COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF FORENSIC EVIDENCE IN THE MEDIEVAL LEGAL SYSTEMS OF THE SLAVIC PEOPLES
The old-Slavic judicial means of evidence such as svod, an oath, sakletvenici and ordalium (a trial by combat, a trial by iron, a trial by water) have been studied and reconstructed through the most important available written Russian, Bohemian, Polish, Croatian, and Serbian legal-historical sources, such as the contracts of the Russian princes Igor and Oleg with the Byzantine Empire, Russkaya Pravda, the Statutes of the Bohemian prince Condrad Otto, the untitled collection of Polish customary laws written in German (known as “das Buch von Elbling’’), the Vinodol Law, the Statute of Poljica and the Code of Tsar Stephan Dushan. These legal-historical sources testify that these judicial means of evidence were very widespread in the judicial procedure in the entire Slavic world and that their reliability as means of evidence was never doubted, even when the judiciary was almost completely transferred to the state authority. They were probably based on the principles of the folk judiciary and self-protection, starting from the Slavic tribal communities, and therefore, a lot earlier than the emergence of the first early Slavic states and that is why they are much older than the written historical sources in which they first appeared.