Among these is also a monastery called Our Lady of Blahernae, where is found the shroud wherein Our Lord was shrouded: all [Good] Fridays, it is raised wholly upright so that the figure may be seen. Nobody, neither Greek nor French, knows what happened to this shroud when the city was conquered. [57]
In the church of the Blachernae, the shroud was opened in a frame thanks to a mechanism that slowly lifted it, so that the faithful could see body of Jesus as though he were slowly and gradually rising from the grave. The cloth, therefore, was earlier kept folded, then very slowly spread out. According to Robert de Clari, the Blachernae ceremony took place every Friday, but it is more likely that he intended to mean only Good Friday rather than every week; his description, together with the other sources, suggests that on special occasions the Shroud-mandylion was removed from its holder in the chapel of Pharos and taken to Blahernae where the faithful could contemplate it, even spread out, in the impressive liturgy of the “ascent” (in Greek anàstasis, “resurrection”).[58]
At the present stage of our knowledge it is clear that the Shroud of Turin had once belonged to the Byzantine Emperors, since the descriptions of ancient authors are fairly precise; on the other hand, it is certain that until the time of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitos the traditions about the mandylion speak of a head-and-shoulder portrait of Jesus alive, while later – as I will point out shortly – this object is always described as a cloth on which is outlined the image of a full body. At present we have no clear idea how this change could come about; a credible idea suggested by historians is that there was in Edessa an attempt to mask in any possible way the funeral nature of the mandylion, because the marks of suffering and death on the figure of Christ might create a scandal that would not be endurable in that particular historical context. But this explanation might be incorrect, or might be accompanied by other issues unknown to us at present. It is evident that we know some moments of the Shroud’s millennia of history in detail, while we know nothing of others. To strain to tell its vicissitudes date after date is in my view unhelpful, because it means, over so many stretches, dressing up as ornately as possible incomplete or highly dubious notices; rather, it is wiser to arrange in their place the pieces of the puzzle on which we can rely, waiting for further discoveries to give us other convincing information.
In effect, the religious tradition that went into the making of some icons of the mandylion associates this image to Christ dead in the sepulchre, as shown for instance by a superb item in the St. Petersburg Russian State Museum, painted by Prokop Tehirin in the early 1600s: the dead body of Jesus, with his hands joined over the pubis as in the Shroud, arises from the sepulchre, while two angels above him display the mandylion, which is not a towel, but a fairly long sheet.[59]
Thanks to public showings and the narratives of foreign ambassadors who had been able to be present at private ones, the fame of the mandylion spread as far as the West as early as the 11th century; but in Europe it was never described as a towel and, as soon as it was mentioned, it was a sheet that bore the image of the whole body of Jesus Christ. To the text of a sermon ascribed to Pope Stephen III (768-772 AD), someone added in the 11th century a bit of a speech retailing the “updated” version of the legend of Abgar with the extra bits added on in Constantine Porphyrogenitus’ time:
So, fully to please the sovereign, the mediator between God and men lay the full length of his body over a sheet of snow-white linen; and upon this linen, wonderful to relate or to hear, the most noble form of his face and of his whole body was divinely transfigured, so that to be able to see the transfiguration impressed upon that linen should be enough even for those who had not been able to see the Lord in the flesh.[60]
More or less at the same time, between 1130 and 1141, the monk Orderic Vitalis clearly stated, in his Historia Ecclesiastica, that the mandylion of Edessa bore the image of Jesus’ whole body:
Abgar reigned as toparch of Edessa. To him did the Lord Jesus send [...] the most precious linen, wherewith he dried the sweat from his face, and upon which the features of the Saviour appear, miraculously reproduced. It showeth to those who behold it the image and proportions of the body of the Lord;[61]
and in Gervase of Tilbury’s Otia Imperialia, written in 1218, the fact was asserted again:
It has been ascertained, thanks to the story told in ancient documents, that the Lord lay the whole of His body down upon the whitest of linen, and so thanks to divine power there remained impressed on the linen the fairest image not only of the face but also of the body of the Lord.[62]
In 1957, historian Pietro Savio pointed out that a Vatican Library manuscript contained a different testimony, going back to the twelfth century, with an “altered” version of the legend of Abgar. Jesus had written to the king: “If thou truly desirest to see my face as it physically is, I shall send thee a piece of cloth; know about it that upon it is divinely transferred, not only the image of my face, but of my whole body”.[63]
Around 1190, Pope Celestine III received from Constantinople the gift of a luxurious liturgical canopy for use in solemn processions, a masterpiece of sacred art which represented the mandylion as a sheet bearing the image of the dead Christ with his hands joined over his pubis; and Gino Zaninotto has recently found in another tenth-century Greek codex a further confirmation that the famous Byzantine relic bore the image of the whole body.[64]
From Byzantium to Lirey?
