Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion

by Jonathan Sumption

  Similar considerations applied a fortiori to the dismemberment of bodies. But this too was ultimately permitted in both east and west. This development, the source of most of the abuses of the mediaeval period, was readily justified by eastern theologians. Theodoret of Cyrus proclaimed that ‘in the divided body the grace survives undivided and the fragments, however small, have the same efficacy as the whole body.’ Victricius, bishop of Rouen, himself an enthusiastic collector of relics, uttered the same opinion at the beginning of the fifth century. In the Latin Church, however, dismemberment continued to be regarded with distaste. Gregory of Tours once met a Syrian merchant who was offering a detached finger bone for sale, ‘though not, I think, with the approval of the martyr’. When bodies were dismembered, efforts were sometimes made to secure the saint’s approval; the priest whom St. Radegonde sent to collect some relics of St. Mammas reported that on his approach a finger had detached itself from the body of its own accord.

  The practice of fasting and praying before removing a relic was a survival of these ancient prejudices. Gregory of Tours reported that three bishops fasted for three days before opening a casket containing the blood of John the Baptist. Similar austerities were considered advisable in much later periods. When the Bohemians captured Gnesen in 1039 they were prevented by divine intervention from removing the body of St. Adalbert until they had fasted for three days, renounced polygamy, and promulgated effective laws against murder and rape. The elaborate precautions taken by abbot Samson of Bury before opening the tomb of St. Edmund are recorded by his biographer Jocelyn of Brakeland. The rebuilding of the abbey church had made it necessary to move the coffin and Samson, accompanied by a chosen few, flagellated himself and dressed in white robes before proceeding to lift the lid of the coffin. Even then Samson did not dare unwrap the saint’s winding sheet but cradled his head in his arms and said: ‘Glorious martyr St. Edmund, … condemn me not to perdition for this my boldness that I, a miserable sinner, now touch thee. Thou knowest my devotion and my good intent.’

  Two factors combined to create an unprecedented demand for relics, however dubious the source. The first was the growing feeling that relics were necessary for the consecration of churches. Relics must have been used for the consecration of Roman churches as early as the fourth century, for on the famous occasion of the invention of the relics of St. Gervaise and St. Proteus, the crowd shouted ‘consecrate it in the Roman manner’, to which Ambrose answered ‘I will if I find relics.’ Similarly Gregory the Great sent to Augustine and his fellow-missionaries in England ‘all things needed for the worship of the church, namely sacred vessels, altar linen, ornaments, priestly vestments, and relics of the holy apostles and martyrs.’ In 787 the second council of Nicaea insisted on the use of relics in the consecration of new churches and decreed that any churches which had been consecrated without them should acquire some as soon as possible. The conversion of northern France, England, and Germany brought into the Christian fold nations with few indigenous martyrs, who were obliged to acquire their relics abroad. In practice they usually acquired them in Rome, and the eighth and ninth centuries saw an unprecedented series of translations and partitions of the relics of Rome for the benefit of her newly converted daughters.

  The second factor, which was of far greater long term importance, was the accumulation of enormous private collections of relics by connoisseurs at least as avid as the wealthy art collectors of post-Renaissance Europe. The earliest and most successful of these were the emperors of Byzantium whose collection, built up over five centuries, was dramatically dispersed across the face of western Europe when the fourth Crusade took Constantinople in 1204. This extraordinarily large and varied collection was lodged partly in the churches of the city, and partly in the various royal palaces. It was a constant source of wonder to Latins who passed through on their way to the Holy Land. When Amaury, king of Jerusalem, visited the emperor Manuel Comnenus in 1171 he was taken aback by the rich display of silks, jewels, and reliquaries in the imperial chapels. Surviving lists demonstrate that most princes of western Europe at all times expended a great deal of money and energy in enlarging their collections. Charlemagne and the German emperors accumulated an astonishing collection of relics at Aachen, many of which had come by more or less devious routes from Constantinople. Henry I of England sent emissaries to acquire relics in Constantinople, and he appears to have given much of his substantial collection to Reading abbey. Louis IX of France endowed the Sainte Chapelle with the crown of thorns, a portion of the true Cross, a piece of the Holy Lance, and fragments of the purple cloak of Christ, all of which had been sold or given to him by the bankrupt Latin emperor of Constantinople.

