Judicial Organization and the Sources of Decision-Making in Sixteenth-Century Transylvania

Abstract

The paper describes the organization of the independent Transylvanian central court of law, the so-called Royal/Voivodal/Princely Table (Tabula) and its court of appeal, the court of personal presence (personalis presentia), in the light of the modest secondary literature, dietary decisions, and archival sources. Manuscript and published sources of law referred to in the course of litigation in the Transylvanian Royal/Voivodal/Princely Table (Tabula, Curia) in the second half of the sixteenth century are also presented. Based on the analysed archival sources—mainly the various allegationes lawyers made—it may be concluded that different sources provided the grounds that were frequently given for the court decisions. The analysis of available sources shows that, besides the Tripartitum, which was mostly referred to, during the litigations lawyers generally used the laws of the Hungarian Kingdom, and that the Decreta of the Transylvanian diets and the Table judged some cases according to their own custom.