Shroud of Turin II--A Mysterious Provenance

The Hagia Sophia, or Church of 

the Holy Wisdom, one time seat of

the Patriarch of Constantinople 

Let’s get back to the Shroud of Turin.  In a previous entry (October 1) I said that the history of the shroud can only be traced with exactness from 1390 when the Bishop of Troyes wrote the pope with his (the bishop’s) opinion that the Shroud was a forgery and even claimed that the artist had confessed to his counterfeit.  The Shroud was in the possession of the family of the Counts de Charny and was passed on in that family until it was sold ot the Dukes of Savoy in 1453.  It remained in possession of the Savoy House until 1983 when the Savoys (the Italian Royal Family from 1861 until 1946) gave it to the Holy See.  During its time with the Savoys it was kept first in a chapel at Chambéry and was later (1578) transferred to the cathedral in their new capital, Turin.  It remains in Turin to the present.  That is all history.
     Now to reasonable conjecture.  Medieval documents allege that the shroud was in Constantinople from an unspecified date, probably as early as the seventh century, until the city was sacked by the Crusaders in 1204.  It disappears at that time until possibly (and even probably) 1353 when it shows up in Lirey.  (There is mention of it in 1353, but the earliest definitive record is 1390.)  How did it get from Constantinople to Lirey, and where was it from 1204 until 1353 (much less 1390).  The theory is (and it is a reasonable conjecture) that it had come into the possession of the Knights Templar at the time that Constantinople was sacked in 1204 and remained with them until the Order was dissolved in 1307.  A key figure in the Templars was Geoffrey de Charny who served as the Grand Preceptor of Normandy (the head of the Order in North-west France).  DeCharny was among the Templars burned at the stake with Jacques de Molay, the Master General of the Order.  When the shroud surfaces, it is in the custody of  his nephew, another Geoffrey de Charny.  There is a bit of a jump here, but it is reasonable. 
     Ok, but how did it get to Constantinoplein the first place?   Here there is some controversy.  There are coins from the reign of Justinian II—coins minted in 692—that purportedly display the image of Christ from the shroud?  Do they?  Hard to say.  Art historians differ and medieval representations are never exact.  If they do, it would indicate that the shroud was in Constantinople, Justinian’s capital, by the end of the seventh century.  There are other scholars who identify the shroud with “The Image of Edessa”—a representation of Christ on cloth that is mentioned by Saint John Damascene (675-749).  We will do a separate entry on the “Image of Edessa.”  The Image of Edessa was brought to Constantinople only in 944; there exists a sermon preached on the occasion by the archdeacon, Gregorios Referendarios.  Another reason not to associate the shroud with the “Image of Edessa,” also known as the Holy Mandylion, is that this image also was looted during the sack of Constantinople but was sold to Louis IX (Saint Louis) of France and kept in the Sainte Chapelle in Paris along with other relics of the Passion of Christ.  It was lost or destroyed during the French Revolution, but this testifies to the Shroud at Lirey- Chambéry-Turin existing separately from the Image of Edessa at Paris from 1390 (the point in time when we undisputedly have both relics) until 1789 when the Paris relic disappears.  The existence of the “Image of Edessa” is recorded at the very end of the sixth century though there are stories going back to the fourth which may refer to it.  All that is for a later entry.  We are still left with the problem: even if Justinian’s coins from 692 refer to the Shroud at Constantinople—where was it for the approximately 660 years between the burial of Christ and Justinian’s coins?  Frankly we don’t know.  All we can say is that from the time that Constantine transferred his imperial capital to Constantinople, the city and its churches became a repository for a huge number of relics of Christ, Mary, and the Saints.  There authenticity—at least form a historical perspective—cannot be proved.  It should not surprise us that a burial cloth purported to be that of Jesus—authentic or not—eventually found its way to what was until the Sack of Constantinople, the greatest treasure house of Christian holy objects in the world.  Is it the historical Shroud of Jesus?  I don’t know; the Church doesn’t say, but as a dear friend of mine, Dot Pittman (God Rest her) used to say: “never let the truth spoil a good story.”     

