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

Examines sententia — the judicial sentence — in 2,121 records across 11,148 Árpád, 33,882 Angevin, and 9,986 Transylvanian charters. The pope is the dominant Árpád issuer (22.3%), reflecting canonical sentences (excommunication, interdict) in the early corpus; this share falls to 9.3% in the Angevin period. The Árpád rate declines from 11.2% (Andrew II) to 4.8% (Andrew III), inverting the capitulum trend. Transylvania (2.6%) shows a flat by-reign distribution, with the voivode as primary sentencing authority. 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 The study has not been peer reviewed.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.