Diaconescu, Marius (szerk.): Mediaevalia Transilvanica 1999 (3. évfolyam, 1-2. szám)
Mentalităţi
10 Mária Makó Lupescu the practice with them to the eastern Mediterranean. At the end of the crusading period, the crusading orders carried the trial by ordeal into the lands of the eastern Baltic.35 Thus, trial by ordeal spread into Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, and the Islamic world as part of the process of conversion and crusade, which so greatly enlarged Latin Christendom between the eleventh century and the thirteenth.36 Although the fact that ordeal was a favoured form of proof over many centuries, it did not always benefit from the support of the Church. By 1215, the Lateran Council forbade clerics to pronounce the liturgical blessing on which the whole structure of the ordeal was held to depend. The ordeal, they said, was an ancient custom, vulgar, lower class, tolerated in earlier times merely as a concession by the church to the “hard hearts” of the Germanic “barbarians”.37 In spite of this, in Hungary, similarly to other countries, ordeals were practiced in later periods too. The latest mentioned ordeal (a trial by hot iron) in Hungary was held in 1234 in Oradea Cathedral.38 39 “Ordeals had depended on an easy passage between the sacred and the profane,” writes Brown.35 This sentence has a lot of truth in it, if we are thinking of the process of the ordeal itself. A case begun among laymen in a trial in a lawcourt might find itself transferred to the solemn mise en scéne of a great church. The upshot of dramatic and often desperately cruel action - the effect of a hot iron on the hand that could hold it for three or nine paces - if this was surrounded by solemn prayers of blessing by the priest, it would be held as the final decision of God on the rights and wrongs of the case. The ordeal in this way, was a “controlled miracle” brought to bear on the day-to-day needs of the community:40 small issues such as debts, money, and the ownership of cattle jostled side by side with accusations of witchcraft, poisoning, murder, and assault in the register of ordeals performed in the early thirteenth century in the town of Oradea.41 This study, however, concentrates upon the reconstruction of trial by hot iron practiced in medieval Oradea based on the evidence provided by the Oradean register. The register of Oradea, similar in nature to the medieval charters, is one of the most outstanding sources for the Hungarian language-,42 cultural-,43 and judicial 35 Bartlett, Trial by Fire and Water, 45-46. 36 Ibid., 47. 37 Petrus Browe, De ordaliis, vol. 2: Ordo et rubricae. Acta et facta. Sententiae theologorum et canonistarum (Rome, 1933), no. 99, p. 77; no. 104, pp. 79-80. 38 See, for this, the two women’s case, namely Mizla and Vtalou, accused of hiding away Paul’s maid: “... Brictius, episcopus Vaciensis, ... Mizlam et Paridem misit Varadinum ad examen ferri candentis, ubi illa [scilicet Mizla], portato ferro pro se et pro domina Vtalou, combusta est.” Karácsonyi, and Borovszky, Regestrum Varadinense, no. 381, p. 304. I want to notice that the rule, which I shall use for the quotation of the records, will be the following: no. for the number of the regesta, p. for the number of(the page, both referring to Karácsonyi and Borovszky’s critical edition of the register of Oradea. If only a number follows the title, I will be referring to the page number. 39 Brown, “Society and the Supernatural,” 134. 40 Ibid., 135-36. 41 According to Bunyitay, from 389 cases reported, 119 are robberies and offences of personal property, 105 are defalcation, theft, and fraud, 34 are connected to the personal freedom and social status, 32 are murders and mutilations, 11 are poisonings and witchcraft, 5 are abductions of young girls, and 1 is adultery. Bunyitay, A váradipüspökség, voi. 1, 78. 2 It has to be admitted that linguists are the scholars who have most exploited this incomparable
