The Templars and the Shroud of Christ (16 page)

In three days of horror, from the 14 to 16 April 1204,
Constantinople was subjected to an unprecedented sack, that spared nobody; even the churches were desecrated, even though the expedition that had taken those men to the Bosporus was supposed to follow the
flag of religion. The butchery was atrocious, even though Byzantine civilisation later recovered and still had some periods of splendour, the sack of 1204 left a terrible wound and irreparably compromised that union of the Greek and Latin churches that
Innocent III so longed for.
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The violence and looting were followed by a more systematic stripping of all other treasures in the capital, precious objects that the Crusaders had been able to study in detail in the previous months; Greek monks had tried to make relics and furniture safe, but all their hideouts were discovered. The conquerors had reached a preliminary agreement: the whole booty was to be gathered in the house of Garnier de
Traynel, bishop of Troyes, under pain of excommunication; after which it would be properly shared out. It seems that the Doge craftily offered to the French barons an efficient guard service for the small sum of ten marks per person; but this time he had overrated French naivety, and he was politely turned down. Anyway the Venetians were the first to break the pact, taking several precious objects into their ships on the quiet, under cover of darkness – but they weren’t the only ones. The official reckoning went on in parallel with a clandestine and wholly autonomous one, which fed a wholly repulsive trade. The notion took hold that to obtain at least one relic would mean to be freed of the vow to go to Jerusalem; they actually thought that once they had got the precious pieces of loot, they would be entitled to turn their backs on the
Holy Sepulchre and go home with an easy conscience. Nobody wanted to be left empty-handed, and no sanctuary was spared. The rumour of these unworthy transactions led the IV Lateran Council of 1215 to excommunicate anyone guilty of trafficking in relics.
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Individual crusaders found ways to secretly get hold of these eagerly desired objects, intending to take them home to enrich the family churches. In no more than four years, the immense sacred treasury of relics kept in
Constantinople was sent to Europe. Crusaders often sent them as gifts to persons from whom they expected favours, or used them as investments: owning an illustrious relic seemed like an actual guarantee of future earnings, for the faithful were expected to come in crowds to venerate it, taking fat alms with them. That was the expectation that led the crusader Nivelon de
Quierzy, bishop of Soissons, to mortgage the future income of an object he owned to rebuild the cathedral and bridge of the French town of Châlons-sur-Marne; the restorations of Troyes cathedral were also paid with the income from some relics donated by bishop Garnier de
Traynel, and the same happened in many other cases. When they reached Europe, these relics were expected with great trepidation and were delivered to their addressees in solemn and elaborate religious ceremonies, accompanied by hymns and poems composed for the occasion.
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Obviously, the relics from the great imperial collection housed in the chapel of Pharos and in the Blachernae basilica were given special treatment. The whole operation concerning them was carefully recorded in an official report; they were sealed in purpose-made crates to prevent thefts and fraudulent substitutions, which were entrusted to the most trustworthy of carriers. They had a general passport and a certificate of authenticity that guaranteed their origin, a certificate bearing the golden seal of Byzantine emperors.
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In 1241 when the Latin Empire of
Constantinople, after a long decline, entered into a full-blown economic crisis, the last priceless few relics of the Passion left the capital. They had been acquired by an exceptional buyer, the King of France,
Louis IX, a man of great and sincere faith, who had paid out an absolute fortune for them. In the heart of Paris, near Nôtre-Dame cathedral, an exquisite little church, a jewel in and of itself, had been put up for the express purpose of guarding such treasures: the
Sainte-Chapelle. Carefully crated up, sealed, certified, and handed over to trustworthy persons, a fragment of the True Cross, the Spear, the Sponge, the Crown of Thorns and a number of other relics of Jesus, sealed in their valuable original reliquaries, moved off towards France.
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If the Templars ever held the Shroud, they cannot have failed to know its history and the fact that it had been stolen during a frightful massacre against which
Innocent III had flung his curses. The sheet was valuable beyond reckoning, but owning it involved many risks.

