did not make the holder owner, and in canon law a perpetual grant was an alienation that could be void. In Hungary perpetuitas became, around 1230, the name of grants under revocation, and ended as a word for a form of ownership. Hostiensis offers the closest learned parallel, but no direct influence can be shown. This study counts and reads the language of perpetual holding in a large body of edited medieval documents. It was prepared with AI assistance: the counts, tables, charts and maps were made by code from the author's archive, and the prose was drafted with an AI system (Claude, Anthropic). The author reviewed the Latin readings and translations. The counts depend on what the editions print and on OCR, and the classing of grants and sales was made by rule, 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 The study has not been peer reviewed.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.