Sigismundov porez na Crkvu
Sigismund’s Church tax

Summary/Abstract: This essay investigates the new tax on church institutions introduced by King Sigismund after the defeat at Nicopolis. The purpose of the tax was to raise funds for the war against Turks and it amounted to half of the Church income. There are few surviving data about the tax and some may be found in the archival funds of Zadar and Korčula. I use the extant information to reconstruct this tax, how it was collected and difficulties that arose in the course of its collection. I will try to assess its overall importance within the contemporary social context. For historians, Sigismund’s decision to introduce a tax that would collect half of the income of all the church institutions, in order to organize defence against Turks, was just one of the many conclusions of the 1397 Assembly of Temesvár (Timişoara). Yet the discovery of new archival data from Zadar and Korčula has made this conclusion come alive. It became manifest that, for several years, church institutions indeed had to part with half of their income, and that the king put considerable effort into the tax and into setting up the administrative organization around it. It is striking that, around the turn of the fifteenth century, another royal tax was added to the salt tax and the tax of one-thirtieth. This information changes our perspective of the royal rule in Croatia. Because this tax was paid by the Church, it is also a contribution to the understanding of the church history in Croatian- Hungarian Kingdom under Sigismund. From the social perspective, taking half of the (considerable) income from all the church institutions is not a negligible fact and it contributes to our understanding of the relationship between the king and the Church. We may also accept the argument of János M. Bak that, from the perspective of the early modern era, Sigismund’s daring encroachment upon the church property at the end of the Middle Ages indicates the dawn of a new era. It is a predecessor to all the taxes that later, in the sixteenth century, would be introduced to finance the fight against Turks. So we could say that the knowledge of this tax has pushed the onset of the anti-Turkish taxes backward, from the sixteenth to the late fourteenth century.

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