Hungarian Historical Review 7, no. 4 (2018): 694–717 694 http://www.hunghist.org Did Romanians Living on Church Estates in Medieval Transylvania Pay the Tithe? * Géza Hegyi Research Institute of the Transylvanian Museum Society hegeza@gmail.com The Romanians of Transylvania, who were followers predominantly of the Orthodox rite, did not pay tithe to the Western Church in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. However, again according to the secondary literature, beginning in the ffteenth century, two groups of Transylvanian Romanians were obliged to pay this tax: those living on church properties and those who had moved to settlements formerly inhabited by Catholics (referred to as “terrae Christianorum”). This study deals with the issue of the frst group, analyzing the only source that would support the thesis in question, namely a letter of King Sigismund of Luxembourg (which in some editions was dated to 1398 and in others to 1425 or 1426). Although the facts described in the document would correspond to realities from 1426, the contradictory dates, the confusing language, and the absence of the original (the earliest manuscript copies of the text are from the eighteenth century) arouse suspicions. Even if we accept it as authentic, the phrase “decima Volahorum,” which is used in the letter, cannot be interpreted as an ordinary tithe, but only as a royal tax. Neither the late medieval registers of revenues of the Alba Iulia chapter nor the urbaria of the estates of the Transylvanian bishopric offer any evidence in support the thesis according to which Romanians who lived on church properties paid the tithe. Keywords: Transylvania, tithe, Romanians, church property, source criticism Introduction One of the most signifcant differences between Western (Catholic) and Eastern (Orthodox) Christianity in the Middle Ages was the paying of the tithe. While Catholics had to pay one tenth of their most important agricultural produce to the Church (or its value in currency), members of the Orthodox Church had no such obligation. 1 Given this difference, the study of the collection of the tithe in a region in which members of the two Churches lived side by side but in which the Catholic Church was nonetheless the religion of the state (and therefore also * The research has been implemented with the support provided from the National Research, Development and Innovation Fund of Hungary, fnanced under the K 119 430 funding scheme, and the Hungarian Academy of Science Domus Hungarica Program. 1 Schmid, “Byzantinisches Zehntwesen.” See also: Zimmermann, “Zehnt,” 496.