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Constantinople’s Relics, 1204–1261

In March 1204, the secular leaders of the crusading army optimistically drew up an agreement about what to do with Constantinople if they were lucky enough to seize it. All parties swore sacred oaths to adhere to the terms of the treaty, which became known as the “March Pact.” The pact governed nearly every aspect of the division of Constantinople’s wealth. It mandated that all plunder be brought to one of three central locations so that it could be doled out appropriately. It stated that the Franks would pay off their debt to the Venetians before all parties split the rest of the plunder. It contained a mechanism for electing a new emperor and another for dividing up the property of the Greek church. Still other passages governed the division of the lands of the empire outside the city and protected Venetian trading hegemony. Both contemporary sources and modern scholarship have used the pact as a template for talking about the division of spoils and have argued about the extent to which the crusaders followed their own plan.¹

The March Pact does not mention relics or other moveable types of sacred items (altarpieces, works of religious art, icons, and so forth). In fact, no document written either before or after the pact reliably describes the process by which such objects were intended to be distributed or were in fact removed and dispersed. The only clear statement about plans for relics comes from the chronicler Robert of Clari, who writes that all the soldiers were required to swear an oath that they would not despoil churches or sacred objects.² Despite such oaths, of course, churches were looted or systematically stripped of value. Over the next few decades, unprecedented numbers of significant holy objects and uncountable numbers of fragments and forgeries from Constantinople appeared in the Latin West.

Due to the memorializing efforts of people such as Pope Innocent III and the Greek chronicler Niketas Choniates, the looting of Constantinople, especially the looting of its churches, has been fraught with controversy. In an angry letter that he widely distributed, Innocent wrote,

How will the Greek Church . . . return to ecclesiastical unity and devotion to the Apostolic See, a church which has seen in the Latins nothing except an example of affliction and the works of Hell, so that now it rightly detests them more than dogs? . . . It was not enough for them [the Latins] to empty the imperial treasuries and to plunder the spoils of princes and lesser folk, but rather they extended their hands to church treasuries and, what was more serious, to their possessions, even ripping away silver tablets from altars and breaking them into pieces among themselves, violating sacristies and crosses, and carrying away relics.³

More verbosely, the Greek chronicler wrote,

Their [the Latins’] disposition was not at all affected by what they saw. . . . Not only did they rob them [the Greeks] of their substance but also the articles consecrated to God. . . . What then should I recount first and what last of those things dared at that time by these murderous men? O, the shameful dashing to earth of the venerable icons and the flinging of the relics of the saints, who had suffered for Christ’s sake, into defiled places! How horrible it was to see the Divine Body and Blood of Christ poured out and thrown to the ground! These forerunners of Antichrist, chief agents and harbingers of his anticipated ungodly deeds, seized as plunder the precious chalices and patens; some they smashed, taking possession of the ornaments embellishing them, and they set the remaining vessels on their tables to serve as bread dishes and wine goblets. Just as happened long ago, Christ was now disrobed and mocked, his garments were parted, and lots were cast for them by this race; and although his side was not pierced by the lance, yet once more streams of Divine Blood poured to the earth.⁴

The pope, the historian, and other medieval writers who agreed with their characterizations established the overarching narrative of sacrilegious pillaging that has remained the consensus ever since. Innocent and Niketas won the battle of memory.

There can be no doubt that horrific violence, rapine, and out-of-control looting filled the first three days after the conquest. Michael Angold has argued that the violence fell within medieval norms for a postconquest city, paling in comparison to the 1099 conquest of Jerusalem or the worst episodes of the Albigensian Crusade. Traditionally, commanders allowed their soldiers three days to pillage and then reasserted control, a process followed in 1204.⁵ Angold thus writes against a long tradition of scholarship that adopts the positions of Niketas and Innocent. For example, Steven Runciman described the sack of Constantinople as “unparalleled in history,” then declaimed, “There was never a greater crime against humanity than the Fourth Crusade.”⁶ In his text, the dispersal of sacred objects, linked to rapacious descriptions of looting and violence, serves as evidence for the atrocities of 1204. But even the myth-eroding work of Donald Queller and Thomas Madden implies a link between the taking of relics and the first three days of looting. After describing a prostitute dancing on the throne of the patriarch, they write, “Equally sought after in the churches and monasteries were Constantinople’s numerous relics. For most, this ‘pious thievery’ was embarrassing enough that they later tried to conceal it.”⁷ Some must indeed have concealed their actions, especially after the looting of churches became the focus of Innocent’s condemnation (the subject of chapter 2). Others, however, commissioned narrative accounts of their exploits, wrote letters and charters, or sponsored new liturgies. This evidence supports a more nuanced narrative than a tale of smash and grab, though plenty of smashing and grabbing occurred.

In this chapter, I argue against a loose conflation of the tumultuous initial looting of the city with the long-term extraction and dispersal of its sacred objects by the Latins in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade. I offer an account of the various means, timing, and rationales employed by the victors of the Fourth Crusade to obtain and export relics. This account provides a context in which to examine the contested ways that crusaders and critics alike memorialized the treatment of Constantinople’s relics.

Certain distinctions among the various cases of relic acquisition serve as organizing principles for the chapter. One can distinguish between haphazard and targeted looting of relics and between authorized and unauthorized acts. Sometimes, crusaders just grabbed whatever they could (haphazard). Other looters consciously sought out relics from saints who were already venerated in their home churches, that were especially valuable, or whose loss would not garner unwanted attention (targeted). At other times, commanding nobles and elite clerics took whatever they wanted from churches under their control and sent or carried the relics west without fear (authorized). However, some had to creep secretly through the treasuries or find a way to trick the guardians of the relic (unauthorized).

I also divide the movement of relics from east to west into three distinct phases in order to highlight chronological separation among various acts of relic acquisition. The first phase took place in the weeks immediately after the sack. This period is the most obscured by the chaotic nature of conquest and the concomitant lack of solid documentation, but the available source material does reveal enough fragments of data to draw some rough conclusions about those initial days. The second phase occurred over the next few years, as Constantinople’s new occupants—people directly involved with the events of 1204—took possession of their city, took stock of their churches’ possessions, and, sometimes, chose to send relics west. The great and powerful men of the crusade and new empire figure largely in this period. Doge Enrico Dandolo of Venice, cardinal and papal legate Peter Capuano, and Emperor Baldwin of Flanders stand out as the exemplars in this second phase. During the remaining years of the Latin Empire’s short existence, which I mark as the third phase, relics continued to trickle west via theft, sale, and gift, particularly the latter. The great translation of the relics of the Passion to King Louis IX and many lesser-known translations fall into this category.

The Plan and the Looting: Context for the Relics

The looting of churches took place in a broader environment of postconquest plundering. Despite the reputation of the sack of Constantinople for indiscriminate slaughter, rape, and pillage, the internal sources on the crusade reveal many preemptive efforts to control the looting. The extent to which such plans failed is a separate issue.⁸ The leadership, motivated by self-interest, sought to both monopolize distribution of the great city’s riches and gather the needed coin to pay off their debts. The March Pact represents the culmination of their planning. It proposed a system for apportioning the throne, churches, land, fiefs, and coin of the Byzantine Empire. Sacred items, notably, do not appear in the document.