  The unrestrained popular enthusiasm which greeted each new accession of the Byzantine collection demonstrates that relics were regarded as a proper object of national pride. On occasions the emperors were prepared to forgo significant political advantages in order to acquire an important relic. In 944, for example, the army of the emperor Romanus Lecapenus, at the climax of its triumphal campaign in Asia Minor, spared Edessa and released two hundred captives in return for the celebrated portrait of Christ which was preserved there. This attitude to relics explains much of the frenzied acquisitiveness of Latin rulers and their subjects throughout our period. Relics were the guarantors of political prestige and spiritual authority. William of Malmesbury described Cologne as ‘the metropolitan city of Germany … with the patronage of the saints’. France, declared a French monk of the eleventh century, was ‘like the treasure-house of the Lord’ on account of the priceless relics that were to be found there. A sermon of Walter Suffield, bishop of Norwich, was largely devoted to the proposition that England was exalted above other nations by its collections of relics. The occasion was the translation in 1244 of a vase of the blood of Christ to Westminster abbey together with ‘numerous sealed documents attesting its authenticity’. In the course of his speech, the bishop recalled that Louis IX of France had recently acquired a fragment of the True Cross.

  ‘But we must consider not the nature of matter but the causes thereof. Now it is true that the Cross is a very holy relic but it is holy only because it came into contact with the precious blood of Christ. The holiness of the Cross derives from the blood whereas the holiness of the blood in no way derives from the Cross. It therefore follows that England, which possesses the blood of Christ, rejoices in a greater treasure than France, which has no more than the Cross.’

  Not only a nation but a region, a city, or an individual, acquired new status when it obtained a valuable relic. To a powerful collector, the body of a saint might quite literally be worth more than gold or silver. So much was admitted by Fernando count of Carrion who, when collecting his debts from the emir of Cordova in 1047, rejected all the bullion that he was offered: ‘of gold and silver I have enough already; give me the body of St. Zoyl.’

  The Sale and Theft of Relics

  So long as even an august churchman like Gregory of Tours was satisfied with brandea, few problems arose. But as soon as they began to insist on bodily relics the demand rapidly outstripped the supply and a nefarious trade in relics sprang up which provided a constant source of indignation among satirists and reformers from the fourth century to the sixteenth. When the eastern Church abandoned its objections to the translation of relics, the itinerant salesman came into his own. St. Augustine complains of wandering relic-hawkers dressed as monks at the beginning of the fifth century, while Gregory of Tours mentions with distaste the activities of Syrian merchants in France.

  By the ninth century there was a large market for relics in the newly founded abbeys of northern Europe, which was supplied by highly professional relic merchants. In the 820s a Roman deacon called Deusdona is known to have travelled to Aix in order to sell relics looted from the Roman catacombs to churchmen at the court of Louis the Pious. Hilduin, abbot of St.-Medard of Soissons, and Einhard, the biographer of Charlemagne, were among his clients, ‘and by this means’, we are told
, ‘he succeeded in supplementing his low income.’ In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the sale of relics was practised on an alarming scale and active measures were taken to discourage it. Emma, Canute’s queen, bought several relics of doubtful authenticity. The bishop of Benevento sold her the arm of St. Bartholomew in 1017, having come to England for the express purpose of finding a buyer. During her exile in Rouen after 1016 she bought several bones of St. Ouen, at the thought of which William of Malmesbury blanched when describing it a century later, even though his own monastery proved to be the ultimate beneficiary. The trade in relics reached epidemic proportions after the sack of Constantinople in 1204, when the market was inundated with objects whose authenticity was impossible to prove. The fourth Lateran council condemned the traffic as sacrilege and simony but this did not prevent Jean d’Alluye, for example, from selling a piece of the True Cross to the abbey of La Boissière for 533 livres tournois. Nor did it deter Baldwin, the impecunious Latin emperor of Constantinople, from pawning the crown of thorns to the Venetians for 13,075 livres in order to mount a campaign against the Bulgars.

