Ius Patronatus: The Right of Patronage in Hungary and the Holy See, 1100–1400

The ius patronatus — the right of patronage — is the bundle of rights held by the founder or endower of a church: to present a candidate to the bishop, to receive certain liturgical honours, and to claim support from the benefice in need. Regulated by Gratian (C.16), systematised in Gregory IX's Decretals (X 3.38, De iure patronatus) and interpreted by Hostiensis in the Summa Aurea, it was the central legal institution mediating between local founders and the bishop's power of collation throughout the medieval Latin church. This study traces the concept in 318 charter records for Hungary and Transylvania and 545 for the papal curia, 1100–1400, from the archive of the Florilegium Reipublicae Christianae (corpus snapshot of 12 November 2026). In Hungary the ius patronatus carries a constitutional weight it has nowhere else in the Latin West: Stephen I's foundation of the Hungarian church gave the Apostolic King a supreme patronage (ius supremi patronatus regis Hungariae) over all major benefices, invoked continuously against Avignon provisions from the 1310s to the 1380s. The corpus shows a double movement. The curial peak runs from 1175 to 1274 (417 papal records against 53 from Hungary), when canon lawyers were debating the limits of the patron's right against episcopal and papal authority; after 1300 the balance shifts decisively: 355 Hungarian records in 1300–1399 against only 183 curial, with the regal auth_group accounting for 178 of the Hungarian records (56%). The Angevin kings — Charles I (1308–1342) and Louis I (1342–1382) — are the chief royal issuers; their chancery's consistent invocation of the supreme patronage against repeated Avignon reservations is the dominant story of the later fourteenth century. 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.