Why this absence? The Latins were well aware of the sacred richness of the city; indeed, crusaders and Western pilgrims had been marveling at Constantinople’s relic collection throughout the history of the crusades. As early as 1106–7, a forged letter purporting to be from Alexius I invited Latin soldiers to come take possession of Constantinople in order to keep the relics safe from the Turks.⁹ Robert of Clari, a knight of Picardy and author of one of the two main Western eyewitness accounts of the Fourth Crusade, revels in the majesty of the city’s relics and grand churches.¹⁰ Thus, the armies of the Fourth Crusade knew that the relics were present but made no plans regarding how to handle them. Ultimately, their decisions about secular wealth and offices shaped the fate of the relics and the later contest about the meaning of the fall of Constantinople in the Latin world.

The combination of the prohibitive costs of campaigning coupled with the potential bounty of a conquered Constantinople drove much of the crusade’s action. By March 1204, the crusaders still owed another year’s worth of fees to the Venetians. As the Latins drew up their pact, they hoped that the city of Constantinople would pay the now-deceased emperor’s (Alexius IV Angelos’s) debts to the crusaders and the crusaders’ debts to the Venetians.¹¹ The realists among the army must have known that full conquest was highly unlikely, but they still needed a system for handling plunder, lest greed undermine a victory. Previous assaults on Constantinople indicated that they might be able to take, hold, loot, and retreat from a section of the city, even if a full conquest failed. The plan was to mandate, on pain of death, the collection of all valuable goods and coin in centrally guarded sites.¹² Anxious to avoid any conflict over the imperial throne, the crusade’s leadership developed an electoral system that would go into effect as needed. The system would eventually work, but out of necessity the pact ensured that the leadership had not preselected an emperor at the moment that the crusaders entered Constantinople. Hence, as the crusaders began pillaging, no one could claim to be fully in charge.¹³

Toward the end of the March Pact, having dispensed with the apportioning of coin, food, and the throne, its authors turned to other forms of wealth. One paragraph of the pact ultimately not only shaped the division of the property and the offices of the Greek church but also set the stage for the next (postconquest) conflict between the Venetians and the papacy. Both subjects—church property and Venetian-papal dispute—pertain to the fate of the relics. The pact reads,

Let it also be understood that the clergy who are from that party from which the emperor was not chosen will have authority to organize the church of Sancta Sophia and to elect the patriarch for the honor of God. . . . Certainly, the clerics of each party ought to organize those churches that have come into the possession of their party. To be sure, sufficient quantities of the possessions of the churches ought to be provided to the clerics and the churches so that they might live and be sustained in an honorable fashion. The remaining possessions of the churches, indeed, should be divided and distributed in accordance with the aforesaid agreement.¹⁴

The first part of this passage eventually gave control over Hagia Sophia to the Venetians. The subsequent text suggests that all sides would be claiming territory in the city as their own and that whoever took an area might also lay claim to the churches there. Any group of crusaders could seize an area and its churches, but it would not also receive all of the property and rents traditionally owned by a given church. Instead, such property (beyond “sufficient quantities”) went into the general pool of plunder, was split according to the aforementioned guidelines, and was then apportioned by a given faction’s leaders. The framers of the pact might have had relics in mind when they wrote about the “remaining possessions of the churches,” but if so, their plans did not come to fruition. In the end, a central committee handled the issue of control over the churches and their properties, though arguments on this matter continued for decades.¹⁵ Relics never received the same degree of citywide oversight as the churches themselves.

Evidence suggests that the leaders of the crusade made a strong attempt to keep to the terms of their pact, a finding that contrasts with the general tenor of external accounts of the days after the fall of the city. Some common soldiers, of course, had other ideas. Villehardouin, for example, laments that many soldiers did not deposit all of their plunder at one of the three central churches that the crusaders had set up as repositories, despite threats of execution for holding back loot.¹⁶ Clari angrily accuses the treasure’s guards of letting elite knights take whatever they wanted, leaving only the silver for the common soldiers.¹⁷ The anonymous author of the Devastatio Constantinopolitana scornfully characterizes the common shares of the spoil as “almost like certain down-payments.”¹⁸ Scholars argue about how to tally the total wealth collected. They also argue over why the shares were so low, whether the shares were actually as low as stated, how many people and what class of people were hanged for keeping back loot, the fate of jewels and other precious objects not easily divided, and other related issues.¹⁹ If Clari and the author of the Devastatio Constantinopolitana were correct, then the collection system more or less worked (as evidenced by how unhappy they were with the official distribution). If Villehardouin is correct, then common soldiers concealed much of the loot for their personal benefit. Niketas and Innocent ranted about the wild looting, but neither was in as good a position to know the truth as the soldiers present in Constantinople. On the other hand, soldiers were unlikely to confess to sacrilegious outbursts of violence and destruction in internally produced sources. The totality of the evidence suggests that the initial days of the looting were indeed quite chaotic, as described to various degrees by eyewitness sources. Eventually, however, Villehardouin and his fellow elites took control of the city and its wealth and then made an honest effort to collect the treasure centrally. After all, the debt still loomed unpaid.

Thus, we understand the Latin army’s approach to the secular wealth of Constantinople. The leadership tried to assert authority, the better to distribute loot and property in an organized and self-benefitting manner. The rank and file, risking serious punishment but aware of the great wealth available in the city and the difficulty that their leaders would have in enforcing their edict, helped themselves as they could. When able, the leaders punished those they caught, making an example out of the miscreants. Despite the many violent incidents that no doubt took place, no matter how much plunder the rank and file seized in bloody pillaging, the bulk of Constantinople’s vast wealth passed into the hands of the great men of the crusade by the simpler process of occupation, appropriation, and negotiation with one another. The same holds true for the relics.

Phase One: Relics and Looting Immediately Following the Conquest

The crusaders took the walls, frightened off the Greek army, opened the gates, and stormed the city. Many citizens, expecting a more-or-less orderly triumph, lined the streets to welcome the new emperor; alas, for them, no emperor had yet been named and no single leader of the crusade could claim control over the whole city.²⁰ Instead, the various military commanders staked out their own territories. As was typical of the initial days following a conquest, chaos reigned, magnified more by scale than by ferocity. We will never know exactly what happened in the churches of Constantinople in these first hours and days, but out of the confusion and the scant textual evidence, a few faces and deeds emerge. We can begin to tease out a narrative based on scarce data points. An abbot sees soldiers looting the great monastic complex of the Pantocrator and uses that sacrilege to justify a more pious sacrilege of his own. He creeps into a remote part of the complex and bullies a Greek monk into revealing the location of relics, which he then takes into protective custody. A French bishop follows his friend, Boniface of Montferrat, into the Bucoleon Palace and takes command of one of the greatest collections of relics in the world. When the bishop leaves a month later, the collection is missing some pieces. Some Venetian crusaders take advantage of the confusion to scout out the crypt that holds the relics of their patron saint; a week later, while their comrades-in-arms are celebrating Palm Sunday, they steal them. A bishop from Troyes confiscates relics looted by soldiers and carefully apportions them to European and local churches. When he dies, the papal legate takes the bishop’s collection and does the same.