  Few relic merchants had satisfactory credentials and fewer still could explain the origin of their wares. For this reason, the more important collectors preferred to steal relics than to buy them. Many of the greatest pilgrimage churches in Europe, including St. Benedict at Fleury, St. Foy at Conques, St. Nicholas of Bari and St. Mark in Venice, owed their prosperity to some pious theft. Einhard, friend of Charlemagne and founder of the abbey of Seligenstadt, had no compunction about stealing the bodies of Marcellinus and Peter from the Roman catacombs; his servant prised open the tomb with his own hands. Pilgrims were constantly attempting to steal relics, and as early as 385 armed deacons surrounded the True Cross at Jerusalem in order to prevent pilgrims from kissing it and taking a splinter away in their teeth. Fulk Nerra count of Anjou was alleged to have obtained a splinter in this way when he visited Jerusalem at the beginning of the eleventh century, and at Bury St. Edmunds, pilgrims to the shrine of the martyr king had to be prevented from biting off pieces of the gilt.

  It is clear that contemporaries did not consider it possible to have any property in the body of a saint, and accordingly the customary canons of ethical behaviour did not apply to relics. This attitude is found in Greek hagiography very early but it does not make its appearance in the west until the seventh century or later. One of the earliest attempts to give moral justification to an audacious theft is found in the official account of the translation of the bodies of St. Benedict and St. Scholastica from Monte Cassino to Fleury. This event occurred at the end of the seventh century after the devastation of the abbey of Monte Cassino by the Lombards. According to the oldest account a French priest visited the ruins and, finding the tomb of the two saints in the midst of the desolation, placed them in a casket and carried them off to France. The body of St. Benedict was laid in the recently founded abbey of Fleury on the Loire, while his sister was taken to Le Mans. The official account by Adrevald, a monk of Fleury, was not composed until two centuries later, and it is full of apocryphal details designed to prove that God and St. Benedict had brought the translation about. Here we learn that abbot Mummolus was advised in a vision of the desolate state of Monte Cassino, while a similar vision was vouchsafed to the clergy of Le Mans. Two parties of clergy made their way to Monte Cassino, where a divine revelation led them to the tomb. Further miracles saved them from pursuit by the Romans and Lombards by causing night suddenly to descend. As soon as they had reached the Loire valley a man blind from birth was healed and a constant succession of miracles began which had not ceased in the writer’s own day. In this account we have all the elements of the classic mediaeval justification for the theft of relics, which remained for several centuries the stock-in-trade of hagiographical writers: neglect of the saint in his former resting-place; revelation of his whereabouts to the thieves; divine assistance in accomplishing the theft; constant miracles on their return.

  One of the more remarkable thefts justified according to this formula was the translation of St. Nicholas to Bari in 1087. St. Nicholas was a bishop of Myra on the Lycian coast of Asia Minor, who was believed (on no very sound basis) to have been martyred during the persecution of Diocletian. His body had been preserved at Myra for several centuries, but recurrent raids by Arab pirates had depopulated the region, and after the collapse of Byzantine power at Manzikert in 1071 the city was almost entirely deserted by its inhabitants. In the spring of 1087, several merchants of Bari met on a trading mission to Antioch and resolved to remove the saint to their native city. They completed their business as quickly as possible, purchased some crowbars and sailed to Myra. Forty-seven men, heavily armed and carrying the crowbars, knocked at the door of the monastery of St. Nicholas and asked to be admitted to pray at the shrine. Their prayer completed, they turned on the monks and demanded to know where the martyr lay, declaring that the pope himself had ordered them to remove the body ‘on the express instructions of St. Nicholas who had appeared to him in a dream.’ After threatening the monks with a naked sword, they located the body, disinterred it, and removed it to Bari where spectacular miracles immediately occurred.

