Hermannstadt, and authorizing them to freely elect their local leaders. After a Saxon rebellion, Charles I of Hungary abolished the office of the Count of Hermannstadt and appointed royal judges to head the Saxon districts in 1324. However, the wealth of the Saxon merchants, who controlled the trade routes towards Wallachia and Moldavia, enabled them to gradually achieve the restoration of their autonomy. In 1486, Matthias Corvinus united the Saxon communities under the leadership of the elected mayor of Hermannstadt, who was thereafter known as the Count of the Saxons. The Gesta Hungaroruma book of debated reliabilitystated that Vlachs (or Romanians) had already been present in Transylvania in the late 9th century. The earliest contemporaneous records evidence that Romanian communities existed in southern Transylvania in the first decade of the 13th century. In contrast with the Roman Catholic Hungarians, Székelys and Saxons, the Romanians adhered to the Orthodox Church. Their administrative units were known as lands or districts. The Romanian districts were initially located in royal estates, but most of them were given away to noblemen or prelates by the end of the Middle Ages, or the local chiefs (or knezes) achieved the acknowledgement of their ownership from the kings. Development General assemblies General assemblies of the noblemen from one or more counties developed into important forums of the administration of justice in the entire Kingdom of Hungary in the second half of the 13th century. Noblemen formed the highest level of the society in the Transylvanian counties. The wealthiest nobles owned dozens of villages, but most noble families had only one or two villages, or only a part of a village. They had specific privileges, such as tax exemption (from 1324), and the right to administer justice in their estates (from 1342). Székely chiefs could only seize private landed property in the counties, outside Székely Land. The wealthiest Saxons also attempted to acquire landed property in the counties, outside the jurisdiction of the Saxon communities. Being obliged to render services (primarily of military nature) for the lands that they possessed, the Romanian leaders' position was similar to the status of the "nobles of the Church" and other groups of conditional nobles. Consequently, they were not regarded real nobles, but the monarch could award them with nobility. The ennobled Romanians adopted their Hungarian peers' way of life, but dozens of Romanian noble families remained Orthodox for centuries. In comparison with