More precious than rubies

The theory Ian
Wilson offered years ago could close the gap between the Byzantine witnesses of the Shroud before the sack of April 1204 and those which find it in France about 150 years later. Attractive and based on some credible documentation, it raised some enthusiasm early on, but some scholars also raised serious objections: in effect, the author tended to take as fact certain things that only arose from his own deductions, brilliant and credible though they might be. Over time, the best known experts in Templar history have had a wide range of reactions to
Wilson’s theory, and after an original stage of prevailing scepticism, it seems to have been cautiously but increasingly re-evaluated.

A few years after the publication of
Wilson’s book, in 1985, Alain
Demurger of the Sorbonne declared himself fairly sceptical, while
Malcolm Barber of Cambridge showed himself more open to its possibilities. In a 1982 article on the specialist magazine Catholic Historical Review,
Barber assessed
Wilson’s theory as weakly supported, since not a single one of these mysterious Templar
idols has been preserved. The other evidence
Wilson had gathered seemed to him to lack a strong connection, amounting in effect to a sequel of scattered and not very coherent fragments. However,
Barber had already had a definite impression, during his own analysis of the
trial records, that the Templars were actually worshipping some sort of portrait of Christ done in the Byzantine manner. He closed by remarking that the idea seemed possible to him, but still needed a sufficiently strong explanation.
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Some time later, Francesco
Tommasi of the University of Perugia carried out a broad and extremely detailed research on the relics the Templars had acquired. The Italian historian decided not to study the
trial records, which are the most abundant source of evidence about the Templars to have reached us, but a great deal of whose information is vitiated by torture; this left him with a much narrower area of research, but also one that could not be suspected of manipulation.
Tommasi discovered that the Order of the Temple had carried out a genuine policy of systematically combing for relics, building up a treasure-store of such objects, which in contemporary culture were of great economic as well as religious value. More than a thousand years earlier, the acts of the martyrdom of Saint
Polycarpus (about 165 AD) stated that the bones of its hero could be much more precious than gems.
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The author certainly meant only a spiritual value, but that was one sentence that was to have an incredible career.

The Templar’s favourite way to acquire them was simply to buy them: either they made a straightforward purchase, or else they took relics in pawn against hefty loans made to persons in trouble, loans that never were returned and left the pawn as a Temple property. The Temple had money to spend, and in the matter of relics it was quite happy to spend it.

