It was against the backdrop of this sorry affair that Helena embarked on the journey which has come to define her life, a journey undertaken when she was approaching eighty years of age and just a couple of years away from her own death. As the dust settled on Fausta’s and Crispus’s deaths, the emperor’s elderly mother departed in around 327 on a ‘pilgrimage’ to the Holy Land, accompanied only by her own entourage. The aim, according to Eusebius, was to trace the footsteps of Jesus Christ, and ‘to inspect with imperial concern the eastern provinces with their communities and peoples’. He went on to record the highlights of the trip, which included her dedication of churches on the sites of important episodes in Christian history, including the cave of the nativity in Bethlehem and the point on the Mount of Olives where Jesus was said to have ascended to heaven. Besides the Church of the Nativity and the Church of the Ascension, she supervised the construction of a large number of other churches in the region, all in the name of her son. As the Augusta’s impressive cavalcade passed through each new town, crowds of townsfolk gathered to see her go by, hoping to benefit from the generous cash and clothing handouts she doled out to the poor, courtesy of the imperial treasury on which Constantine had given Helena permission to draw. Others such as soldiers and mine-workers also profited from her largesse:
… she showered countless gifts upon the citizen bodies of every city, and privately to each of those who approached her; and she made countless distributions also to the ranks of the soldiery with magnificent hand. She made innumerable gifts to the unclothed and unsupported poor, to some making gifts of money, to others abundantly supplying what was needed to cover the body. Others she set free from prison and from mines where they laboured in harsh conditions, she released the victims of fraud, and yet others she recalled from exile.56
Eusebius was adamant that Helena’s journey was motivated by personal Christian piety, but acknowledged too the demands of imperial duty that required her attention. The timing of the trip has inevitably fostered the suspicion that Helena’s departure was connected to the deaths of Faustus and Crispus, that it was a stunt designed to distract attention from the unpleasant aftertaste of the murders, as well as to appease discontent in the eastern provinces, so recently won from Licinius. The reported presence among the party of Fausta’s mother Eutropia adds fat to the fire, intimating that the latter had perhaps been co-opted into a demonstration of Constantinian family unity.57
As with the question of whether Constantine’s ‘conversion’ to Christianity was genuine, Helena’s own personal religious faith has been the subject of close scrutiny. In his obituary for her, Eusebius declared that Constantine had ‘made her Godfearing, though she had not been such before’. This version of events was both embellished and subverted by Christian writers of late antiquity and their medieval counterparts, who claimed that Helena was a follower of Judaism, and that she had written to Constantine from her home town of Drepanum, trying to persuade her son towards that faith too. But Pope Sylvester, popularly known in art and literature as the man who baptised Constantine after curing him of leprosy, had triumphed in a public theological debate with twelve rabbis, and through his miraculous resuscitation of a dead bull, stunned Helena into switching sides, and converting to Christianity. Meanwhile, other chroniclers insisted that it was Helena who converted Constantine, not the other way around.58
Although women had indeed played a significant role in proselytising on behalf of Christianity, long before Constantine came along, the question of whether Helena came to Christianity before or after Constantine, and how fervent was her conviction in her adopted faith, can never be known. The sight of an Augusta touring the empire’s holdings, making charitable handouts and dedicating new building projects, was of course by no means a novelty. Livia, Agrippina Maior, Sabina and Julia Domna had all spent long periods on the road as companions to their husbands, doing just that, and the familiarity of such foreign tours provides a counterweight to conspiracy theories which insist Helena’s journey must have been a hastily orchestrated gesture aimed at smoothing the waters after Fausta’s and Crispus’s deaths. Nor did Helena invent the concept of pilgrimage to the Holy Land – other Christian wayfarers had gone before her.
