Iudex in the Kingdom of Hungary, Transylvania and the Holy See, 1100-1400: the judge, the iudex nobilium, and the judicial office

The iudex (judge) in medieval Hungary designates three distinct institutions: the iudex nobilium (the county judge of the nobles), the iudex curiae regis (the royal court judge), and the iudex Saxonum (the Saxon city judge in Transylvania). This study traces iudex and iudicium across 5,993 Hungarian records (Arpad 1,742 of 11,148 = 15.6%; Angevin 4,251 of 33,882 = 12.5%), 1,158 Transylvanian records (11.6%), and 229 papal letters (4.0%). The dominant finding is the 44x growth of the iudex nobilium category from 9 Arpad to 392 Angevin records, reflecting the county court consolidation under Charles I. The 1325-1349 quarter-century (1,517 HU records) is the highest single-period total in this study series. 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 The study has not been peer reviewed.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.