Izvorni znanstveni članak
https://doi.org/10.21857/90836cw51y
Capital Punishment in the Gradec of Zagreb in the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century
Kristina Judaš
orcid.org/0000-0002-7168-9453
; Nacionalna i sveučilišna knjižnica, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Sažetak
In 1242, King Bela IV of Hungary-Croatia granted the charter known as the Golden Bull and proclaimed Gradec (Mons Grecensis), a small settlement situated on the hill adjacent to the seat of the Zagreb Diocese, a free royal city. As a consequence, Gradec soon developed into the most important urban settlement in medieval Slavonia and had an autonomous right to enact statutes, prosecute criminals and pass the death penalty. The Golden Bull also provided a basic framework for legal actions and described penalties for various crimes, including taking vengeance, i.e. the capital punishment for premeditated murders. However, legal records dating from the fourteenth and fifteenth century reveal that local authorities would not only impose the death sentence for crimes of premeditated murder, but also for other intolerable crimes such as infanticide, counterfeiting, sorcery and even some committed against the property and sexual morality. In this paper, he author examines practices of the imposition and implementation of the capital punishment in late medieval Gradec, based on the analysis of trials performed from 1451 to 1500. Thirty-one out of 62 analyzed trials were concluded with the capital punishment of the convicted criminals. In other 5 trials convicted faced other sentence, but were warned that they will suffer death penalty in case of recidivism. The rest of the trials were concluded with the commuting or, although rarely, forgiving the death sentence. Our findings suggest that local Gradec authorities used various methods of the implementation and ceremonial of public execution, tightly linked to types of crimes. Since there is a number of instances in which a group of respectable people, always successfully, petitioned judicial authorities to have mercy on those sentenced to death and also a few when the authorities showed clemency themselves, it provides us with two new insights. The first one is into the level of influence which popular opinion exercised over legal practice and the second one is into both the community and the local authority’s attitude on what crimes and perpetrators could have deserved their mercy.
Ključne riječi
Zagreb; the Middle Ages; crime; capital punishment; penal law
Hrčak ID:
220243
URI
Datum izdavanja:
27.12.2018.
Posjeta: 2.449 *