Excommunicatio: The Sentence of Excommunication in the Kingdom of Hungary, Transylvania and the Holy See, 1100–1400

Excommunicatio — the sentence of excommunication — is the canonical penalty that cuts a baptised Christian from the sacraments and from the community of the faithful. Its major form severs the offender from every act of Christian fellowship until absolution; the interdict, its companion sanction, suspends divine services over a territory. This study traces excommunicatio and interdicto in 324 charter records for Hungary and Transylvania and 2,982 for the papal curia, 1100–1400, from the archive of the Florilegium Reipublicae Christianae (corpus snapshot of 12 November 2026). The curial volume dwarfs every territorial count — it reflects the papal registers as the primary medium for issuing, confirming, appealing and lifting excommunication sentences across Latin Christendom — but the Hungarian corpus has a distinctive profile. Before 1300 it is dominated by the high-political confrontations: Innocent III's threat against Andrew II, Gregory IX's repeated sentences in the dispute over the Golden Bull's ecclesiastical clause (1231–1232), and legatine sanctions. After 1300 the balance shifts: 112 Hungarian records in 1300–1324 and 111 in 1325–1349, against 207 and 348 curial, with ecclesiastical issuers (117 records) slightly outnumbering the regal group (112) across the full period. The Angevin chancery's dense documentation and the network of Hungarian chapters and conventualia acting as places of authentication drive the 14th-century surge. The interdict in Hungary tracks excommunication closely, with 272 records across the period, rising steeply after 1300 (56 in 1300–1324, 68 in 1325–1349). 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.