Demetrios Chomatenos or Chomatian , Archbishop

Archbishop

An archbishop is a bishop of higher rank, but not of higher sacramental order above that of the three orders of deacon, priest , and bishop...

 of Ohrid

Ohrid

Ohrid is a city on the eastern shore of Lake Ohrid in the Republic of Macedonia. It has about 42,000 inhabitants, making it the seventh largest city in the country. The city is the seat of Ohrid Municipality. Ohrid is notable for having once had 365 churches, one for each day of the year and has...

 from 1216 to 1236, was a Byzantine

Byzantine

Byzantine usually refers to the Roman Empire during the Middle Ages.Byzantine may also refer to:* A citizen of the Byzantine Empire, or native Greek during the Middle Ages...

 priest and judge.

His comprehensive legal education allowed him to exert substantial influence as judge, arbiter

Arbitration

Arbitration, a form of alternative dispute resolution , is a legal technique for the resolution of disputes outside the courts, where the parties to a dispute refer it to one or more persons , by whose decision they agree to be bound...

, confessor

Confessor

-Confessor of the Faith:Its oldest use is to indicate a saint who has suffered persecution and torture for the faith, but not to the point of death. The term is still used in this way in the East. In Latin Christianity it has come to signify any saint, as well as those who have been declared...

 and advisor to the Byzantine Imperial house. This makes him a characteristic representative of a time where judicial power was devolving from the weakened secular authorities to the Church

Eastern Orthodox Church

The Orthodox Church, officially called the Orthodox Catholic Church and commonly referred to as the Eastern Orthodox Church, is the second largest Christian denomination in the world, with an estimated 300 million adherents mainly in the countries of Belarus, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Georgia, Greece,...

, and also one of the last legal practitioners in full command of Justinian's laws as recovered by the Macedonian legal renaissance.

Some 150 of Chomatenos' legal files have remained, allowing legal historians to construct a reasonably complete picture of the legal and institutional framework of the late Byzantine Empire.