Exemptio in medieval Hungary and Transylvania, 1100–1400: the three studies compared

This study sets side by side the three corpus studies of exemptio in medieval Hungary: the Árpád-age kingdom (515 of 10,893 charters, 4.7%), the Angevin kingdom (473 of 33,877, 1.4%) and Transylvania (274 of 9,991, 2.7%). Read within the editions that print the Latin, exemption is far more frequent before 1302 than after, in the kingdom and in Transylvania alike; the fourteenth-century regest series exaggerate the fall but do not make it. What is lifted changes more than how often: castle land, a fifth of the Árpád-age exemptions, gives way to taxes, dues and tolls, and the royal court replaces the castle as the place a privileged person answers. Everywhere the royal family's share of the grants falls and the places of authentication's rises, from 9% before 1302 to 15%. Exemption moves from grant to 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 The study has not been peer reviewed.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.