The power and authority of the medieval Romanians is a slippery subject, which becomes delicate when the analysis focuses on relations in the Kingdom of Hungary. Therefore the book studies the centuries when the Romanians began to rise from the sources. With them a world, unique in its diversity, rose at the eastern limits of Christendom.

Ioan-Aurel Pop is member of the Romanian Academy and Director of the Center of Transylvanian Studies of the Romanian Academy, as well as the Rector of the Babe?-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca (Romania). For more than three decades he has researched European archives and libraries, focusing on the medieval and early modern history of East-Central Europe, and in particular of the Romanians, with special emphasis on social relations, political structures and ideological mechanisms.

Contents: How could the mechanism of power in the Middle Ages be understood? – An explanation: why the Romanians and their country (countries) have two names – Between grandeur and decadence: Hungary during the last Árpádian century and the new Angevin century – The others and power: ethnicities and religions in mediaeval Hungary and Transylvania (Up until the fourteenth century) – «Masters of our own land for a thousand years»: The ancientness of the Romanians as portrayed by the official documents – The Fourth Crusade (1203-1204) or the western method of eradicating the «schism» – The elite of the Romanians in and around Transylvania in the tenth-thirteenth centuries-landowners, fighters and political leaders – Transylvanian (Hungarian) feudalism or sui-generis organisation? – Land and power: the official landholding mechanism in the Kingdom of Hungary – Knezes and their status as rulers and owners in the Romanian world – «Within their true, right and ancient boundaries»: The grounds of the Romanian knezes’ and nobles’ landholding rights – «Liberties, uses, services and duties» of the knezes and of knezial villages – Power deprivation: Dispossessed knezes and subdued Romanian villages – How the Romanians lived with the Hungarians, the Saxons and the Szeklers in the Middle Ages – «Our loyal guests»: The image of the outlanders or foreigners in Transylvania and Hungary – Outgoing Romanians, incoming Romanians, or the limits of mediaeval mobility – The image of the Romanian countries in the Hungarian consciousness and its impact on the status of the Transylvanian Romanians – «As the Romanians call it, in folk parlance»: The Romanian onomastics and toponymy – The Romanians position regarding the Western Church and the position of the Western Church regarding the Romanians – From acceptance to exclusion: Romanians and Transylvania’s estate assemblies in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries – The consequences of excluding the «schismatics», the «knezes» and the «Vlachs» from the estates in the Middle Ages.