The foundation of an institution in early Europe was supported by legal documents with a rigorous logical and conceptual architecture, endowed with the necessary authority. The proposed research is part of a pilot project that aims to analyze two institutional foundations from the second half of the 16th century during the reign of Stephen Báthory: the Jesuit academy in Vilnius in 1579, validated by royal privilege and confirmed by papal authority, and the act of establishment of the Jesuit College in Cluj (Collegium Academicum Claudiopolitanum, 1581).

The paper analyzes how these acts of institutional legitimation can be structurally represented through TEI encoding and a graph-based modeling approach. The diplomatic architecture of the documents (invocatio, intitulatio, arenga, dispositio, sanctioning clauses) is segmented, special attention being paid to performative verbs (e.g., erigimus, confirmamus) and named entities (persons, institutions, places). The texts provide the basis for the extraction of a knowledge graph representing acts of authority, institutional foundations, and their issuing agencies.

The paper demonstrates how digital formalization allows for both the analysis of a pontifical and a princely foundation within a common Latin-language documentary culture that transcends political and confessional boundaries. The pilot project highlights both the heuristic potential of interoperable coding frameworks and the interpretative decisions required in the process of transforming complex diplomatic documents into relational data structures, and emphasizes the capacity of digital formalisation to model the institutional evolution across the interconnected European political spaces.