The income register of Béla III of Hungary, compiled around 1185 or 1195, is a unique document of the economic history of Hungary, which lists the crown revenues of the Hungarian king and the incomes of the archbishops and their suffragans in the late 12th century. The data shows that Béla III was one of the wealthiest European monarchs of his time, but the reliability of the figures is questioned and long-disputed.

The document It is possible that the Latin-language income register was compiled for the English royal court, when Béla III, whose first wife Agnes of Antioch died around 1184, intended to marry Matilda of Saxony, the granddaughter of Henry II of England. Finally, Béla married Henry II's widowed daughter-in-law, Margaret of France, in the summer of 1186. According to historians Gyula Kristó and Boglárka Weisz, it is also possible that the list of Béla's revenues was recorded around 1195 for the Aragonese royal court, when Béla's eldest son and heir Emeric was betrothed to Constance of Aragon. Based on the various surrounding content of the codex, which preserved the text of the income register (see below), historian Dániel Bácsatyai argued that Béla's list of revenues belonged to the collection of 12th-century English cleric and chronicler Ralph de Diceto, who acquired the data via the legation of Richard Barre to Hungary in 1188. The data set can thus be related to the preparations for the Third Crusade and the creation of its financial conditions, in which church institutions also took part.

The income register was copied to a 15–16th-century codex in the Kingdom of England (folio 20). Jean-Baptiste Colbert bought the codex around 1680 and it (under the reference number Latin 6238) subsequently became part of the collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. After identifications in auction catalogues, historian Dániel Bácsatyai determined that, in fact, Colbert's namesake son bought the codex in 1687, along with several other pieces from the library of William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley and his descendants, which was being auctioned in London. The French royal library (predecessor of BnF) acquired the Colberts' library in 1732.

For the Hungarian historiography, the text was discovered and copied by royal chamberlain Count János Waldstein-Wartenberg in 1824. With his permission, legal historians Alajos Mednyánszky and György Bartal published the document, which was also included the collection of charters in the monumental work of archivist György Fejér. The manuscript was discovered and published by several travelers and researchers (for instance, Albert Volstán Berzeviczy and Ferenc Tessedik) independently of each other in the first half of the 19th century, but Fejér's edition, which was laden with numerous errors, became authoritative after Stephan Endlicher published it in his collection of texts Rerum Hungaricarum monumenta Arpadiana in 1849.

Figures Incomes of the prelates

+ Incomes of the archbishops and their suffragans Diocese Income (Hungarian marks) Income (pure silver kg) Archiepiscopal Province of Esztergom Esztergom 6,000 1120.1 Eger 3,000 560 Vác 700 130.6 Pécs 1,500 280 Győr 1,000 186.7 Veszprém 1,700 317.3 Nyitra 300 56 Archiepiscopal Province of Kalocsa Kalocsa–Bács 2,500 466.7 Csanád 2,000 373.4 Bihar 1,000 186.7 Transylvania 2,000 373.4 Zagreb 1,500 280 Dalmatian archdioceses Zadar 500 74.7 Split 400 93.3 Altogether 24,100 4,499 Without Dalmatia 23,200 4,331

According to the earliest opinions (for instance, Ferenc Baumgarten), the above account was made for the purpose of papal tax collection for the Roman Curia. The document lists the revenues of the two archbishops and their suffragans, in addition to mentioning that Esztergom had its own mintage and data also refer to the two Dalmatian archdioceses, which at that time had a total of ten suffragan bishoprics, but their names and income are not detailed in the list.

Historian Bálint Hóman denied the above position regarding the purpose of papal tax collection and argued the summation does not list the entire episcopal income, but only the tithe paid by the royal court after the royal income, so it only includes a specific part of the church income. As evidence, he referred to the law of Coloman, King of Hungary, which ordered that the bishops receive one tenth of the royal customs and fair revenues in the territory of the respected dioceses. Gyula Kristó considered it is possible that one of the purposes of the account was to inform the papal court. He explained this assumption by the relatively low amount of the bishops' income — a maneuver that deliberately reduced their revenues and thus the papal tax amount.

Historians János Barta and Gábor Barta converted the unit of measure (Hungarian mark) to its equivalent: 233.35 g, 80% silver content, i.e. one Hungarian mark contained 186.68 g of pure silver during the reign of Béla III. Using 15th- and 16th-century data sets on bishops' incomes with the same unit of measure (pure silver), they revealed that, by the beginning of the 14th century, revenues of the prelates had fallen drastically, which, however, did not correspond to the development of the Hungarian population (the largest part of the church income was always the tithe). János Barta and Gábor Barta argued the list was intended to summarize the full episcopal incomes. The division of tithes between bishops and their chapters was not yet common at the end of the 12th century in Hungary, thus, this can be explained by the fact that the data series contain substantially fewer amounts in the later centuries, when total revenues are approx. one third has already gone directly to the cathedral and collegiate chapters. According to the research, three-quarters of the 12th century income fell on church income (tithes, cathedraticum, etc.) and one-fourth part on the yield of church estates; expressed in silver value, this is 3248.2 kg and 1082.7 kg, respectively. The two economic historians considered the income register, for political purposes, gave an amount between one third and one quarter higher than the real one, so the total income of the dioceses was approx. 3,200-3,400 kg of pure silver in 1185 (or 1195), which already proportionally fits into the later data series.

