The present volume bears the title Secular Power and Sacral Authority in Medieval East-Central Europe. The volume encompasses a collection of papers presented at the international conference entitled Second medieval workshop in Rijeka held at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Rijeka (Croatia) on 10th and 11th October 2014. The main goal of this volume is to enable scholars, who are at the start of their careers, to present their research on a broad spectrum of medieval themes and problems, in new methodologies, which have a strong base in tradition. It should be emphasized that a lot of work on this volume owes to a strong collaboration with the Department of Medieval Studies of the Central European University in Budapest or with the scholars who have been associated with them. Budapest is still the best forum for gathering of young and experienced scholars, and the idea of a Medieval Workshop in Rijeka is to further that bond.

Since the papers presented in this volume are dealing mostly with social elite in Hungary, Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia, we have chosen to define the area as East Central Europe, without any nineteenth- or twentieth-century connotations, as explained by Nora Berend in the recent volume on the region.

All of the articles offered in this volume have generated from the debates during the workshop, and have been submitted a year later. Here we present a selection of them, with a focus on social elites which were in the position to exercise secular or sacral power.

The social elites at the centre of all of the presented studies in this volume are the ones pertaining to various types of nobility, both of secular and sacral origin, power and authority. Nobility is a social group which left the most traces in medieval sources. In the course of the medieval period nobility experienced development, diversification and even evolution. The process can be traced in the sense of terminology and practice. Social reality was reflecting their difference according to status, origin, political power, wealth, education, mobility, etc., making nobility one of the most researched medieval social groups.