The Voivode (vaivoda) of Transylvania in the Charter Corpus, 1100-1400

The vaivoda Transsilvaniae (voivode of Transylvania) was the king's appointed governor of the entire Transylvanian province, with combined military, judicial and administrative powers. This study traces the office across 370 Hungarian records (Árpád period 1100-1301: 47; Angevin period 1302-1400: 323) and 418 Transylvanian records. The corpus shows a clear functional shift: military command dominates the Árpád period (17 of 47 HU records, 36%), while judicial and administrative documentation expands under Charles I (122 HU records) and Louis I (141). The 1291 Privilege of Andrew III and the 1366 Decree of Louis I at Turda mark the constitutional high points of the office. 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 The study has not been peer reviewed.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.