The most efficient cause of the increased use of the ordeal was, however, to be found in the Church. With her customary tact, in converting the Barbarians, she adopted such of their customs as she could adapt to Christian belief and practice; and she accepted the ordeal as an undoubted appeal to God, whose response was regarded as unquestionable, warrant being easily found for this in the Jewish practices already described. The pagan ceremonies were moulded into Christian rites, and the most solemn forms of religion were thrown around the rude expedients invented thousands of years before by the Bactrian nomads. Elaborate rituals were constructed, including celebration of mass and impressive prayers, adjurations and exorcisms of the person to undergo the trial and of the materials used in it, and the most implicit faith was inculcated in the interposition of God to defend the right and to punish guilt.[878] The administration of the ordeal being thus reserved for priestly hands, the Church acquired a vastly increased influence as the minister of justice, to say nothing of the revenues thence arising, and the facility with which ecclesiastics could thus defend themselves when legally assailed by their turbulent flocks. We are not without evidence of the manner in which the church thus favored the use of this Christianized paganism, and introduced it along with Christianity among people to whom it was previously unknown. Thus among the Turanian Majjars, the laws of King Stephen, promulgated in 1216, soon after his conversion, contain no allusion to the ordeal, but in those of Ladislas and Coloman, issued towards the end of the century, it is found, in its various forms, thoroughly established as a means of legal proof.[879] So, when in the twelfth century Bishop Geroldus converted the Slavs of Mecklenburg, they were at once forbidden to settle questions by oaths taken on trees, fountains, and stones, as before, but were required to bring their criminals before the priest to be tried by the hot iron or ploughshares.[880] Under the Crusaders, the ordeal was carried back towards the home of its birth, even contaminating the Byzantine civilization, and various instances of its use are related by the historians of the Lower Empire to a period as late as the middle of the fourteenth century.