But Helena was the first pilgrim about whom detailed information survives, and crucially, what makes her different from Sabina, Domna and her counterparts is that Helena was the first imperial woman to make such a journey alone – in other words, without her husband or son accompanying her – and under a banner of personal religious conviction. In doing so, not only did she popularise pilgrimage to the Holy Land, she became the trailblazer for a generation of imperial and elite women who followed in her footsteps. These women included Paula, a close intimate of Jerome, who wrote an epitaph recording her journey of the 380s; Egeria, travelling in the same decade, who wrote her own account of her travels; and the two Melanias – Melania the Elder, an ascetic member of the senatorial elite who founded monasteries in Jerusalem, and her granddaughter Melania the Younger. The latter was a friend of Aelia Eudocia, wife of fifth-century emperor Theodosius II, and inspired the empress to make the trip to the Holy Land not once, but twice.59
For Aelia Eudocia and her fellow fourth- and fifth-century female travellers, including her sister-in-law Pulcheria and granddaughter Eudocia – whose stories will round off our gallery of Roman women – Helena was the figurehead. It was she who prescribed the model for the philanthropic behaviour they would emulate and who established the itinerary for the holy sites they and other Christian pilgrims would visit. One of these of course was Jerusalem, where Helena had been entrusted by Constantine with monitoring building works in the city. Shortly before his mother’s departure, Constantine had written to the Bishop of Jerusalem, Macarius, commissioning a magnificent church to be built over a recently excavated area near the crucifixion site of Golgotha, where what was believed to be the tomb of Jesus had been discovered.60 Although a few later writers assumed that the resulting Church of the Holy Sepulchre was the personal commission of Constantine’s mother – and the pilgrim Egeria wrote in her travel diary of 381–4 that Helena had personally overseen her son’s decoration of the building – it is virtually certain that the church and the excavations which attended its construction could only have been initiated on the say-so of Constantine. Still, despite the fact that no commentator during her lifetime referred to the revelation, it was during her activities in Jerusalem that history credited Helena with the personal discovery of the hiding place of the True Cross, the cross on which Jesus had been crucified and the most revered symbol in Christianity.61
That an object considered to be the True Cross was indeed discovered in the first half of the fourth century, perhaps in the excavations beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, is very plausible. Certainly a profusion of highly coveted ‘relics’ from it appeared during that period in churches as far afield as North Africa. In around 350, Bishop Cyril of Jerusalem referred to the dispersal of these wood fragments of the cross all around the Mediterranean and in a letter to the ruling emperor of that time, Constantius II, even spoke of the ‘saving wood of the Cross’ being found in Jerusalem during the reign of that ruler’s father, Constantine.62 But the earliest surviving account of Helena’s personal role in its discovery dates some sixty years after her death, when Bishop Ambrose of Milan delivered his obituary for the emperor Theodosius I on 25 February 395. Recalling the mother of the Christian dynasty whose mantle Theodosius had inherited, Ambrose described how Helena resolved to search for the wood of the cross at Golgotha, and how she identified the True Cross from a jumble of rival candidates:
And so she opens the ground; she casts off the dust. She finds three forked-shaped gibbets thrown together, which the debris had covered; which the enemy had hidden … she hesitates, as a woman, but the Holy Spirit inspires a careful investigation, with the thought that two robbers had been crucified with the Lord. Therefore, she seeks the middle wood, but it could have happened that the debris mixed
up the crosses one with another, and chance interchanged them. She returned to the text of Gospel, and found that on the middle gibbet a title had been displayed ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews’.63
Ambrose’s Helena proceeded to scrabble around for the nails with which Christ had been crucified, and on discovering them, had one worked into a bridle and the other into a jewelled crown, both of which she sent to her son. These most Christian of symbols thus came into the guardianship of the Constantinian dynasty, and effectively become part of the Roman crown jewels – a useful epitaph to a sermon aimed at glorifying one of Constantine’s Christian heirs.
