Ius Patronatus in the Latin West: Holy Roman Empire, France, England, 1100–1400

This study sets the archive's 1,294 comparison-region records for ius patronatus and its variants (Holy Roman Empire 1,244, England 59, France 31, Poland 5, Bohemia 0) beside the Hungarian baseline of study 8 (318 records) and asks whether the same documentary pattern — a curial peak in 1175–1274 followed by a surge of local documentation after 1300 — appears across the Latin West, or is specific to the Angevin kingdom. The answer is that the later surge is not universal: the HRE's volume is high throughout but its peak is 1325–1349 (262 records), coinciding with Hungary's strong period; England's modest contribution clusters in 1175–1249 (36 records) and vanishes after 1325; France contributes only 31 records across the whole period, clustered in 1225–1249 (17 records). The HRE's dominance of the comparison corpus (96% of distinct records) is the main structural fact: Germany's dense network of episcopal churches, cathedral chapters, and Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries, each with its own patronage history, produced the largest volume of patronage documentation in the Latin West outside the curia. The near-absence of Bohemia and Poland (0 and 5 records respectively) is a corpus-coverage question rather than a historical one; both regions had rich patronage practice but are only partially represented in the archive's current holdings. 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 The study has not been peer reviewed.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.