A very interesting fact pointed out by
Tommasi is that the sacred treasury of the Templars was full of saints worshipped mainly in the Byzantine East, such as
Polycarpus of Smyrna, Plato, Gregory,
Anastasia,
Euphemia; but the central place in this collection was obviously taken by direct testimonies of the Passion of Jesus Christ. The order had owned a great Cross-holder in Jerusalem that held a fairly large fragment of the True Cross, from which had been cut several small bits that had been then sent throughout the Templar world; many Templar commands had their own reliquary with a Cross fragment, which must have represented to the monks a physical link with Christ and the Holy City. The Templars seem to have been more devoted to the Cross than other religious orders, and they offered it special liturgies, both in Syria and later in Cyprus.
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The Templar collection’s centre piece was a thorn from the Crown of Thorns, which was said to flower miraculously on Good Friday. A curious fact is that when the
Hospitallers took over Templar goods after the Order’s dissolution, they inherited the Thorn as well, and became used to its annual miracle. On Good Friday of 1497 the Thorn flowered no less than three hours before its usual time of midday, and the Grand Prior Jacques de
Milly immediately called for a public notary to make a legal record of that unusual event. The same wonder was recorded by the last Grand Master of the Templars, Jacques de
Molay, during the
trial, as he testified in defence of his order: God would never have granted a similar miracle to unworthy persons or to heretics. Another important relic was a cross inside a little cup that had belonged to Jesus. Kept by the Templars of Jerusalem, it was borne in procession when drought threatened, to beg God for the gift of rain. According to this evidence, it also had the power to heal the sick and free the oppressed.
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Apart from what they owned themselves, the Templars in general were held to have a particular link with relics and were regarded as among the greatest experts in recognising true ones; in fact, when great personages have something to do with relics, it is to the Templars that they turn as to trustworthy and authoritative people. In 1164,
Louis VII, King of France, charged the Templar knight Geoffroy
Foucher, who was about to travel to Syria, to consecrate a ring of his by placing it physically in touch with the sanctuaries he was to meet during his mission. In 1247, the Patriarch of Jerusalem wanted to send to Europe an ampoule containing some of the Most Precious Blood to be given to King
Henry III of England: Grand Master Guillaume de Sonnac of the Temple and Grand Master of the Hospital Guillaume de Chateaunef were summoned to underwrite in person the certificate of authenticity that went with the relic. Thirty years later, Grand Master of the Temple
Thomas Bérard and some faithful from the Holy Land sent some particles of the wood of the True Cross to England, along with relics of Saints Philip, Helena, Stephen, Lawrence,
Euphemia and Barbara, besides a fragment from Jesus’ table; the archbishop of Tyre was called to sign the certificate of authenticity together with Bishop Hubert of Banyas, who was a Templar.
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Before the fall of Jerusalem, this core of sacred goods was almost certainly kept in the mother-house of the Holy City, near the ruins of the Lord’s Temple; when Jerusalem fell back into Muslim hands, all the Templar treasures were transferred to Acre headquarters, which became the Order’s central point in the East. When
Acre too fell in 1291, the collection of relics and of the most valuable objects found a place in Cyprus in the church of the chief mansion in Nicosia. The never-ending danger, however, had long since made it advisable to send many relics westward, and several such transfers are known to Italy, to England and in all likelihood to France as well, to the Paris headquarters. The picture reconstructed by
Tommasi agrees perfectly with the statements of Jacques de
Molay in the
trial: the treasury of relics and liturgical furniture that adorned Templar churches was far superior to that of other religious orders and found its equal only in the treasuries of cathedrals. Two of these centre pieces, that is the body of Saint
Euphemia and the Thorn of the Crown, came certainly from that collection that had been the pride of Byzantine emperors, and there was also kept the basin for Jesus’ foot-wash during the Last Supper: these are relics which vanished with many others during the sack of
Constantinople, and as things stand it is not possible to understand how the Templars managed to gain their possession.
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I would like to add a curious coincidence: according to the account of
Bishop
Anthony of Novgorod, who visited
Constantinople only a few years before the terrible sack, the cathedral of Hagia Sophia kept two slabs of stone that came from the
Holy Sepulchre. During the
trial against the Templars of England, an old man was called to testify who had served for 20 years in their mansion of Sumford, who described a relic that sounds exactly like one of these small slabs of stone.
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He said that he could not find anything bad to say about the Templar monks, except for one oddity he had seen and that had greatly surprised him: when the monks of the house had to carry out some important or demanding piece of business, they used to get up very early in the morning and go to the chapel of their church. There they approached the altar, and from the table of the altar they would draw a smaller stone table, cut so thin that it could be replaced back into the altar so that no outsider could have noticed it was there. Having lifted this stone tablet so that it could stand upright over the altar, everyone knelt and adored it, falling down to the ground before it. Nobody was allowed into that chapel who was not a Templar or at any rate closely connected with the Order.
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We should add that the Templars used to own a precious icon covered in gold and silver, which featured the Face of Christ, something analogous to the images on the verso of the seals of Germany’s Masters and the face on the
Templecombe panel.
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It is hardly surprising at the end of this long
excursus
that Francesco
Tommasi is decidedly more optimistic than his colleagues from outside Italy about the idea of the Shroud passing into the Temple’s possession:

For it is quite possible that the Templars might know the image of the man in the Shroud, without for that reason being the owners of the relic. Besides, there is an undeniable resemblance between the Christ’s face (without the traditional aureole) as it appears on a wooden panel discovered in 1951 in
Templecombe (Somerset), former home of a Templar community, and the face in the Shroud [...].Nonetheless there are overall elements enough not to treat
Wilson’s intuition as groundless; so the hypothesis that iconographies of the Christ of the Shroud type should have a special place in Templar devotional practice seems to me hardly to be rejected.
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