page_title: Hungarian nobility
section_title: Age of the Angevins
hierarchical_section_title: Hungarian nobility / Middle Ages / Age of the Angevins
caption_attribution_description: Order of Saint George (Hungary)
context_page_description: The Hungarian nobility consisted of a privileged group of people, most of whom owned landed property, in the Kingdom of Hungary. Initially, a diverse category of people were mentioned as noblemen, but from the late 12th century only the high-ranking royal officials were regarded as noble. Most aristocrats claimed a late-9th-century Magyar leader for their ancestor; others were descended from foreign knights; and local Slavic chiefs were also integrated in the nobility. Less illustrious individuals, known as castle warriors, also held landed property and served in the royal army. Most privileged laymen called themselves royal servants to emphasize their direct contact to the monarchs from the 1170s. The Golden Bull of 1222 enacted their liberties, especially their tax-exemption and the limitation of their military obligations. From the 1220s, the royal servants were associated with the nobility and the highest-ranking officials were known as barons of the realm. Only those who owned allods – lands free of obligations – were regarded true noblemen, but other privileged groups of landowners, known as conditional nobles, also existed.
context_section_description: Ladislaus IV's great-nephew, Charles I, who was a scion of the Capetian House of Anjou, restored royal power in the 1310s and 1320s. He captured the oligarchs' castles, which again secured the preponderance of the royal demesne. He refuted to confirm the Golden Bull in 1318 and claimed that noblemen had to fight in his army at their own expenses. He ignored customary law and regularly "promoted a daughter to a son", granting her the right to inherit her father's estates. He reorganized the royal household, appointing pages and knights to form his permanent retinue. He established the Order of Saint George, which was the first chivalric order in Europe. He was the first Hungarian monarch to grant coats of arms (or rather crests) to his subjects. Charles based royal administration on honors (or office fiefs), distributing most counties and royal castles among his highest-ranking officials. These "baronies", as Matteo Villani recorded it around 1350, were "neither hereditary nor lifelong", but Charles rarely dismissed his most trusted barons. Each baron was required to hold his own banderium (or armed retinue), distinguished by his own banner.
  In 1351, Charles's son and successor, Louis I confirmed all provisions of the Golden Bull, save the one that authorized childless noblemen to freely will their estates. Instead, he introduced an entail system, prescribing that childless noblemen's landed property "should descend to their brothers, cousins and kinsmen". The concept of aviticitas also protected the Crown's interests: only kins within the third degree could inherit a nobleman's property and noblemen who had only more distant relatives could not dispose of their property without the king's consent. Louis I emphasized that all noblemen enjoyed "one and the selfsame liberty" in his realms and secured all privileges that nobles owned in Hungary proper to their Slavonian and Transylvanian peers. He rewarded dozens of Vlach knezes and voivodes with true nobility for military merits. The vast majority of the noble sons of servants achieved the status of true noblemen without a formal royal act, because the memory of their conditional landholding fell into oblivion. Most of them preferred Slavic names even in the 14th century, showing that they spoke the local Slavic vernacular. Other groups of conditional nobles remained distinguished from true noblemen. They developed their own institutions of self-government, known as seats or districts. Louis decreed that only Catholic noblemen and knezes could hold landed property in the district of Karánsebes (now Caransebeș in Romania) in 1366, but Orthodox landowners were not forced to convert to Catholicism in other territories of the kingdom. Even the Catholic bishop of Várad (now Oradea in Romania) authorized his Vlach voivodes to employ Orthodox priests. The king granted the district of Fogaras (around present-day Făgăraș in Romania) to Vladislav I of Wallachia in fief in 1366. In his new duchy, Vladislaus I donated estates to Wallachian boyars; their legal status was similar to the position of the knezes in other regions of Hungary.
  Royal charters customarily identified noblemen and landowners from the second half of the 14th century. A man who lived in his own house on his own estates was described as living "in the way of nobles", in contrast with those who did not own landed property and lived "in the way of peasants". A verdict of 1346 declared that a noble woman who was given in marriage to a commoner should receive her inheritance "in the form of an estate in order to preserve the nobility of the descendants born of the ignoble marriage". Her husband was also regarded noblemen – a noble by his wife – according to the local customs of certain counties.
  The peasants' legal position had been standardized in almost the entire kingdom by the 1350s. The iobagiones (or free peasant tenants) were to pay seigneurial taxes, but were rarely obliged to perform labour service. In 1351, the king ordered that the ninth – a tax payable to the landowners – was to be collected from all iobagion
caption: Insignia of the Order of Saint George
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