ABSTRACT
First, some background to trial by ordeal in Byzantium. e Byzantine case histories of ordeals are few, yet the amount of scholarly attention that the handful of cases has attracted is great. e examples concern mainly one type of ordeal, that of the hot iron,3 and are concentrated in the thirteenth century. e cases thus date to a time after the ordeal was outlawed in the west at the Lateran council of 1215.4 e thirteenth-century date of the rst Byzantine cases identies them with the period of decentralisation of the empire, following the Fourth Crusade and the conquest of Constantinople in 1204. e Latins established an empire on former Byzantine lands, while Byzantine successor states were created in Anatolia and mainland Greece, states that vied for power, competing to recover Constantinople.5