None of the standard reports of the conquest reveal much reliable information about its chaotic first few hours. The incendiary rhetoric of Niketas quoted above represents just the barest fragment of his detailed and horrific description of the sack of Constantinople, for which he mourns. In lurid, tragic tones, the chronicler describes the breaking of the altar, the destruction of priceless works of art, and the stabling of mules in the sanctuary. In an ultimate act of impiety, a prostitute was placed on the throne of the patriarch. After describing the outrages committed against women and the old, Niketas concludes by attacking the crusaders for violating their crusading oath. They had promised not to deviate from their planned course until they found the Saracens, but deviate they had. They had promised not to have sexual intercourse, but now they were raping Greek women. “In truth,” he wrote, “they were exposed as frauds. Seeking to avenge the Holy Sepulchre, they raged openly against Christ and sinned by overturning the Cross with the cross they bore on their backs, not even shuddering to trample on it for the sake of a little gold and silver. By grasping pearls, they rejected Christ.”²¹ Niketas attempts to present the incursion as an unholy war that played out in diametric opposition to the crusaders’ holy mission. With such an agenda, he found the violation of relics rhetorically useful. Of all the crimes committed against the city by the conquering Latins, the chronicler chose to recount the sacrilegious looting first and the breaking of the sacred oath last, thus bookending his account with the worst offenses. Niketas sought to convey his horror at the atrocities committed in the name of Christ by these “Franks,” who should have been trying to liberate the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. He evoked the Antichrist and Judgment Day. He compared the Latins to the most despised people in the New Testament—those who participated in the shaming and execution of Christ. He did not eschew describing the other iniquities of the conquerors but began with the violation of the sacred.²² That decision may reflect a quick sense on his part that the memory of the sack would be ruled by the postconquest behavior of the Latins. That said, his account must largely be rejected.

Niketas was working within the genre of lament, not history, and thus employed hyperbole as a rhetorical strategy. His goal was to blame and weep in prose, not to make a historical argument about causation. Even other elements of his own chronicle call his descriptions into question. Wisely, Niketas was in hiding during the initial chaos, so at best he knew only secondhand of the depredations. As Michael Angold has noted, when Niketas actually encountered crusaders, one Frank did try to rape a girl in his party, but several Italians intervened and threatened to hang the Frank if he did not give her back. She was returned unscathed. The Chronicle of Novgorod, naturally sympathetic to Orthodox clergy, complains about the robbing of clergy and nuns but not of their murder or rape.²³ Another Greek eyewitness, Nicholas Mesarites, tells the story of his brother John, who took refuge in a monastery and faced crusaders who broke into the sacred house without fear. Impressed by his faith, the crusaders treated him with respect and did him no harm.²⁴ If, as Angold has supposed, the leader of the Latins who met John Mesarites in the Monastery of St. George of the Mangana was Count Hugh of Saint-Pol, who took over St. George’s after the conquest, this episode provides more evidence for the quick reassertion of control by the crusade leadership, especially over ecclesiastical properties.²⁵ The Latin leadership did what it could to roll back the fog of war.

The Latin accounts support the notion that the churches of Constantinople were spared significant damage from the looting soldiers, although the fires certainly scorched them. Robert of Clari, representing the viewpoint of the rank-and-file soldier in the army, reserves harsh criticism for the conduct of many of his fellows. He finds the vast riches of Constantinople amazing but also witnesses the tensions that they caused within the army. He writes that, according to the Greeks, Constantinople had been filled with “two-thirds of the wealth of the world.”²⁶ Now that wealth belonged to the Latins. Yet, Clari laments, little of the profit made its way into the hands of the common soldiers. Instead, the victors fought over how much each one should take from the spoils, and many “who ought to have guarded this wealth took the jewels of gold and whatsoever else they desired, and robbed the spoil.”²⁷ These moments of anger and disappointment with his lack of loot stand in stark contrast to his commentary on the relics of the city.

Relics, in Clari’s narrative, receive nothing but words of wonder and praise. He exults in their capture, lists the major acquisitions, and recounts histories and provenance insofar as he knows them. He writes of the Holy Lance, the pieces of the Cross, the robe of Mary, the head of St. John the Baptist, and the shroud of Christ, and then adds that he saw even more relics than he could possibly describe. And these were just the relics that the crusaders found at the Bucoleon Palace. The chance for the Latins to view such holy objects as their “owners”—not as the somewhat unwelcome guests of the Greeks—delighted Clari.

The difference in tone between the descriptions of normal plundering and the capture of relics is striking. When a particular hoard of gold and gems or a piece of property fell into a crusader’s hands, Clari names the crusader (or group) or at least labels the acquisition’s point of origin.²⁸ These statements are usually accompanied by words of condemnation for not properly sharing the plunder. When a crusader found a relic, however, Clari rarely mentions the individual who uncovered it. He reserves his narration for descriptions of the relic and its resting place, expresses wonderment at the miracles associated with the object, and then moves on to the next one. The chronicler was not afraid to document internal divisions in the force or to criticize when his fellows erred or sinned. He presents the acquisition of the relics, however, as a victory for all of the crusaders.

Curiously, the most complete account of the Fourth Crusade, that of Geoffrey of Villehardouin, never refers to the acquisition or looting of relics. As is typical of accounts of crusades, God and providence play active roles in the narrative. Sermons and other religious affairs appear regularly, and relics are mentioned when oaths are sworn over them. Villehardouin even refers to the relics of Constantinople, specifically, in one key passage. After Alexius III had fled and Alexius IV had taken the throne with his father, the chronicler writes, “Now you may know that many people from the army went to look at Constantinople, its sumptuous palaces, its many impressive churches and its great riches, of which no other city ever had as many. It is impossible even to begin to describe all the saints’ relics since there were as many in the city at that time as there were in the rest of the world put together.”²⁹ Villehardouin notes the existence of the relics but omits any reference to the specific objects captured after the final conquest. He discusses plundering in general. He, like Clari, excoriates those who stole valuables for themselves and is quick to point out how the army’s leaders—of which he was one—punished the offenders. Regarding the looting, he writes, “Individuals began to come forward with their booty and it was gathered together. Some were honest in presenting their spoils, others deceitful. Greed, which is the root of all evil, knew no restraint; from that time forward greedy people started to hoard things for themselves, and Our Lord started to love them less. Oh God—they had behaved so loyally up to that point!”³⁰ Villehardouin laments that even the threat of excommunication did not deter these men from keeping some portion of the booty for themselves instead of turning it over to their leaders to be divided “fairly.” That they could ignore the sacred sanctions they were risking seems to have infuriated the chronicler more than their lack of fear of being hanged—the bodily punishment for theft. Had crusaders been breaking into vaults and claiming relics or stripping away golden reliquaries from their sacred bones with wild abandon throughout the city, Villehardouin could have described it as yet another outrage. His silence on the subject might speak to ignorance of such sacrilege or embarrassment about the conduct of his fellow crusaders. On the other hand, perhaps Villehardouin, the best-informed of the Fourth Crusade chroniclers, was silent precisely because whatever pillaging of Greek churches took place did not seem egregious. Rather, it fell within normal medieval conduct of war.