Shroud of Turin I: the traceable history

The photographic negative

of the face on the Shroud

as taken by Secondo Pia in

1898

Well we looked at Veronica’s veil, now let’s take a look at the “Shroud of Turin,” alleged to be the burial cloth of Christ.   Is it?  Who knows?  It is a mighty strange phenomenon! Scientists have examined it from every angle and under every discipline and have only conflicting theories and opinions.  But we won’t look at the scientific data, simply the historical narrative.  The history is problematic enough.  To begin with we can only be sure of its history for the last six-hundred and twenty years or so.  That isn’t very long and doesn’t help us explain the almost fourteen hundred years between its supposed use for the burial of Christ and its recorded history. 
     The history of the shroud can be traced with certainty only after 1390 when it’s presence in Lirey, a small village in the Champagne region of France, is attested by a letter to the Avignon claimant to the papacy, Clement VII,  in which the bishop of Troyes denied its authenticity as the burial cloth of Jesus.  The shroud belonged to the family of Geoffrey de Charny whose lands included the village of Lirey and who had established there a collegiate church with canons responsible for the custody of the relic.  This would have been a handsome income producer for Geoffrey and his family as a quarter of the revenues of such a church traditionally went to the Advowson—the patron who built (and owned) such a church.  The bishop claimed that the shroud was a forgery by a clever artist and that the artist hadconfessed to the fraud.  Strangely, under the circumstances, this did not stop Clement from granting indulgences to those who made the pilgrimage to Lirey and venerated the shroud though he did prohibit it being referred to as “the True Shroud” of Christ. 

      From Lirey its history is well recorded.  Geoffrey’s granddaughter Margaret married the Count de la Roche who  brought the relic to his castle at Montfort in the Franche-Comté and from there it went to the nearby town of Saint Hippolyte sur Doubs.  The canons of Lirey sued for possession but Margaret kept the relic and after her husband’s death took it on the road with her and exhibited it in various towns and cities of France.  There was a stiff trade in relics at the time and as I said, the shroud was a money maker. As she got older, Margaret was not cut out for carnie life and ended up retiring, selling the shroud and buying a castle with the proceeds.  The new owner was Anne of Cyprus, Duchess of Savoy, who build a collegiate church at the Savoy capital of Chambéry to hold the relic.  It was here at Chambéry that the shroud was damaged in 1532 when the chapel in which it was reposed caught fire and a drop of molten silver pierced the folded cloth within creating sixteen identical burn-holes where it went through the material.  The holes were patched by local Franciscan nuns.   During its time at Chambéry the Shroud was frequently sent out on tour through the Savoy lands in northern Italy and southern France.  Emmanuel Philibert (1528-1580), Duke of Savoy (and one time suitor of Elizabeth I of England) made Turin the capital of his Duchy in 1563 and fifteen years later moved the shroud there.  It has remained there since. The House of Savoy came to the Italian Throne in 1861.  Although the monarchy was abolished in 1946, the shroud was the possession of the House of Savoy, not the Italian government, and so it remained until 1983 when it was given by the once Royal Family to the Holy See.   Although it belongs to the Holy See it remains in the Cathedral of Turin.  This history is all able to be documented and, while it involves certain curious personalities, is not particularly interesting.   

      The more fascinating uestions is how did the shroud supposedly arrive in Lirey?  Well, let’s take it in stages as the history between 1204 and 1390 is a bit easier to reconstruct than the history previous to 1204.  Supposedly—and I say supposedly—the shroud was one of the many valuable relics held in the Greek Capital of Constantinople.  Remember that the Byzantine Empire was a strong and powerful empire that had for centuries ruled the eastern Mediterranean, including the Holy Land.  Especially in the reign of Justinian, (527-565) many holy objects were brought to Constantinople.   The Byzantines lost the Holy Land in 638-39, but still maintained rights of protection over the Christian shrines there.  In 1204 the Crusaders—Catholics from Western Europe—attacked and sacked the city during the fourth Crusade.  This act more than anything else, has permanently (and understandably) poisoned the Greek Orthodox attitude towards Catholicism.  The Italians went for the gold and jewels; the French—ever more pious than the Italians—went for the relics.  Well, that’s not true, at least not totally, but many of the most precious relics did end up in France.  It seems—and again, I say it seems—that Shroud of Christ  which had been reported to have been at Constantinople ended up in the hands of the Knights Templar.  There is no record of it with the Templars and this is what makes it sketchy. But then the Templars were not the sort of men for public display.  To the contrary they were the embodiment of discretion.  The Knights Templar are a fascinating group and we need to do some entries about them.  In 1307 Philip of France—who owed the Templars a huge amount of money—attacked them for heresy and immorality. (The immorality is far more interesting than the heresy; but then it always is.) Among the Templars put to death on the King’s orders was one Geoffrey of Charny, the Templar Preceptor of Normandy.  It is one of his descendents, Geoffrey of Charny whose widow has possession of the shroud in 1390. We don’t know for sure, but it seems that the Shroud found its way from Constantinople to the Templars and from the Templars to Lirey through the de Charny family. That is one theorym, anyway, and the most plausible.  Hmmm.  Now we have to find out how it made its way to Constantinople.  That is for the next episode.