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

This study asks what metae and the boundary-walking procedure (reambulatio metarum) meant in the charters of the Kingdom of Hungary and Transylvania across 1100–1400. It reads 11,148 Arpad-age charters (1100–1301), 33,882 Angevin charters (1302–1400), and 9,986 Transylvanian charters (1100–1400), finding 14,519 records that contain the boundary-marking vocabulary: 2,684 Arpad (24.1%), 8,801 Angevin (26.0%), and 3,034 Transylvanian (30.4%). The study traces the development of the boundary clause (clausula metalis) from an occasional element in early twelfth-century grants to the standard feature of Angevin investiture diplomas, identifies the formula metasque antiquas renovando vel novas erigendo as the dominant Angevin pattern, and distinguishes the Transylvanian corpus's mix of royal, Saxon, Szekely, and ecclesiastical boundary-marking from the kingdom's royal-chancery practice. 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 The study has not been peer reviewed.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.