ses of five nuns, who had been dead for more than
twenty years; and these corpses, though covered with quicklime, still
contained blood.

Footnotes:

[513] Goar, not. in Eucholog. p. 688.

CHAPTER XXX.

INSTANCES TO DEMONSTRATE THAT THE EXCOMMUNICATED DO NOT DECAY, AND
THAT THEY APPEAR TO THE LIVING.

The Greeks relate[514] that under the Patriarch of Constantinople
Manuel, or Maximus, who lived in the fifteenth century, the Turkish
Emperor of Constantinople wished to know the truth of what the Greeks
asserted concerning the uncorrupted state of those who died under
sentence of excommunication. The patriarch caused the tomb of a woman
to be opened; she had had a criminal connection with an archbishop of
Constantinople; her body was whole, black, and much swollen. The Turks
shut it up in a coffin, sealed with the emperor's seal; the patriarch
said his prayer, gave absolution to the dead woman, and at the end of
three days the coffin or box being opened they found the body fallen
to dust.

I see no miracle in this: everybody knows that bodies which are
sometimes found quite whole in their tombs fall to dust as soon as
they are exposed to the air. I except those which have been well
embalmed, as the mummies of Egypt, and bodies which are buried in
extremely dry spots, or in an earth replete with nitre and salt, which
dissipate in a short time all the moisture there may be in the dead
bodies, either of men or animals; but I do not understand that the
Archbishop of Constantinople could validly absolve after death a
person who died in deadly sin and bound by excommunication. They
believe also that the bodies of these excommunicated persons often
appear to the living, whether by day or by night, speaking to them,
calling them, and molesting them. Leon Allatius enters into long
details on this subject; he says that in the Isle of Chio the
inhabitants do not answer to the first voice that calls them, for fear
that it should be a spirit or ghost; but if they are called twice, it
is not a vroucolaca,[515] which is the name they give those spectres.
If any one answers to them at the first sound, the spectre disappears;
but he who has spoken to it infallibly dies.

There is no other way of guarding against these bad genii than by
taking up the corpse of the person who has appeared, and burning it
after certain prayers have been recited over it; then the body is
reduced to ashes, and appears no more. They have the