Villehardouin was not alone in omitting any discussion of relics from his account. The Devastatio Constantinopolitana, a harsh critique of the crusade, never mentions the sacred objects removed from Constantinople. This text is a curious and brief account—only five pages in the single extant manuscript—that expends most of its fury on the perfidy of the crusade’s leaders. The author, who felt that the poor men of the crusade had been cheated, emphasized the misdeeds of the Frankish and Venetian leadership, especially when it came to the acquisition of wealth. Had the leadership immediately claimed the relics for themselves personally, rather than opening Constantinople’s shrines and their sacred objects to crusader veneration, one might expect the Devastatio Constantinopolitana to discuss it.³¹

Taken as a whole, these arguments suggest the lack of direct evidence for the kind of widespread sacrilegious looting of churches cited by both Innocent and Niketas. Indeed, in their omission of descriptions of persistent sacrilege, the major Greek and Latin eyewitness accounts of the crusade do more to dispel mischaracterizations of the looting than to support any particular chronology of such events. Of course, absence proves nothing, but it ought to introduce some doubt into the conversation about the plundering of the city. For more concrete information about the treatment of relics following the conquest, we must look to hagiographical sources. It is from these that one can reconstruct the deeds of specific crusaders, track the fate of relics, and more clearly demarcate the knowable from the unknowable.

Four hagiographical texts in particular open small windows into the history of relics in the postconquest city—the “Gesta episcoporum Halberstadensium,” “The Land of Jerusalem” (De terra Iherosolimitana), the Historia Constantinopolitana, and the “Translatio Symonensis.” A fifth text, the “Translatio Mamantis,” also contains a description of the initial relic looting, although secondhand at best, and it will be treated more carefully during the discussion of phase two. The four texts describe four acts of relic acquisition. Two depict the risk-free (authorized) acquisition of relics by Bishops Conrad von Krosigk of Halberstadt and Nivelon de Chérisy of Soissons; the other two record careful and surreptitious (unauthorized) raids by Abbot Martin of Pairis and a group of lower-status Venetian crusaders.

Bishop Conrad von Krosigk of Halberstadt

To piece together this relic-centered narrative, we must begin before the final capture of Constantinople. The crusaders spent months camping just outside the city walls while ostensibly working for the rightful emperor, Alexius IV, and they were free to enter in small groups. Among the crusaders was Bishop Conrad von Krosigk of Halberstadt, a supporter and client of Philip of Swabia, Alexius’s brother-in-law and backer in the Latin West. During this time, Conrad ostensibly benefitted from a long-established practice of relic gifting. He later professed to have received several objects from Alexius, who in fact pillaged his own churches for gold and silver items to melt down in an attempt to pay off his debts. In the “Gesta episcoporum Halberstadensium,” the anonymous author makes grandiose claims that Conrad returned to Halberstadt with “the blood of our Lord, Jesus Christ, [portions of] the Lord’s wood, the Lord’s Sepulchre, the Lord’s crown of thorns, His shroud and sudarium, the purple garment, the sponge and reed,” and other objects.³² These were among the most venerated relics in all of Christendom, but Conrad did not acquire the main Byzantine relics of the Passion. Those ultimately ended up in the hands of the French king Louis IX. Instead, the author of the “Gesta” is following typical medieval practice by equating tiny fragments of a relic with the whole. For example, Conrad’s “crown of thorns” was merely one thorn.³³ In truth, the fragmentary pieces that arrived in Halberstadt could easily have been products of looting. A contemporary Greek writer, Nicholas Hydruntinus, accused Conrad of being a relic thief, but Conrad’s own 1208 proclamation of celebration for the sacred items (making August 16 a feast day) describes them as gifts from Alexius.³⁴ The claim is supportable. The extant reliquaries, small and ornate, are comparable to other types of reliquaries long used by Byzantine rulers in sacral diplomacy.³⁵

If Alexius favored Conrad, the short-lived emperor perhaps favored other elite Latins similarly. While Conrad might have acquired additional pieces after the conquest, as there were plenty of relics to be gained and his hoard is impressive, the physical evidence supports the bishop’s statement that at least some were gifts. The Halberstadt trove, overall, suggests that at least a fraction of the relics taken west after the conquest were not stolen, looted, bought, or otherwise acquired as a result of war; they were diplomatic mementos of contact with the last of the Angeloi emperors.³⁶ Such gifting served as one, largely unconsidered, vector by which relics of Christ proliferated in the West after 1204.³⁷

One of the more precise descriptions of a relic muddies the water. Conrad acquired “a [portion of] the skull of St. Stephen the protomartyr, along with his elbow,” in order to bring Halberstadt a relic belonging to its patron saint.³⁸ Venice had laid claim to the relics of St. Stephen, stealing them from Constantinople in 1107 or 1108. Nearly a century later, Conrad and others found more. We cannot say whether these relics were simply pieces the Venetians had missed, forgeries created by the Greeks after Venice’s theft, or a postconquest invention by Greeks or Latins. Regardless, Conrad did not acquire a relic of his cathedral’s patron by chance. Other crusaders made similar acquisitions. Conrad’s conduct, in conjunction with several examples discussed below, suggests that instead of just grabbing whatever sacred item was at hand, some crusaders sought out objects of special personal significance.