Revenues of Béla III + Revenues of Béla III Revenues Income (Hungarian marks) Income (pure silver kg) Ordinary and regular income Royal estates 45,000 8,400.766 Tax from the hospes community in Transylvania 15,000 2,800.255 Occasional income Coinage and the exchange of coins 60,000 11,201.022 Royal monopoly of salt mining and salt trade 16,000 2,986.940 Customs, duties, fairs 30,000 5,600.511 Altogether 166,000 30,989.494

In addition to the sums of money, the text also mentions that Béla III and the royal family received a substantial "gift" in silver, silk cloth, and horses. In addition, the people of the land fully provided for the king's household. Bálint Hóman considered the summation (altogether 166,000 marks) does not include the in-kind benefits mentioned in the last sentences. Hóman, who claimed the incomes of the prelates contains the tithe paid by the royal court after the royal income (see above), argued Béla III had revenues of 241,000 marks (ten times the amount of the bishops' income). According to the list of Béla's revenues, his yearly income amounted 36.1 percent regular royal revenues and 63.9 percent jura regalia. If the list is reliable, which Hóman accepted, his income surpassed the revenues of the contemporaneous Kings of France and England, and only the Holy Roman Emperor and the Byzantine Emperor ahead of him in terms of annual revenues.

János Barta and Gábor Barta argued both the real size and the internal proportion of the king's considerable incomes are more than doubtful. The two historians compared it with the annual incomes of later kings (again using the pure silver as a common unit of measure), and according to this, only Matthias Corvinus approached the amounts found in Béla's income register 300 years later, in the 1480s (with annual 703,000 golden florins, an equivalent to 27,775 kg of pure silver), which casts doubt on the authenticity of the Béla-era figures. They argued the amount of Béla's income from the compulsory annual exchange of coins (11,201 kg of pure silver) assumes a surreal scale in annual production of precious metals (35,000 kg silver yearly), thus the amount is completely uncredited, or the data does not only contain the numbers for the mandatory coin exchange (the so-called "chamber's profit"), but also revenues from coinage, silver mining (in Selmec and Radna) and gold mining. Béla's amount from salt mining and trade point again only to the fact that it was reckoned about 25 percent more to the reality in the age of his reign, after analyzing the increase in the population of Hungary and the parallel increase in the demand for salt and production costs in the upcoming centuries (during the rule of Sigismund then Matthias). Béla's significant income from the royal estates (60,000 marks) shows that at that time the monarch was still the largest landowner in the country, owning more estates than all the nobles combined (two-thirds part of the entire kingdom). He also maintained the taxation of royal estates that fell into private hands. The disintegration of the royal landholding system took place in the 13th century, during the reigns of Andrew II and Béla IV. The high amount of tax from hospes (guest) communities from Transylvania (15,000 marks) reflects that this category did not only include Transylvanian Saxons, but other ethnic groups (e.g. Székelys, Walloons, Pechenegs and Vlachs). Even with this, the overcounting can therefore be at least doubled, or even greater, if the Székelys, for instance, cannot be classified among the "foreign" peoples paying tribute to the king.

The two historians compared the data of Béla's income register with contemporaneous or near-contemporaneous taxation records from England and France. Hungary, a territory of approximately 300,000 km2, resulted a value of 45,000 marks for its monarch. The dominalian incomes of the Duchy of Normandy with a territory of altogether 30,000 km2 may be valued of this time 2808 silver marks. Consequently, the Hungarian datum is not absolutely impossible. János Barta and Gábor Barta argued that, the dis-figuration of the data of the age of Béla III on the whole might be hardly more than 20–25 percent, that is, it can be estimated the real value of the Hungarian royal revenues at the end of the 12th century about 123,175 marks, equivalent to 22,995 kg pure silver. The decline of economic power of the Hungarian monarch in the 13th century resulted that only Matthias Corvinus was able to obtain similar large-scale revenues in Hungary in the second half of the 15th century.

+ Revenues of Béla III (revised by J. Barta and G. Barta) Revenues Income (Hungarian marks) Income (pure silver kg) Proportion (%) Ordinary income 50,000 9,334 40.6 Mining, coinage 42,000 7,841 34.1 Customs 18,375 3,431 14.9 Royal monopoly of salt 12,800 2,389 10.4 Altogether 123,175 22,995 100+ Revenues of some Hungarian monarchs (analysis by J. Barta and G. Barta) Monarch Year Income (pure silver kg) Béla III c. 1185/1195 22,995 Charles I c. 1320 14–15,000 Sigismund c. 1420 13,000 Matthias I c. 1480 27,775

Historiography