Ian Wilson believes that the Shroud-mandylion vanished from Constantinople during the terrible sack suffered by the city in the days of the fourth crusade (1204). It remained hidden over long decades, then reappeared in the year 1353 near Lirey, a small town in north-central France: in that year, the knight Geoffroy de Charny, Bearer of the Oriflamme in the army of King John the Good, and widely popular at court, made a gift of the singular relic to the collegiate church he had just founded in the town. The Shroud started being exhibited to popular veneration as the true shroud of Jesus with a series of solemn obstentions that drew the enthusiasm of the faithful and the jealousy of the local bishop; in the end, after several events, it passed into the hands of the Dukes of Savoy, who had it kept first in their then capital Chambéry, in the sumptuous Sainte-Chapelle of the Ducal Palace, then moved to their new capital Turin, where it is to this day. The link with the Templar order was first suggested to Ian Wilson by the fact that the man who died at the stake together with Jacques de Molay was called Geoffroy de Charny, the exact same name of the owner of the Shroud in Lirey.[65]
Someone objected to this on the ground that the first owner of the Shroud is found named as Geoffroy de Charny, while the surname of the Templar preceptor appears in the various documents naming him in different forms, that is as Charny, but also Charneyo, Charnayo, Charniaco. In the objectors’ view, that is, there is a little difference in sound which would be enough to suppose that the two names were different. I take the liberty to reply that in an administration register from the age of King Philip VI of Valois, the surname of the first owner of the Shroud is given in the forms de Charneyo and also Charni, Charnyo or else Charniaco, just as is found in the case of his kinsman Geoffroy, dead at the stake on 18 March 1314 together with Jacques de Molay.[66]
This kind of hair-splitting on the basis of mediaeval Latin spelling variants can only be fed to someone who has no practice of mediaeval documents. It would work out if our characters had lived in the France of Napoleon or Victor Hugo, that is in a world dominated by printed paper and in a culture which is officially French-speaking.
For mediaeval society things are quite different. The acts of the Templars’ trial, like a countless amount of other contemporary documents, were hand-written, which means that it was easy to make small mistakes; but above all, they were composed in Latin by teams of notaries who translated simultaneously into Latin while they heard the witnesses speak in their native language, in this case French. All French surnames did not have Latin forms, and yet the way ha
d to be found to render their often peculiar sounds into Latin; so adaptations were made, and they could well be different from notary to notary.
For this reason we find the same character quoted in quite different forms, whose variety can seem downright ridiculous to us. Jacques de Molay’s surname can also be found written as Malay, Molaho and Malart, while the Visitor of the West, Hugues de Pérraud, is also called Parando, Peraudo, Penrando, Penrado, Peralto, Peraut but even Peraldo, Paurando and Deperando. In the case of Templar leaders who lived before the trial, the situation can be even more curious: Gilbert Erail’s surname is also found written Roral, Arayl, Herac, Eraclei and Eraclius, while that of Robert de Sablé turns up as Sabolio, Sabluillio, Salburis, Sabloel and Sabloil. And this phenomenon is just as common in the registers of mediaeval Popes: in one and the same letter, written by the same notary, it often happens that the same surname is spelled differently.[67] If we are to assess facts within their historical context, I would say that the notaries transcribed the name of Geoffroy de Charny fairly faithfully, indeed better than many other cases.
