Rady, Martyn and Simon, Alexandru (eds) Government and Law in Medieval Moldavia, Transylvania and Wallachia (review)

Abstract

SEER, 93, 4, OCTOBER 2015 754 published via the online journal, KinoKultura (as is the case with Meghan Vicks’s piece on Andrei Zviagintsev’s The Return) is also questionable, given that this is easily accessible to students all over the world via the Internet. These observations notwithstanding, undergraduate students of Russian cinema will no doubt find the Readers useful, and the books also have much to offer the general reader, not least the fact that they situate the films they discuss firmly within the specific socio-ideological and cultural contexts from which they emerged. UCL SSEES Rachel Morley Rady, Martyn and Simon, Alexandru (eds). Government and Law in Medieval Moldavia, Transylvania and Wallachia. SSEES Studies in Russia and Eastern Europe, 11. UCL SSEES, London, 2013. ix + 125 pp. Tables. Notes. Further reading. Index. £20.00 (paperback). Government and Law in Medieval Moldavia, Transylvania and Wallachia, the volume edited by Martyn Rady and Simon Alexandru, fills a gap in the existing English-language bibliography on the legal history of medieval Transylvania, Wallachia and Moldavia. It is an important and welcome contribution to Central-East European medieval historiography on law and custom, featuring a number of strong, insightful essays (in particular those by Mariana Goina, Adrian Magina and Tudor Sălăgean). The volume also makes available in English the latest research in the field and promotes the work of young academics, thus building academic bridges between local historians and Western academics and research students. Although there are fewer contributions on Moldavia and Wallachia than on Transylvania, this however reflects the book’s origins as a conference proceedings volume (the International Medieval Congress, Leeds, 2012) and can only serve as an incentive for further research and publication. The excellent editorship of the volume makes it a pleasure to read. The volume kicks off with Romulus-Gelu Fodor’s contribution on ‘Constitutional Thought and Institutions in Medieval Transylvania’, which stresses the influence of Werbőczy’s Tripartitum on Transylvanian law and institutions as well as its distinct status among the lands belonging to the Hungarian Crown. Fodor presents the tug-of-war between king and estates, which resulted in the sixteenth-century creation of an independent principality of Transylvania, thus transposing Werbőczy’s notion of a noble republic onto Transylvania. The second contribution, authored by Tudor Sălăgean, explores this theme further by focusing on the Transylvanian congregatio nobilium REVIEWS 755 and its role as a legal community at the end of the thirteenth century. The author cogently explains the ambiguity implicit in the notion of regnum Transilvanum, which has been divergently interpreted by Romanian and Hungarian historians. Thus, the emergence of a congregatio of nobles in Transylvania ‘gave the title of regnum a new meaning, in the sense of a “legal country”, a juridical community with its own privileges and the right of collective self-government’. The next three contributions on Transylvania shift the focus of analysis from sources of law and authority to interactions between these and ordinary people. Florin Nicolae Ardelean provides an in-depth survey of military recruitment in Transylvania within a legal framework in which royal decrees were often overturned by customary law. Liviu Cîmpeanu explains the process of colonization, the fiscal and military obligations of the Transylvanian Saxons and the nature of their privileges. Oana Toda describes in detail the road infrastructure of northern Transylvania and places it in the context of property and legal relations, contrasting the royal interest in commercial routes and the salt trade with the reality on the ground of illegal tolls and other abuses. Adrian and Livia Magina cover the territory of what in later centuries would become the Banat of Temesvár. Adrian Magina thus looks at the intricacies of the ius valachicum in the Hungarian Kingdom and its relationship with written law, concluding that, ‘having its roots in both the Romano-Byzantine legal tradition and influenced by the Hungarian customary law, the ius valachicum demonstrates a self-generating and pragmatic form of law, as well as one that borrowed from larger legal traditions’. Livia Magina maps the changes undergone by the environment in the medieval and early modern Banat under the impact of water technology (mills...