At the Turn of the Fourteenth Century: Sigismund of Luxemburg and the Wallachian Princely “Stars” of the Fifteenth Century

Abstract

Abstract In late spring 1398, the noble judges of the Inner Szolnok County rejected John Toth as the legal representative of Stephen I, voivode of Moldavia. Toth (i.e. the Slav/ Slovak, chiefly in later centuries) was in fact merely the procurator of Stephen’s appointed procurator (representative), a certain John, the son of Costea. Mircea I the Elder, the voivode of Wallachia, was experiencing similar legal problems at the time in the Voivodate of Tran-sylvania. In January 1399, his procurator, Nicholas Dobokai of Luduş, the son of Ladislas Dobokai (the relative of Mircea’s step-uncle, Wladislaw I Vlaicu), had to admit he did not know the exact boundaries of the estate of the Hunyad castle, recently granted by Sigismund of Luxemburg to Mircea. The two documents, almost trivial in essence, point towards two neglected issues: the first Transylvanian estates granted by a king of Hungary to a voivode of Moldavia and to the transalpine origins of the Hunyadi family. Placed in the context of other edited and unedited sources (charters and chronicles), the documents in question provide new perspectives on the beginnings and actions of famed Wallachian personalities of the next century.