Ambrose did not invent the story of Helena’s discovery himself. It can be traced at least as far back as an author named Gelasius of Caesarea, who published a version (now lost but reconstructed thanks to fragments) of the finding of the cross a few years earlier in around 390. His account, in which Helena was able to identify the True Cross when its application against the body of a seriously ill woman cured her, spawned a number of fifth-century imitations.64 Scholars to this day remain locked in debate over the question of whether Helena’s really could have been the hand behind the cross’s discovery. The most convincing argument against her having found the cross, its authenticity notwithstanding, is that Eusebius, Constantine’s hagiographer and contemporaneous author of the only account we have of Helena’s journey to the Holy Land, makes absolutely no reference to it. Why would Eusebius have missed the opportunity to publicise such an enormous coup for Constantine and his mother?65
Despite Eusebius’s omission, it would be impossible to overstate the popularity and scope that the legend of Helena’s discovery enjoyed in the literature and art of late antiquity right through to the present era. Several splinter versions of Ambrose’s main narrative developed in the fifth century, including a Syrian account which ignored Helena altogether and instead claimed that a fictional wife of the Emperor Claudius named Protonike discovered the cross. The most famous and influential narrative, however, was the so-called Judas Cyriacus version, also originating in Syria, which had it that a recalcitrant Jew named Judas reluctantly led Helena to the burial place of the three crosses whereupon she proved which was the True Cross by using it to revive a dead man. Convinced by this miracle, Judas was converted and baptised under the new Christian pseudonym of Cyriacus (‘the Lord’s own’), and the story concludes with Helena ordering that all the Jews should be banished from Judaea. In the Middle Ages, this version was a particular favourite, no doubt thanks to its anti-Semitic sentiment, surviving in over 200 manuscript accounts from the sixth century onwards, and used as source material for early English poems such as Cynewulf’s ninth-century Elene and for Jacob of Voragine’s thirteenth-century compilation of saints’ legends, the Legenda Aurea, one of the most widely read and translated books in western Europe.66
Art, as well as literature, adopted Helena’s popular association with the True Cross in myriad forms. Paolo Veronese’s The Dream of St Helena in the National Gallery in London, shows a young Helena propped up by her elbow against the frame of an open window, dreaming as a cross supported by two cherubs appears in the sky above.67 A standard iconographical type of Helena and Constantine standing on either side of the cross developed from the late fourth century onwards in Byzantine art, an interpretation of which can be seen today on a small gilt-silver altar in the collection of New York’s Pierpoint Morgan Library, known as the Stavelot Triptych. This exquisite object, thought to have been brought from Constantinople to the west in around 1155, features various scenes from Helena’s life alongside Constantine’s, including her discovery and verification of the cross, while in the centre panel, Helena and Constantine are portrayed on either side of what is said to be a reliquary of the True Cross.68 An estimated 1,150 separate relics of the cross have been counted in total from the available sources since the fourth century. Today, in churches all over Europe which boast relics of the True Cross among their collections, one can be almost certain of finding a fresco or stained-glass window depicting Helena too, be it in the cathedral of Cologne, or Rome’s Basilica di Santa Croce in Gerusalemme.69
Helena returned to Rome from the Holy Land in 328 or 329, and died not long afterwards. The exact date and place of her death are unknown, but since coins featuring her image ceased to be produced after the spring of 329, it can be inferred that she did not live beyond that date. According to Eusebius, she carefully put her affairs in order as her end approached, drawing up her will in favour of Constantine and her grandchildren and dividing up her estate and possessions between them. Her son was with her when she died, ‘ministering and holding her hands … her very soul was thus reconstituted into an incorruptible and angelic essence as she was taken up to her Saviour’.70
The fate of Helena’s remains, like so much of her life, is full of plot twists. According to Eusebius, a military escort accompanied her as ‘she was carried up to the imperial city, and there laid in the imperial tombs’. Since the imperial city in question almost certainly referred to Rome, the implication is that she was not in that city when she died, and since Constantine seems to have been in Trier campaigning against German tribes in the autumn of 328, it may well have been here that Helena breathed her last.71 But a writer in the fifth century, Socrates Scholasticus, took the imperial city to mean Constantinople, where Helena’s son was entombed, thus giving birth to a medieval tourist industry in which travellers came to marvel at the tomb of ‘Constantine and Helena’. An alternative claim was peddled that after the fall of Constaninople in 1204, Helena’s relics were moved to Venice.72