Bishop Nivelon de Chérisy of Soissons

The “Gesta episcoporum Halberstadensium” is suggestive about the postcrusade environment but not definitive. No sources attest to Conrad’s whereabouts in the days after the sack, so one is left with some questions, especially given the mystery of St. Stephen’s head and elbow. Thanks to Robert of Clari’s description of the relics of the churches in the Bucoleon Palace complex, we know somewhat more about the activities of Nivelon de Chérisy, who served as the bishop of Soissons from 1176 to 1207 and was another notable translator of relics. The sacred items that Nivelon brought back to Soissons are recorded in “The Land of Jerusalem,” an anonymously authored text that he presumably commissioned. The author framed the translatio within a discussion of the larger struggle to redeem the Holy Land, placing the recent conquest of Constantinople in the context of that struggle. The text begins with the loss of Jerusalem and the famed relic of the True Cross to Saladin in 1187 and ends with Nivelon’s return to Soissons with four Constantinopolitan fragments of the True Cross, along with other relics.³⁹ Nivelon was one of the most important clerics on the crusade; he led the army’s clergy, just as Boniface of Montferrat led the secular force. At the end, he served as one of the twelve electors of Baldwin of Flanders and crowned him emperor in Hagia Sophia.⁴⁰ While Peter Capuano, the papal legate, came and went (depending on the army’s current relationship with Rome), Nivelon was the constant leading ecclesiastical presence on the crusade.⁴¹

Nivelon’s relics, according to “The Land of Jerusalem,” included another head of St. Stephen the Protomartyr, a finger and the head of the Apostle Thomas, the crown of the head of Mark the Evangelist, a thorn from the Crown of Thorns, a belt of Mary and a piece of her robe, a piece of the towel with which Christ girded himself at the Last Supper, a forearm and the head of St. John the Baptist, a rib and the head of the blessed Blaise, the pieces of the True Cross, the staff of Moses, and many other objects.⁴² The text tells us that Nivelon divided them among churches in his diocese, where the newly translated saints began to work miracles.

“The Land of Jerusalem” does not record how Nivelon actually acquired his relics, but, as a source on the relic looting, it does permit some modest deductions. First, one can correlate its list with relics described by Clari. He lists the Crown of Thorns, the Virgin’s robe, the head of St. John the Baptist, and two large pieces of the True Cross as residing in the church of the Blessed Virgin of the Pharos, which was located in the Bucoleon Palace.⁴³ Boniface of Montferrat, a friend of Nivelon’s, took control of the Bucoleon in the initial weeks after the conquest.⁴⁴ A month later, Doge Enrico Dandolo of Venice suggested that everyone vacate their (fortified) palaces before the election of the emperor, presumably to stave off any thought of armed resistance from the loser. That month gave Nivelon ample time to organize the churches, go through the inventories, and take whatever he wanted. Indeed, the March Pact specifically stated that “the clerics of each party ought to organize those churches that have come into the possession of their party.”⁴⁵ Nivelon followed the agreed-upon arrangement.

Thus, we can place Nivelon and the relics that he eventually took home in the same place at the same time and speculate about what might have happened. Regardless of what Nivelon did in the privacy of the Bucoleon’s treasury—even if he personally went in with a tool or snapped finger bones off a dead saint’s hands—his actions cannot be characterized as looting or relic theft. The bishop encountered no danger, which, as we will see, is a prerequisite for the narrative traditions relating to relic theft. Nivelon was organizing the churches that his faction controlled. As the leading clerical overseer of these churches, he was within his canonical rights to translate relics—hence, no sacrilege. Too often scholars have conflated the activities of marauding soldiers with those of confiscatory bishops or princes. In a brief summary, Donald Queller and Thomas Madden use the words “stole” and “seized” to describe the deeds of Bishops Nivelon and Conrad, linking them to the “hundreds of relics pilfered by the crusaders.”⁴⁶ I suggest here that the looting of soldiers and the secretive thieves discussed below varies significantly from confiscations by commanding bishops, especially in terms of how such deeds are memorialized. The elites could authorize their own activity; the common crusaders could not. Surely Nivelon was not the only Latin cleric to extract a few sacred fragments from a newly possessed church’s inventory.

Abbot Martin of Pairis

In the initial chaos, many crusaders no doubt plundered Constantinople’s churches, but the record of their misdeeds emerges only in sources distancing themselves from such behavior. Bishop Garnier of Troyes seems to have tried to put a stop to the sacrilege; one source from a site that received a relic from Garnier labeled him procurator sanctorum reliquarum (manager of holy relics), but this is an uncertain attribution at best and is probably untrue, as will be argued below.⁴⁷ He certainly failed to contain the actions of Abbot Martin of Pairis, his ecclesiastical peer.

Abbot Martin’s actions lie somewhere between the authorized, careful deeds of the bishops and the indiscriminate and largely untraceable looting that was not memorialized. Martin had left the main force of the crusade to protest the diversion to Constantinople, but he returned before the final conquest and entered the city after it was taken. According to the Historia Constantinopolitana, a text Martin commissioned from Gunther of Pairis once he returned home, he witnessed bands of soldiers ripping through the abbey church of the Pantocrator and decided to seek relics in a remote section of the monastic complex. These scenes may well accurately recount events that Martin actually witnessed, but as with all translatio narratives, one must be cautious. The neat positioning of Martin’s pious looting against the impious looting of secular crusaders, for all its plausibility, may well function as a rhetorical device rather than correlate to fact.

By implication, Martin worried that he might lose his sacred plunder to the secular throng. Within the complex, he found a Greek priest hiding and threatened him with death if he did not yield the most powerful relics up to him. The priest, “thinking it more tolerable that a man of religion violate the holy relics in awe and reverence, rather than that worldly men should pollute them, possibly, with bloodstained hands,”⁴⁸ eventually submitted to Martin’s demands. Martin took the best relics and hid them, then offered his protection to the priest and found him safe lodgings in the city.⁴⁹

St. Simon and the Seven Thieves

The Historia Constantinopolitana suggests that Martin was concealing the relics from common pillagers, but he was likely also hiding his haul from other elites. As an abbot, perhaps he could have protected his plunder; other relic thieves were less fortunate. This conclusion may be drawn from the account of a successful theft carried out by seven crusading sailors from the parish of St. Simon the Prophet in Venice. Within days of the conquest, the sailors decided to steal the body of their parish’s patron saint from the church of St. Mary Chalkoprateia.⁵⁰ According to the “Translatio Symonensis,” which survives only in a fourteenth-century manuscript, they laid their plans, reconnoitered the site, and then stole the relic on Palm Sunday (April 18, 1204). They selected the holy day in order to avoid notice, as the citizens and other crusaders would be busy celebrating.⁵¹

The heist went off relatively smoothly, although some of the Venetians got lost on their way to the church. Having stolen the body, the remaining thieves found that they could not leave the city because Doge Enrico Dandolo would not let any ships depart. This had nothing to do with the theft of St. Simon; rather, it was an attempt by the leaders of the new empire to keep the army intact. According to the translatio, the doge then heard of the relic’s theft and announced a reward for its recovery. After hiding St. Simon in an abandoned palace on the banks of the Bosphorus, the sailors waited for six months. Eventually, one of them received permission to leave Constantinople (by lottery) and took the body to his home parish.⁵²

One can deduce many things about the looting of relics based on this rare narrative. First, these men clearly stole a relic as part of a heist. They did not simply authorize themselves to take possession of relics in their new church treasuries. Whereas Abbot Martin demanded to be taken to the most powerful relics and the looters he was avoiding grabbed whatever they came across, the Venetians were more discriminating. Theirs was a carefully planned and executed heist with a target chosen solely because of its particular value to the parishioners of St. Simon. Indeed, they even ignored the relics of St. Zachary, the patron of an important Venetian church, taking only the body of their own patron saint.⁵³ If Dandolo’s attempt to obtain the stolen relic by offering a bounty is credible, as it may well be, another fact comes into focus. Had someone betrayed the fellowship of thieves and given the relic to the doge, the “Translatio Symonensis” would never have been written. We would not know about the band from the parish of St. Simon, although Dandolo might still have sent the relics to Venice in the end. Thus, we can conclude that there may have been other cases in which a member of the leadership, secular or clerical, confiscated a relic from a lower-status thief, condemning his story to oblivion, yet providing clues as to how bishops and counts acquired their relics.