What we can deduce from the records of the trial against the Templars strengthens Wilson’s theory. Geoffroy de Charny belonged to the narrow circle of Jacques de Molay’s loyalists, and he was the only compaignon dou Maistre reckoned by Nogaret as powerful enough within the Temple to lock him up in the dungeons of Chinon together with the members of the Templar headquarters, the kind of isolation selected for him, and the attempt to keep him from the Pope when the Pope had asked to question them, leads us to suppose that Charny and the others were able to give an important witness. Geoffroy came from a family of knightly rank and had become a Templar in 1269 at the mansion of Étampes, in the diocese of Sens: his ceremony of admission was celebrated by a high Templar officer called Amaury de La Roche, of whom we shall speak later, a front-rank figure in the Temple, but also very closet to the crown of France. It must have been an important ceremony, since even the preceptor of Paris, Jean le Franceys, left his mansion to attend.
Born about 1250, the knight Geoffroy de Charny was in 1294 in charge of the mansion of Villemoison, in Bourgogne, and one year later, at no more than 45 years old, received the responsibility for the Templar province of Normandy; he had an outstanding career, but it is not only his hierarchic rank that determined power and prestige in the Temple. Templar sources show that this man was always very close to the person of Jacques de Molay; in 1303 he was in the mansion of Marseille, where he witnessed the admission of a young servant of the Grand Master, charged with the care of his harness and horses, who was received by Symon de Quincy, the then supervisor of the sea journeys to Outremer. Marseille was France’s main port for the East, and both testimonies assert that the monks present at that chapter then left for Cyprus: a norm of the hierarchic statutes forbade preceptors of western provinces from going to Outremer except in obedience to a specific order from the Grand Master, so it is certain that Geoffroy de Charny was in that place while travelling with other brothers to reach Jacques de Molay.[68]
There certainly was a strong tie of personal friendship between the Grand Master and Geoffroy de Charny: the chronicle known as the Continuation of Guillaume de Nangis remembers that it was only the Preceptor of Normandy who chose to follow Molay to the stake, shouting to the crowds, during the last appeal they had been granted, that the Temple was innocent and had not betrayed the Christian faith. Geoffroy de Charny seemed to be constantly among the most important dignitaries of the Temple.[69]
There is another detail, too. If we look at the trial documents as a whole, we find that the Preceptor of Normandy Geoffroy de Charny was known to his fellow-monks by a nickname connected to his area of origin. Just as we would call someone “the Tuscan” or “the Sicilian”, Charny was also called le berruyer, which in 14th century French meant “the man from Berry”: it is the area known today as Champagne berrichonne, which lay in the later Middle Ages pressed between the two great powers, the Count of Champagne and the Duke of Bourgogne. This was exactly the area where the de Charnys lived and prospered, always having to cope with the difficult games forced by the presence of these mighty lords.[70]
The Templar preceptor of Normandy, Geoffroy de Charny and the Bearer of the Oriflamme of France who owned the Shroud in the mid-thirteen hundreds, belonged in all likelihood to the same family, even though the sources don’t allow us to check in detail the exact degree of kinship. The De Charnys had connected themselves with the order of the Temple towards the end of the 12th century; in 1170 Guy sold a wood to the Temple, but his sons Haton and Symon, 11 years later, were to donate to the Order 15 arpenta of land, while in 1262 another member of the lineage, Adam, will make a gift to the order of the fief of Valbardin. It is to be noticed that these gifts often were made as “dowries” for a son about to enter the Order. The Templar domain in Charny was only a quarter of a league away from the command. Thanks to the cartulary of Provins we are informed that in 1241 a Templar by the name of Hugues de Charny was living, and he may well be an uncle of the future Preceptor of Normandy.[71]
The family were also concerned (though indirectly) with another event that concerned the Shroud closely: the fourth crusade, with the dreadful sack of Constantinople during which the relic vanished. Count Guillaume de Champlitte, one of the leading barons who took part in the storming of Constantinople and then became Prince of Achaia, sought the hand of Elisabeth of the lineage of Mont Saint-Jean, lords of Charny. Already by the mid-twelfth century the fief of Charny was very closely connected to the de Courtenay family: Peter I de Courtenay, lord of Charny among other fiefs and youngest son of Louis the Fat, King of France, was the father of Peter II de Courtenay, who would become Emperor of Constantinople in 1205; one year after the conquest of the Greek metropolis, a member of the de Courtenay lineage resided in Charny castle. Later, even after the Greeks had recovered the Eastern Empire, the de Charnys kept significant contact with the fiefs they had built up over there; early in the 1300s, the knight Dreux de Charny married the noblewoman Agnès, heir of the Greek lordship of Vostzitza.[72]
Known sources anyway suggest that the family de Charny did not come into the Shroud’s possession immediately after the great sack, but many decades later.