It is virtually certain, however, that Helena’s real resting-place was a vaulted mausoleum which Constantine built on her fundus Laurentus estate, adjoining the basilica dedicated to Marcellinus and Peter.73 It is known today as the Tor Pignattara, and medieval guidebooks to the area recognised this spacious, single-roomed structure’s claim to be Helena’s tomb. A list of the opulent gifts Constantine was said to have left in his mother’s mausoleum, including four 12-feet-high (3.6-metres-high) silver candelabra weighing 200 pounds (90 kg) each and a chandelier decorated with 120 dolphins, records that an enormous silver altar stood before the great porphyry tomb. In the mid-twelfth century, Pope Anastasius IV decided that the sarcophagus should serve as his own tomb and instructed that it be relocated to the Lateran basilica, and eventually, under the aegis of Pope Pius VI, it found its way to the Vatican, where, by now heavily damaged, it was restored. It has remained there ever since, a vast, curiously militaristic affair, indicating that it was once intended for the remains of a male member of the imperial family, perhaps even Helena’s son himself.74
When Anastasius appropriated Helena’s sarcophagus for his own funeral, it was, however, almost certainly empty. A ninth-century source reported that in 840, during evening prayers, a monk named Theogisus stole some of Helena’s treasured remains and carried them back to the Benedictine abbey of Hautvillers, near Reims. Three centuries later, to prevent further depredations on the tomb, Pope Innocentius II (1130–43) ordered what was left of Helena’s corpse, including her head, to be moved for safe keeping to the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, in the centre of Rome. Today, visitors to this church, situated on the old Capitoline hill, will find a porphyry urn whose inscription bears the claim that it holds the remains of St Helena.75
Santa Maria in Aracoeli is one of many churches and monasteries across Europe which have claimed ownership of relics of Helena’s body at one time or another, from Trier Cathedral to Echternach in Luxembourg. Given the roaring trade in relics in the Middle Ages, which led to her ‘tomb’ at Hautvillers being raided repeatedly between the eleventh and seventeenth centuries, there is every reason to believe medieval reports that Helena’s tomb was a prime target for grave-robbers, even if many relic-merchants were inevitably trading in fakes.76 Everyone wanted a piece of Helena, whose sainthood was a generally recognised fact in both the west and the east by the eleventh century, and from her death to the pr
esent day, rival cities and churches have keenly contested the right to claim true ownership of her story.77
In consequence, Helena’s afterlife is a richly colourful tapestry woven of claim and counter-claim, fact and fiction, history and myth. Among those who have claimed her most passionately for their own is the English town of Colchester, which still names Helena as its patron saint. In the twelfth century, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s influential and doggedly nationalistic Historia Regum Britanniae was greatly responsible for popularising the belief that Helena was no humble stable-girl from Asia Minor but actually a native of Britain and, furthermore, a daughter of Colchester’s own King Coel (‘old King Cole’ of the nursery rhyme). These legends were in part preoccupied with the canonised Helena who had discovered the True Cross, and whose feast day in the western church calendar was celebrated at least from the ninth century onwards on 18 August, but also with the Augusta Helena – the imperial Roman woman who could provide a link between Britain and the Roman emperor who was claimed as an ancestor by British monarchs including Henry VIII.78
That Britain, the cold northernmost corner of the Roman Empire’s territorial portfolio, should have one of the richest Helena traditions may seem odd, but it is rooted in the strong links between Constantine’s father and the province which later enabled Henry VIII’s claims – Constantius Chlorus died at York, and Constantine was proclaimed emperor there in July 306. One glance at a map of that region reveals countless testimonies to Helena’s popularity there – the city of St Helens on Merseyside, and thirty-four churches named after her in Yorkshire alone.79 Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum was one of the twelfth-century British histories which suggested that Constantius had signed a peace treaty with Coel and then married the British king’s virtuous daughter Helena.80 It was this Helena whom Evelyn Waugh used as his model for the creation of the eponymous heroine in his finished novel, which he ended up naming Helena rather than the original ‘Quest of the Empress Dowager’. Waugh also claimed in correspondence with his friend John Betjeman to have been inspired by the poet’s wife Penelope, which may in part account for the grating tendency of this 1940s Helena to use expressions such as ‘bosh’ and ‘beastly’.81
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