The great majority of actions taken inside the churches of Constantinople remain invisible, and our few reliable examples cannot support a fully developed narrative. Yet our sources do suggest a range of possibilities. Bishop Nivelon and likely other leading clerics acquired relics by taking them out of churches under their control, confiscating them from errant pillagers, and receiving them as gifts. The deeds of the parishioners of St. Simon provide a counterexample, in which crusaders executed both a targeted and unauthorized theft. For Abbot Martin, the pursuit of saintly power, carried out surreptitiously, trumped other concerns about which specific relics he might acquire. The complaints from outsiders suggest that the stories of Martin and the Venetian parishioners may reflect a much larger, and now forgotten, pattern of theft and pillaging. If Dandolo and his cadre were ready to seize relics from lesser crusaders, no wonder most chose to remain silent.

The Second Phase: The Crusaders Go Home

Enrico Dandolo

Enrico Dandolo tried to recover the body of St. Simon at some point during the first six months after its initial theft. This attempted confiscation actually belongs to the second phase in the movement of the relics of the Fourth Crusade. In the weeks and months after the sack, the crusaders organized and disbursed their loot. They elected Baldwin of Flanders as emperor. The Venetians, as prescribed by the March Pact, took control of Hagia Sophia and the patriarchate. The crusade leadership divided up other properties and Greek territories, many still unconquered, in a process that led to great riches for some, conflicts among the Latin forces and other powers in the region, sales and exchanges, the settlement of Franks in Greece and Venetians in Crete, and many other changes. Boniface of Montferrat began his military operations in Thessalonica. The disastrous campaign against the Vlachs led to the death of the first Latin emperor of Constantinople and other leading nobles. Seeking to undermine the Venetian advantage, Genoa sent out privateers to plunder ships returning to the West. The pope attempted to reassert control. Peter Capuano lifted the crusade vows, and eventually the army dispersed.⁵⁴ As the crusaders returned home, relics returned with them; some were sent ahead as gifts to reward friends or to grease the wheels of diplomacy, as detailed below. In this phase, Dandolo, Baldwin, and Capuano all emerged as particularly important players in the authorized acquisition and translation of relics. Unauthorized actions continued as well, though as always they are harder to locate in the record.

In the most important Venetian chronicle from the fourteenth century, the Chronica per extensum descripta of Andrea Dandolo, who was the doge of Venice from 1343 to 1354 and a member of the same family as Enrico, one finds a description of Venice’s share of the sacred plunder from Constantinople. Andrea lists an ampoule of Christ’s blood, the arm of St. George, a piece of the head of St. John the Baptist, the body of St. Lucy, and the body of St. Agatha, which Enrico gave to an unspecified Sicilian pilgrim.⁵⁵ The chronicle depicts Enrico Dandolo as a grand distributor of relics. He probably brought back many more items, but any records of plunder housed in the treasury of the church of San Marco would have been largely destroyed in a great fire in 1231. However, relics from the conquest had also been distributed to other sites in Venice. And, in the 1260s, Doge Ranieri Zeno claimed that a small set of relics had miraculously survived the fire. These came to constitute the “official list” of crusade plunder that could be traced to Enrico Dandolo, and Andrea Dandolo’s chronicle reflects that list.⁵⁶

How Enrico Dandolo acquired most of his relics is unclear. According to a late fourteenth-century translatio, Baldwin of Flanders gave the relic of St. Lucy to Dandolo for Venice, raising the possibility that the doge received other relics as gifts.⁵⁷ Dandolo made some effort to acquire precious objects for the commune of Venice and San Marco, including, for example, the relics listed above, the relics of St. Simon the Prophet (although he failed), the quadriga that eventually adorned the church,⁵⁸ and large quantities of marble and other precious materials.⁵⁹ One cannot imagine the old, blind doge personally rummaging through a church treasury in Constantinople. Unlike the bishops of Soissons and Halberstadt, Dandolo was not a cleric who could inspect and seize relics in the course of taking charge of a formerly Greek church. Perhaps Dandolo sometimes succeeded in using bribery and threats against lesser crusaders, as detailed in the story of St. Simon and the Venetian thieves, even though he failed to seize those relics. His experience with negotiation and exchange could only have helped him in such an environment. Shortly after Dandolo’s death, the Venetians demanded an icon of the Virgin in exchange for supporting Henry of Flanders’s ascension to the imperial throne after his brother Baldwin died.⁶⁰ One suspects that the Latins traded with, offered gifts to, coerced, and bribed one another in order to acquire specific relics as the chaos of the capture subsided and they assessed their newfound lands and riches.

Baldwin of Flanders

Emperor Baldwin I figures in a number of letters and charters concerning relics. He used them in imperial diplomacy, thus continuing the practice of the emperors before him.⁶¹ Like Dandolo, Baldwin of Flanders sent relics to his homeland, but not exclusively. He also included relics and other sacred items among the gifts that he sent to Pope Innocent III and the Templars in Lombardy. Genoese privateers captured the ship bearing Baldwin’s emissary and pillaged it. According to the Genoese chronicles, the city’s leaders sanctioned this expedition in order to profit from the fall of Constantinople in their own way; moreover, they hoped to limit the gains of the Venetians.⁶² In November 1204, Innocent sent a letter to the archbishop of Genoa demanding restitution. By this time, the privateers had either released or received a ransom for the emissary, a Venetian named Brother Barozzi, who was the master of the Temple of Lombardy and about whom nothing else is known. Barozzi made his way to Rome, gave Innocent a letter from Baldwin (which survives), and told the pope about the piracy. As the relics and precious objects remained in Genoese hands, Innocent threatened to interdict Genoa if it did not immediately return them. Items intended as gifts for the pope, Innocent argued, became papal property immediately. He listed the objects owed to him and added those due to the Temple as well, insisting upon their return. These items included many gems and silver marks, in addition to two icons, a gilt reliquary, two golden crosses, a silver ampoule, and a relic of the True Cross that was bound for the Temple.⁶³ We do not know what, if any, response Innocent’s letter inspired, but he did not place Genoa under interdict. One must assume an arrangement was worked out.⁶⁴

Innocent listed only the one relic, a fragment of the True Cross. However, the Genoese chronicle of Orgerio Pane claims that many relics (multas reliquias sanctorum) were seized and eventually distributed among Genoese churches.⁶⁵ John Fotheringham argues that the medieval cross reliquary still in the Cathedral of San Lorenzo in Genoa is the True Cross relic mentioned in the letter.⁶⁶ It was given to Genoa by the men of Porto Venere, who owned one of the privateer vessels, in exchange for certain economic privileges. Fotheringham notes that the Cronaca of Jacopo da Voragine (who was Genoese) claims not only that the privateers captured many relics but that Jacopo himself obtained relics for the Dominican order in Genoa many decades later. The chronicler does not provide a specific list of these relics.⁶⁷ There are some likely explanations for the discrepancy. First, the Genoese texts could be confusing relics with altar cloths, icons, reliquaries (not the relics themselves), and other valuable items associated with the church. Multas reliquias sanctorum, however, seems to clearly describe relics.⁶⁸ Why, then, did Innocent not demand their return as well? Perhaps Brother Barozzi did not tell Innocent about the other relics, although why he would omit such a detail is unknown. Or perhaps the other relics were intended as gifts for other dignitaries and thus were considered to be outside papal purview. Regardless, the important detail is that Baldwin’s envoy bore both a letter to the pope and sacred gifts for the Holy Father.

