Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.21857/yk3jwhrvv9
The Zagreb Chamber in the Árpádian Period
Boglárka Weisz
orcid.org/0000-0003-3413-8772
; Institute of Historical Research, Centre for Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary
Abstract
In the early 1250s, a royal chamber for Slavonia was set up in Pucruch. It moved to Zagreb not later than 1259. The relatively abundant Slavonian sources tell us of three heads of this chamber in the second half of the thirteenth century: Perchinus, Marculinus and Ganus (Ganinus, John). All three of them had title of the counts of royal chamber, and all were connected to and served interests of the royal court. In the case of Perchinus, the king chose as the head of the royal chamber the mayor (potestas) of Zagreb. Marculinus was related to Perchinus and rendered various services to the kings. Ladislas IV granted Perchinus’ estates to him rather than to Stephen, Ban of Slavonia. Ganus was bound to the king through his service in the royal castle of Medvedgrad (Hung. Medvevár). The choice of the counts of the royal chamber – the same as the legend minted on coins (Moneta regis pro Sclavonia, Moneta ducis pro Sclavonia) – demonstrates, that the Zagreb chamber was a royal chamber in Árpádian age: the ban supervised the minting of coins as the agent of the king, a role equivalent to that of magister tavarnicorum in cases of other royal chambers.
The collecta, a crown tax gathered under the name of the “chamber’s profit” and linked to the minting of coins, had originally been an extraordinary tax that Duke Béla imposed in 1264 on the occasion of his marriage to Princess Kunigunda of Brandenburg. It was soon formalized as an annual tax of seven deniers and referred to as the seven-deniers collecta or “chamber’s collecta.” It was of the same value as a pondus, and in the sources, these two taxes are often difficult to distinguish. Chamber’s profit in Slavonia was royal revenue, and one tenth of it was due to the archbishop of Esztergom. In 1271, however, Stephen V granted the chamber’s profit on the lands beyond the Drava to Roland of the Rátót kindred, former ban of Slavonia, who kept possession of the tax until his death in 1277 at most; afterwards, the revenue again came into the royal treasury.
Keywords
Árpádian age; Zagreb chamber; chamber’s profit; count of the royal chamber; Perchinus; Marculinus; Ganus; Medvedgrad/Medvevár
Hrčak ID:
195435
URI
Publication date:
29.12.2017.
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