engleski

Assaults on Clerics of the Diocese of Zagreb in the First Third of the Fifteenth Century

Physically attacking a member of the clergy was a serious crime in the Middle Ages, with the attacker usually being automatically excommunicated. Such a drastic act would also go against the established social order, as it would scandalize the community in which it occurred. Through studying the rare occurances of members of the clergy being deliberately assaulted, we can attempt to determine which motives drove the perpetrators to break the social order in such a fashion, what consequences followed such an act, and which members of the society were the most prone to committing it.The first third of the 15th century was a period of relative peace and prosperity for the Diocese of Zagreb, which was then under the rule of the Hungarian king (and later Holy Roman emperor) Sigismund and the bishops from the noble Alben family. However, this relative peace did not mean that there were no sudden acts of extreme violence, both on the individual and the collective level. The overall peacefulness of this era makes these acts stand out even more, and the lack of extreme circumstances, such as wars or large-scale raids, enables us to study the individual cases with greater clarity, as they could not have been obscured by everyday violence. It is also helpful that a large number of medieval documents from this diocese was preserved. I will attempt to determine whether these assaults would occur more often in the rural or urban areas of the diocese, what provoked them, were they performed by individuals or groups of perpetrators, and what punishments would follow them, if any. It will also be interesting to determine which courts would handle such cases, and which instruments were employed to punish the perpetrators and re-establish the social order. The latter elements are important because of the often international character of the processes against the attackers, as Catholic clerics were, as members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, subjects of the Roman pope, and therefore cases involving them would often end up at one of the papal courts. This both shows the unity of the medieval Central Europe, as the cases involving clerics were handled by the central ecclesiastic administration, and the fragility of the local social order, which was sometimes shaken to its core by outbreaks of violence.

Diocese of Zagreb, Middle Ages, violence, clergy

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