Baldwin had sent these gifts in hopes of easing the recommencement of papal-crusader negotiations after more than a year of discord. The letter to Rome, enregistered in October 1204, survives, as do three additional copies. These copies are addressed by Baldwin to the archbishop of Cologne, the abbot of Cîteaux and his Cistercian colleagues, and to “all the Christian people.”⁶⁹ We do not know who received the last letter (and there may have been many other copies), but one can speculate that if Baldwin sent relics to Rome, he likely would have sent them to Cologne and particularly to Cîteaux. The Cistercians had been major players in the Fourth Crusade and would continue to be important to the Latin Empire.⁷⁰ Baldwin had plenty of relics to go around. Riant published a number of instrumenta, various types of documents mentioning relics, that describe cases in which an individual or institution received relics from the emperor. These are especially prevalent in Flanders and Hainault.⁷¹ For example, Count Hugh of Beaumetz received a reliquary of the True Cross from Baldwin for his service as a crusader. The Picard count installed the relic in the Abbey of Mont Saint-Quentin.⁷² Baldwin also sent relics to his titular liege lord, King Philip II Augustus of France. In a letter to the king from September 5, 1205, Baldwin records these gifts as a piece of the True Cross, Christ’s suckling clothes and some of his hair, a thorn from the Crown of Thorns, some of the purple garment Christ wore before Pontius Pilate, and a rib of the Apostle Philip, which Baldwin perhaps included because the apostle was the king’s namesake.⁷³ Notably, these relics overlap with those sent to France by Bishop Nivelon of Soissons, a detail supporting the argument that Nivelon acquired his relics from the same imperial treasury as Baldwin. The bishops of Beauvais, Noyon, and Senlis witnessed the arrival of the relics at Saint-Denis. The ritual reception of these gifts may have provided a template for the more famous translation of the relics of the Passion to Paris in 1239, after King Louis IX purchased them from Emperor Baldwin II through the agency of the emperor’s Venetian creditors.⁷⁴

The Papal Legates and Other Clerics

Baldwin sent relics to his homeland of Flanders, to the neighbors of Flanders, to the great ecclesiastical and political powers with whom he was already on good terms, and to those with whom he hoped to cultivate good relations as a result of the gifts, such as the papacy. Meanwhile, Rome’s papal legates, Peter Capuano and cardinal-priest Benedict of Santa Susanna, played multiple roles in the history of the postcrusade translation of relics. Unlike Nivelon of Soissons, Conrad of Halberstadt, or Martin of Pairis, Capuano was not present when Constantinople fell in April 1204. Having left the crusade earlier because the crusaders were ignoring papal edicts, he did not want his presence to imply that the diversion to the city had papal sanction. He joined the “forgotten second front” of the crusade in Acre.⁷⁵ Once Constantinople fell, however, Capuano went there to take advantage of this sudden windfall on behalf of the pope. He lifted edicts of excommunication and absolved the crusaders of their sins. Reconciliation followed and the papacy’s voice returned to the crusade.⁷⁶ Capuano’s activity over the next few years exemplifies all of the roles played in the relic trade by the highest-status individuals connected to the crusade; he was an authority figure who granted permission, a relic translator himself, and an (accidental) enabler of crimes.

Having missed out on the first harvest of relics, Capuano seems to have become a voice of authority on the dispersal of relics in the second phase of their translation. For example, he took control of a trove of relics belonging to a deceased crusading bishop, Garnier of Troyes. Like Nivelon and Conrad, Garnier had provided an episcopal presence on the crusade. He, like his fellows, acquired relics immediately after the conquest, though not, I argue below, in any official capacity. He sent his chaplain to Troyes with the arm of St. James the Greater, the head of St. Philip, a cup that was allegedly the Holy Grail, and the body of St. Helen of Athyra.⁷⁷ Thanks to a letter from 1222, we know that Garnier sent additional relics with the chaplain, along with orders on how to distribute them. John of Poitiers (Iohannes Pictaviensis), canon of St. Victor of Paris, wrote to Peter, canon of St. Martin of Troyes and chaplain to Bishop Garnier, asking him to write an account of how Garnier had sent them the head of St. Victor. Both John’s request and Peter’s reply survive.⁷⁸ Peter recounts that the bishop found the head of St. Victor in a church dedicated to the saint inside the walls near Constantinople’s Golden Gate.⁷⁹ Garnier ordered Peter to take the head and “other relics of the saints” back to France.⁸⁰ There, Peter gave the head to Archbishop Peter de Corbolio of Sens, who later gave a portion of it to John the German (Iohannes Teutonis), the abbot of St. Victor’s.⁸¹ On the ides of April, Peter concludes, the relic was met with a procession and much rejoicing.⁸² This short letter is particularly compelling because it describes not only the translation of the head from a church in Constantinople to Garnier’s hands to the Abbey of St. Victor but also all of the intermediate chains of transmission. The process of exchange and division that took place in this case allows us to conjecture that this process of secondary gifting and sundering of larger relics may have happened often after they arrived in the West.