  The author of this account plainly believed that the theft was a pious act and that the end justified the means ‘for as it is written in scripture, bona est fraus quae nemini nocet’ – there is no harm in deceit if no one is injured. The fundamental argument of the author, an Italian Greek called Nicephorus, is that St. Nicholas demanded proper veneration and this the partially depopulated city of Myra was no longer able to give him. Bari on the other hand was at the height of its prosperity in the eleventh century, and its citizens were particularly devoted to St. Nicholas. According to Nicephorus the thieves replied to the protests of the citizens of Myra with the argument: ‘We too are worshippers of Almighty God, so why distress yourselves? You have had the precious body of St. Nicholas for 775 years and St. Nicholas has now decided to bestow his favours on another place …. The city of Bari deserves him.’ Thus it was that the distribution of relics could be changed in accordance with a new balance of power and prosperity among nations. The thieves further argued that if St. Nicholas had desired to remain in Myra he would have intervened miraculously to prevent his removal. ‘Do you suppose’, asked the monks of Myra, ‘that St. Nicholas will permit you to take him away?’ And Nicephorus reports that when St. Nicholas offered no resistance the monks cried out ‘with lamentable wails’, realizing that it was their punishment for deserting the shrine when the Turks had attacked the city some years before. ‘We left him alone in the town and now he is leaving us to the mercy of the Turks…. It is clear that we are unworthy of so great a saint.’ Then, when the thieves picked up the relics, they exuded a miraculous odour ‘and everyone rejoiced for thus they knew that St. Nicholas consented to his translation.’

  The view that the saint had a mind of his own to decide where he wished to be venerated amounted to a real conviction which was no doubt sincerely held by the thieves who translated St. Nicholas to Bari. According to Adrevald of Fleury (the story is certainly apocryphal), St. Benedict intervened to prevent Pippin from restoring his relics to the monks of Monte Cassino: ‘The holy saint will only permit himself to be moved of his own free will’, the abbot of Fleury is supposed to have said, ‘… and if it is indeed his wish, on account of our sins, to leave France and return to his native country, then there is nothing we can do to prevent him.’ One of the commonest stories found in mediaeval miracle collections relates that a body remained rooted to the spot as soon as impious hands tried to move it without the saint’s consent. A single example will stand in lieu of many. In 1053 Garcia, king of Navarre, resolved to move the body of St. Millan, an obscure Spanish saint of the sixth century, from Cogolla to Nájera where he had recently built a church in honour of the Blessed Virgin. A powerful deputation led by several bishops was sent to Cogolla for this purpose. The monks were unable to resist and the sequel might have been like the story of
St. Nicholas of Myra. ‘But God, the consoler of the troubled, had otherwise disposed. As soon as the party set out on the road with the coffin and entered the valley, the coffin suddenly refused to move an inch further and became so heavy that the bearers had to lay it down.’ Garcia resigned himself to respecting the wishes of the saint and built an oratory on the spot where the miracle had occurred. The author of the twelfth-century Guide for Pilgrims to Santiago believed that such incidents were regular occurrences, and repeated a legend to the effect that four saints, St. James himself, St. Martin of Tours, St. Leonard, and St. Gilles had resisted all attempts to move them, even by the king of France.

  August churchmen of saintly reputation are known to have shared the view that the sanctity of property did not extend to relics, that one was entitled to whatever one could get by fair means or foul. St. Hugh of Lincoln, then staying as a guest at the abbey of Fécamp, was permitted to see the arm of St. Mary Magdalene, which was tightly wrapped in cloth bandages that the monks had never dared to open. In spite of the furious protests of the surrounding monks he took out a knife, cut open the wrapping, and tried to break a piece off. On finding it too hard he bit at a finger with his teeth, ‘first with his incisors and finally with his molars’, and by this means broke off two fragments which he handed to his biographer for safe-keeping. Turning to the abbot, Hugh remarked: ‘If a little while ago I handled the sacred body of the Lord with my fingers in spite of my unworthiness, and partook of it with my lips and my teeth, why should I not treat the bones of the saints in the same way … and without profanity acquire them whenever I can.’ So long as St. Hugh’s attitude prevailed it is no surprise to learn that churches with valuable relics took elaborate precautions against theft. The Lateran Council of 1215 instructed that relics were not to be exposed except in a reliquary, and a provincial synod in Bordeaux in 1255 forbade the removal of relics from their reliquaries in any circumstances whatever. Whenever the relics of St. Cuthbert were exposed at Durham, a group of monks was appointed to stand guard over them all night. Four armed men stood guard day and night in Chartres cathedral in the fourteenth century. When the Spanish traveller Pero Tafur visited the Lateran basilica in Rome in 1437, he found the portrait of Christ by St. Luke perpetually guarded by four men with iron maces.