Consideraţii referitoare la practica falsificărilor de acte în Transilvania (sec. XIII-XVII)
Some Considerations Regarding to the Practice of Falsification of Acts in Transylvania (13th-17th Century)

Summary/Abstract: Forgery of charters was strictly related to the phenomenon of writing and to the increasing value of the written document in the society. Medieval forgeries were usually fabricated within various institutions of the church, the normal environment that made use of literacy in the middle ages. In Transylvania, as well as all over Europe, not authentic acts had as purpose obtaining, enlarging and preserving unlawful rights and benefits. Researches regarding the internal structure of those documents issued mainly in the earlier medieval period demonstrate that a higher concentration of falsified acts is to be found in the 13th Century (11% of the entire surviving documents). Afterwards, this percentage paradoxically decreases to 4% or even to 1% for the following centuries. Regarding the later stage of development of the literacy in Transylvania, the Principality (16th-17th Centuries), it has to be stressed upon an obvious lack of appropriate research. A certain development of literacy in Transylvania in the latter period was followed by a wider use of various forms of counterfeit legal texts, which reached even the lower levels of society, a phenomenon that can be described as a “vulgarization” of the fabrication of official documents.

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