No form of ordeal was more thoroughly introduced throughout the whole extent of Europe. From Spain to Constantinople, and from Scandinavia to Naples, it was appealed to with confidence as an unfailing mode of ascertaining the will of Heaven. The term _judicium_, indeed, was at length understood to mean an ordeal, and generally that of hot iron, and in its barbarized form, _juise_, may almost always be considered to indicate this particular kind. In the Swedish law of the early 13th century, the red-hot iron was used in a large number of crimes, and the ferocity of its employment is exemplified in the formula prescribed for homicide. A person accused of murder on suspicion was always obliged to justify himself by carrying the hot iron for nine steps; and if he did not appear to stand his trial when duly summoned, he might be forced to undergo a preliminary ordeal to prove that he had been unavoidably detained. If he failed in this, he was condemned as guilty, but if he succeeded in enduring it he was forced to perform the second ordeal to clear him of the crime itself; while the heir of the murdered man, so long as no one succumbed in the trial, could successively accuse ten men; for the last of whom, however, the nine burning ploughshares were substituted.[953] In the code of the Frankish kingdoms of the East, it is the only mode alluded to, except the duel, and it there retained its legal authority long after it had become obsolete elsewhere. The Assises de Jerusalem were in force in the Venetian colonies until the sixteenth century, and the manuscript preserved officially in the archives of Venice, described by Morelli as written in 1436, retains the primitive directions for the employment of the _juise_.[954] Even the Venetian translation, commenced in 1531, and finished in 1536, is equally scrupulous, although an act of the Council of Ten, April 10, 1535, shows that these customs had fallen into desuetude and had been formally abolished.[955] In Hungary, the judicial records of Waradin from 1209 to 1235 contain 389 judgments, of which a large part were determined by the hot-iron ordeal.[956] This ordeal even became partially naturalized among the Greeks, probably as a result of the Latin domination at Constantinople. In the middle of the thirteenth century, the Emperor Theodore Lascaris demanded that Michael Paleologus, who afterwards wore the imperial crown, should clear himself of an accusation in this manner; but the Archbishop of Philadelphia, on being appealed to, pronounced that it was a custom of the barbarians, condemned by the canons, and not to be employed except by the special order of the emperor.[957] Yet George Pachymere speaks of the custom as one not uncommon in his youth, and he describes at some length the ceremonies with which it was performed.[958]