Royal Power and Urban Space in Medieval Hungary

Urban space has certainly been the most complex of spatial structures, thus the study of its creation and changes over time needs to pay attention to several factors. The early urban or proto-urban settlements fulfilled the needs of Hungarian society roughly from the eleventh until the middle of the thirteenth century. The medieval kingdom of Hungary united some territories that used to be inside the Roman Empire: Pannonia included territories that became later known as Transdanubia and Slavonia, whereas Dacia corresponded more or less to the territory of the later Transylvania, presently part of Romania. The first two centuries of Hungarian statehood after the foundation of the State at the turn of the tenth century were characterized by strong royal power and authority—a feature that both the surviving records of legislation and the accounts of foreign travellers convincingly convey. The biggest winner of thirteenth-century restructuring of Hungary's settlement network was certainly Buda, the eventual capital.