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seventeenth-century Cambridge historian Sir Paul Rycaut, who claimed to have received it from a preacher named Sofronia in Smyrna, Turkey. According to the tale, there was once a man infamous for his many crimes living in the Despotate of Morea, which at the time was a southern province in the Byzantine Empire. After yet another heinous crime, the man fled authorities to the isle of Milos in the Aegean Sea, where he died in an excommunicated state. Following his burial, the island’s inhabitants began to complain of his apparition returning at night and haunting them in the manner of the bloodthirsty vrykolaka . According to custom, the suspected vampire’s grave was opened and the body within found to be undecayed and full of fresh blood. Initially the islanders wanted to dismember the corpse and boil the parts in wine to dislodge the evil spirit that had taken residence within, but the man’s friends objected and petitioned the church (along with a large sum of money) to grant a reprieve. A letter was then sent to Constantinople begging the Patriarch to grant the deceased an absolution and requesting that the time and date of its performance be written down as proof.
    Back on the windswept isle of Milos the coffin had been taken from the grave and filled with grapes, apples, nuts, and other food to sate the fiend’s hunger. Suddenly the coffin began to shake and rattle, to the great fear of those gathered nearby, but when they had built up enough courage to open it they found the body had turned to dust. When the letter of absolution arrived from Constantinople, the people were amazed to discover that the time and date of the absolution and the miracle were the same.
    This notion of the church’s authority over both the spiritual and corporal aspects of its subjects’ lives was used in more than just domestic examples and was often heralded as a sign that Christianity was indeed the one true religion. In the eastern approaches to the kingdoms ruled by the Orthodox Church, the presence of Islamic nations meant constant encroachments, skirmishes, and outright warfare. With armies of infidels always at its gates, the church did not hesitate to use the issue of incorruptibility as part of its propaganda campaign against Islamic nations.
    In the sixteenth century, the German classical scholar and historian Martin Crusius circulated a report regarding Mehmed II, the Ottoman sultan who conquered Constantinople in 1453. At the time there appeared in the court of Mehmed II a number of men versed in Greek and Arabic literature who were investigating the claims made by the Christian church. After tales of Greek priests halting the decomposition of corpses reached these investigators’ ears, the sultan insisted that the Patriarch Maximus of Constantinople produce evidence of their authenticity. Not wanting to incur his new ruler’s wrath, Maximus hastily convened a council of priests who managed to produce the undecayed body of a woman who had been excommunicated by the previous patriarch for terrible crimes. Once handed over to the sultan’s officers, the body of the woman was placed within a bound coffin marked by the sultan’s seal and guarded by his soldiers. After three days, the priests gathered beside it and chanted a liturgy while the patriarch recited an absolution. Following the service, the coffin was opened and the body within found to be nothing more than dust and bones. The sultan was said to be so amazed by this turn of events that he exclaimed to his officers that such proof could only mean that Christianity was the one true religion.
    Another tale highlighting the political and religious tensions between Christianity and Islam at the time concerns a bishop who pronounced the ban of excommunication upon a man who died and remained uncorrupted. The bishop, being deceived by Satan, so the story goes, renounced his faith and converted to Islam. The Patriarch of Constantinople summoned