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

This study examines arbitrium — arbitration and the arbitral award — in the charters of the Kingdom of Hungary and Transylvania across 1100–1400. It reads 11,148 Árpád-age, 33,882 Angevin, and 9,986 Transylvanian charters, finding 2,090 arbitrium records: 711 Árpád (6.4%), 1,029 Angevin (3.0%), and 350 Transylvanian (3.5%). The CORE pattern captures both formal arbitration (arbiter, compromissum) and the common formula ad arbitrium (at the discretion of), inflating the Árpád rate. The compromissum form (166 records) identifies genuinely formal arbitration. Béla IV Transylvania (12.4%) is the series' highest sub-period Transylvanian rate. 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 The study has not been peer reviewed.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.