Most medieval charters that were preserved in the territory of medieval Hungary concern estates and deal with issues connected to possession rights. This is also true for charters of monastic institutions. As there is no medieval institution whose archive survived completely, writing the history of the orders in Hungary has always been in a way one-sided, researchers dealt much more with secular issues than with spiritual. But, as one of the charters quoted the canon law on monastic orders, “the spiritual cannot be maintained without the temporal” (MNL OL DL 16912), and the economy and management of the various orders were certainly intimately intertwined their spirituality.
The present volume is the result of extensive research. Studying the history of the religious orders in medieval Hungary made it abundantly clear that surviving sources about the Paulines offer an exceptionally good range of materials to analyse monastic estate structure and management. On the one hand, a relatively large number of charters have been preserved; on the other hand, their interpretation is facilitated by two early modern sources: the historical work Vitae fratrum of the prior general, Gregorius Gyöngyösi, and the Formularium maius used under the rule of his successor, Valentine Hadnagy. Thirdly, the order’s centralized organization allows the underlying assumption that the estates and the management of individual monasteries fit into a coherent system and thus can be used to contribute to our understanding of the whole.
At the same time, the limitations of the work are also obvious: despite their relative abundance, the archives of the monasteries are incomplete, the distribution of sources is uneven. Furthermore, the comparable evidence from Hungary, i.e. the analysis of the economy of other orders, has only been partially completed, and Western European parallels should be used with caution because of the different social and economic environment. Thus, my primary aim is to analyse the available sources concerning Pauline economy and to refer to similar phenomena in Hungary and Western Europe where possible.
I wish to express my gratitude to all those who helped my work. First, Professor András Kubinyi, who supported me from the beginning and reviewed the first versions of the text. I also thank the kindness of József Laszlovszky, Gábor Sarbak, László Solymosi and István Tringli who were always keen to offer their helpful advice at various stages of the analyses and called my attention to new data. Last, but not least, I am grateful for Zsuzsanna Reed’s help in proof-reading the English text, and to my daughter Réka Fülöpp for the drawings. Besides them, many colleagues in Hungary and abroad, whom I cannot list by name in a short preface, shared valuable information with me, read parts of the text, and corrected mistakes.