Tari Edit: Pest megye középkori templomai (Studia Comitatensia 27. Szentendre, 2000.)
SUMMARY Pest county situated in the northern part of modern Hungary surrounds the capital. Our present network of important roads has formed in the Middle Ages (some of them even earlier). They led to Buda and made a specific radial system of roads. Comparing to other Hungarian counties richer in historic buildings, Pest county is relatively poor from the point of view of architectural monuments. The database of medieval churches still can not be considered to be complete, the data must be continuously complemented and further archaeological research is necessary. These are the tasks of the forthcoming years. I have succeeded in finding written, archaeological, literary or cartographic (toponymie) data for the total of 373 medieval churches. Written information was collected from the period between the 11 th —18 th century. The database includes rural, clans', agrarian towns', monastic orders' and royal churches and chapels. Among the data of the 373 churches there are 13 questionable church sites that are shown separately. If we not take into consideration the problematic data, out of 360 churches we have 246 church sites (68, 33 %) known from records. The rest of 114 churches was not mentioned in any documents, and we can gather information on them only from archaeological excavations of field surveys. At the same time only in the case of 104 churches out of 360 ones (28.8 %) excavations, wall research or monument survey have been conducted revealing the ground plan and details of walls. The 360 church data also include the sites only the name of which referred to a medieval church, patron saint or titulus of the place and toponymie names with "-egyháza " (church) ending. Some of the latter refer also to the building material, ruins or shape of the church. THE BEGINNINGS OF THE ECCLESIASTICAL ORGANIZATION The coronation of king István (Saint Stephen) in 1001 meant at the same time that the king chose the western (Latin) ecclesiastical organisation. After the formation of the western style ecclesiastical system the king placed the archbishopric to Esztergom and divided the country into 10 bishoprics and dioceses. Later he raised the status of the Kalocsa Bishopric also to a level of archbishopric. The role of the king can be well traced from the foundation of bishoprics to the organisation of rural parishes. Except for the king no lay people had the right of intervening into the church affairs. The king practised pontifical rights. King István founded cathedrals at bishop seats, abbeys and monasteries at other places. The great part of incomes of the bishoprics was guaranteed by tithes, the whole income from which could be used by the bishop. At the beginning the boundaries of bishoprics and comitats (medieval counties) under their authorities precisely corresponded to each other. In the course of the formation of the comitat system ecclesiastical centres were founded near the administrative centres of the comitats. The prelate directing the diocese closely co-operated with the ispán, the administrative leader of the comitat. At the places, where an ispán's castle was built, already in the early 11* century a baptising church was likely to be erected. Churches founded in comitat centres had a parish right, on the first hand: right of baptising and burying. The process of the gradual increase of the number of churches led to the situation in which the priest of the church in the ispán's castle got an outstanding role com234
