Inquisitio in the Kingdom of Hungary and Transylvania, 1100–1400: a corpus study

Examines inquisitio — the royal inquest — in 1,039 records across 11,148 Árpád, 33,882 Angevin, and 9,986 Transylvanian charters. The rate is the most stable of all concepts studied: 1.8–1.9% across all scopes, reflecting the inquisitio's constitutional character as a procedural requirement for investiture. Béla IV (2.3%) and Charles I (2.8%) mark the institutionalisation peaks; Transylvania shows a late peak under Louis I (2.5%), confirming the inquisitio procedure reached Transylvania a generation after the kingdom. 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 The study has not been peer reviewed.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.