Demetrios Chomatenos

Who is Demetrios Chomatenos?

Demetrios Chomatenos or Chomatianos, Archbishop of Ohrid from 1216 to 1236, was a Byzantine priest and judge.

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

He also played an important role in the rivalry of the two main post-Fourth Crusade Byzantine Greek successor states, the Empire of Nicaea and Epirus. Along with John Apokaukos and George Bardanes, Chomatianos championed the Epirote cause of political and ecclesiastical independence from Nicaea, and in 1225 or 1227, it was he who crowned the Epirote ruler Theodore Komnenos Doukas as Byzantine Emperor in Thessalonica.