had pronounced a sentence of excommunication, afterwards turned Mohammedan, while the victim of his curse, though he had died in the Christian faith, remained 'bound.' The matter was reported to the Patriarch Raphael, and at his instance the Turk, though after much demur, read the absolution over the Christian's body, and towards the end of the reading, 'the swelling of the body went down, and it turned completely to dust.' The Turk thereupon embraced Christianity once more, and was put to death for doing so.
Most graphic of all is a story attributed to one Malaxus[1]. The Sultan having been informed—among other evidences of the power of Christianity—that the bodies of the excommunicated never obtained dissolution till absolution was read over them, bade seek out such an one and absolve him. The Patriarch of the time accordingly made enquiries, which resulted in his hearing of a priest's widow who had been excommunicated by a predecessor, the Patriarch Gennadius. Her story was that having been rebuked by him for prostitution she publicly charged him with an attempt to seduce her. Gennadius had answered the charge by praying aloud one Sunday in the presence of all the clergy, that, if her accusation were true, God would pardon her all her sins and give her happiness hereafter and let her body, when she died, dissolve; but, if the charge were slander and calumny against himself, then by the will and judgement of Almighty God he exercised his power of severing her from the communion of the faithful, to remain unpardoned and incorruptible. Forty days afterwards she had died of dysentery and having been buried remained incorrupt.
Exhumed at the Sultan's instance the body was found to be still sound and whole, of a dark colour and with the skin stretched like the parchment of a drum. It was then removed and kept for a certain time under the Sultan's seal, until the Patriarch decided to absolve it. As he read the absolution the crackling of the body as it broke up could be heard from within the coffin. It was
- ↑ According to Georgius Fehlavius, p. 539 (§ 422) of his edition of Christophorus Angelus, De statu hodiernorum Graecorum (Lipsiae, 1676), Emanuel Malaxus was the writer of a work entitled Historia Patriarcharum Constantinopolitanorum, which I have not been able to discover. It was apparently used by Crusius for his Turco-Grecia; for the story here told is narrated by him in two versions (I. 56 and II. 32, pp. 27 and 133 ed. Basle) and he alludes also (p. 151) to a story concerning Arsenios, Bishop of Monemvasia, which likewise according to Fehlavius (l.c.) was narrated by Malaxus.