The tragedy of the fourth crusade
On 10 October 1202, the army of the fourth crusade sailed from the strand of Venice under the leadership of Marquess Boniface of Montferrat. It was a vast contingent, made up of about 33,000 crusaders, largely of French origin, and about 17,000 Venetians. The strand of the mighty sea power was as far as the French barons with their feudal levies had been able to come; they had been forced to wait far longer than anyone had imagined: apart from sincere intentions to recover Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre, the accounts had been very badly drawn up, and organisers had ended up with getting in heavy debt with the Republic’s dockyards. The shipbuilders had dedicated whole months to the Crusade and now wanted to be paid. So the expedition was being born with a grave weakness: economic interests placed a mighty control over religious ideals, a control that would eventually prove able to stifle them. In previous months, when it had become known that the Crusade was intended to attack Egypt, the Venetians had grown very reluctant to accept it, because they saw no advantage in investing in an idea that would not have been particularly profitable for their city. The Doge kept the delegates waiting no less than two weeks, then made a counter-proposal: Venice would provide the transport ships for the crusaders and one full year’s supplies in exchange for costs being covered in advance and the right to a half of what would be conquered. The French barons accepted without delay, showing some considerable naivety.[73]
After stopping in Pola to clear the shore from pirates, on 10 November the fleet attacked Zadar (Zara): that was a grim omen of the future, for the Venetians compelled the army to loot the city, which was Christian but belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary and was a prime target for Venice. They wintered near Zara, the sea be
ing too stormy to risk travelling on; then, when the fair seasons returned, the fleet struck a course towards Corfu. Meanwhile, the other half of the Christian army was waiting in the Holy Land; after Pope Innocent III’s call, all the forces of the Christian kingdom had mobilised, and the military orders, the Templars and Hospitallers, had worked out a plan of operation: as soon as it reached the coast of Syria, the army from Europe was to organise an expedition to shore up Christian presence in northern Syria and up to Armenia. Then Egypt would have to be attacked, because that was where the reinforcements to Jerusalem’s Muslim masters were coming.[74]
By the spring of 1203, the army was preparing to sail away from Corfu, but a change had been made: the leaders had decided to alter their route and go through Constantinople, the mighty capital of the Greek Empire that stretched on both sides of the Bosporus. Several reasons were mentioned, but the most popular was to do with the sad fate of the legitimate Greek Emperor Isaac II Angelos, who was blinded and overthrown. His son Alexius had escaped to Europe and taken refuge with his sister, who had married Philip of Swabia, the brother of Emperor Henry VI; Philip had then asked for the Crusader troops to make their way to Constantinople and help his brother-in-law Alexius to recover power. It was just a matter of helping the legitimate dynasty, who would then, in gratitude, help the Crusade by placing at its disposal a considerable slice of the Byzantine army. Many lords were not convinced, however, they may have perceived that matters were getting out of hand, and so they abandoned the expedition and made their way to the Holy Land on their own.[75]
The Templars and the Shroud of Christ Page 12