Századok – 2016
2016 / 2. szám - TANULMÁNYOK - Mikó Gábor: A "szent királyok törvényei". A kora Árpád-kori törvények fennmaradásának története
340 MIKÓ GÁBOR This, of course, fails to prove that the decrees of Coloman were already then assimilated to the laws of the „Holy Kings”. Yet from the thirteenth century we do have evidence attesting that the figure of Coloman may by then have been intertwined with those of the two canonised rulers of the eleventh century: this is what emerges from the first chapter of Rogerius’s Carmen miserabile. And, finally, it should be emphasised that these early laws and the Golden Bull were the only legal texts from the Árpád perid that were known in the sixteenth century. All other laws from the thirteenth century were revealed only by archival research undertaken in the course of the eighteenth century. The decrees of the three kings Stephen, Ladislaus and Coloman are consequently the reminiscences of an independent and ancient tradition within the Corpus Juris Hungarici, and are in no way connected to Hungarian legal codification in the sixteenth century. The importance of this tradition is especially highlighted by the fact that from the Corpus Juris Hungarici, which represented in the sixteenth century the legislation of a kingdom then already more than five hundred years old, all traces of legislation for some three centuries are altogether missing.