Garnier sent some of the relics that he had collected to France but died within a year of the conquest. As recorded in the “Historia translationum reliquiarum Sancti Mamantis” (history of the translation of the relics of Saint Mamas), or “Translatio Mamantis,” Capuano took control of the rest upon his arrival in Constantinople.⁸³ In this text, an anonymous canon of Langres describes the actions of Walon of Dampierre, also a canon of Langres, who returned home from the crusade with the head of St. Mamas in 1209. This text is the third part of a larger translatio that describes the process by which various relics of the martyr came to Langres over the centuries, in order to authenticate each item.⁸⁴ The translatio contains a compelling description of the looting of relics, as well as the steps that Walon took to authenticate his relic. The relevant portion of the text reads,

When Constantinople had been captured, the victorious Latins exulted over the booty which they had seized, for they had a vast amount of spoils. But blind greed, which persuades so easily, took the hands of the conquering conquerors, so that not only were the churches violated, but so were the vessels in which the relics of saints were resting, [their hands] shamelessly smashing the vessels [and] repulsively pulling off the gold, gems, and silver, and they thought nothing of the true relics. Having heard of this, senior officers of the army grieved greatly, and feared that this destruction might undo their victory. They therefore took counsel with the legates . . . and with the archbishops and bishops, who threatened to excommunicate anyone who unsealed the containers of relics. . . . After this [threat of excommunication] the head of the glorious martyr [St. Mamas] was found.⁸⁵

This paragraph is at best a secondhand account of the looting. Later, I argue that it responds to Innocent’s successful employment of sacrilegious looting as a polarizing issue, the subject of the next chapter. This is the only Latin text that explicitly includes reliquaries among the sacred objects that the Latins despoiled for the sake of the external gold, silver, and gems; more important, it presents the responses of the crusade leadership to the sacrilege. According to the translatio, the leading crusader clerics gathered, threatened the defilers of relics with excommunication, and then took personal control over rounding up and redistributing the relics. If this account contains any truth at all, no wonder the bishops were able to send home such copious sacred largesse. Capuano would have had considerable clout in such proceedings, thanks to his lofty ecclesiastical status as papal legate and cardinal. He could not easily undo distribution decisions previously made by other high clerics on the crusade, but he could take charge of the deceased Garnier’s relics.

According to the “Translatio Mamantis,” the priest Walon visited Capuano and informed him that Garnier had planned to send the head of St. Mamas to Langres, long a center of the cult of St. Mamas, before he died. Agreeing that this seemed just, Capuano let Walon take the relic. The head thus passed to Walon through the legate’s judgment that this was the best possible outcome, not through one of the acts of looting previously deplored by the text’s anonymous author.⁸⁶

By the time Walon spoke to Capuano, the time of chaos had long since passed. The acquisition of St. Mamas clearly belongs to the second phase of relic movement. The passage above indicates that later authors, concerned about the provenance of their new relics becoming tainted, took steps to make it clear that their relics had not been obtained through sacrilege. This concern has led to significant scholarly confusion about the looting of relics. Several medieval texts, including the “Translatio Mamantis,” imply that Garnier had been put in charge of many relics in the city before he died.⁸⁷ Riant decided that this attribution was correct and argued that the crusader clergy had officially appointed him to that position.⁸⁸ Over the last century, other scholars have followed Riant’s lead in arguing that Garnier was the official procurator sanctorum reliquarum.⁸⁹ This title implies a level of organization and oversight that simply did not exist until late in the second phase, probably after Garnier was dead. Most sources on relics never mention Garnier at all. The texts that do elevate him to such an official rank derive from sites that, like Langres, directly or indirectly benefited from relics that he collected in Constantinople. Such sources cannot be trusted because their authors wanted to de-emphasize the possibility of any sacrilege staining their new possessions. No neutral texts mention Garnier, in particular, as being more important than any other bishop; the situation was fluid until Capuano arrived. However, Capuano could not restore precrusade conditions and then reapportion relics. All he and his co-legate Benedict could do was try to control the situation as it developed after their arrival. The translation of St. Mamas offers one example of such attempts at control and regulation.

The papal legates’ efforts to regulate the translation of relics, however, could backfire. Sometime after March 1206, according to the “Narratio exceptionis apud Cluniacum capitis beati Clementis,”⁹⁰ the legates accidentally enabled a brazen relic theft. We know very little about the two knights, Dalmacius of Serciaco and Poncius of Busseria, who stole the relic. The author refers to the former as “well learned,”⁹¹ along with the more usual epithets for crusading knights (“noble,” “faithful,” and “good”). Once these two had served out their term in Constantinople, they tried to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. They failed, due to dangers on both land and sea, and found themselves back in Constantinople, disappointed. Dalmacius therefore went to the two legates to ask for permission to acquire a relic. The legates, speaking in “one voice,” granted the request on one condition: the knight could not purchase a relic because of canonical prohibitions against the sale of such items. Undeterred, the knights went to the Monastery of St. Mary Peribleptos, where Dalmacius asked the monks, who appear to have been Greeks, about St. Clement.⁹² Many Greek monks remained in their religious houses after the conquest until they were driven away by a new papal legate, Cardinal Pelagius, around 1213, so this encounter is plausible. While Dalmacius distracted the monks, his colleague, Poncius, simply walked off with St. Clement’s head. The two returned home and gave it to the Abbey of Cluny.⁹³

If this story reflects an actual conversation between the legates and the knights, it would give the impression that the legates were comfortable with the notion that crusaders might seek out relics to take home with them. Their concern was that such activity not be commercial in nature. On the other hand, the knights may have just bought the relic off of someone in Constantinople and the entertaining details are either their fabrications or the hagiographer’s.

It is difficult to tell precisely when the theft or purchase occurred, but it could not have been in the initial days after the sack; this is a second-phase theft. Innocent sent Benedict of Santa Susanna to Constantinople sometime around May 1205, and he may not have arrived until the following spring.⁹⁴ Furthermore, the text indicates that the knights tried to go to Jerusalem only after they were released from their crusade vow, probably in March 1206,⁹⁵ and were subsequently turned back by harsh winds.⁹⁶ If this is true, then they would have returned to Constantinople just when both papal legates were definitely in the city. Hence, probably more than two years after the sack, the outright theft of relics was still occurring.

After many years of troubled service, Capuano finally returned to Italy, while Benedict remained, both continuing to dole out relics as opportunity arose.⁹⁷ Along his route through southern Italy, Capuano paused to distribute relics to various Latin religious houses. Amalfi, his hometown,⁹⁸ received the head of its patron saint, St. Andrew, in May 1208. Here, Capuano acted similarly to Conrad and Nivelon. He bore relics back to his home church, the locals greeted the relics with celebration, and the late saint worked local miracles.⁹⁹ Sometime between 1210 and the death of Capuano in 1214, an anonymous monk in Gaeta wrote a text celebrating Capuano’s gift of the head of St. Theodore. Although brief, this account is exceedingly useful because it lists other examples of Capuano’s generosity. The author begins with the gift of St. Andrew and then reports that Sorrento received the relics of the Apostle James. Naples received certain “true relics of other saints.”¹⁰⁰ To the Abbey of Monte Cassino, Capuano gave an arm of St. Athanasius.¹⁰¹ Gaeta’s reception of St. Theodore finished the list.

This text serves as an excellent example of the most typical type of second-phase relic acquisition and translation. It was authorized, and the relics were physically carried by a high-ranking official and given to favored churches in his homeland. Capuano enriched the churches of southern Italy. Dandolo favored the churches of Venice. Baldwin sent relics to Flanders and the French king, just as Garnier did to Champagne. One notices a trend: relics of saints were often sent to places that already had a tradition of venerating those saints. St. Mamas went to the Cathedral of St. Mamas in Langres; a fragment of St. Stephen the Protomartyr went to the Cathedral of St. Stephen in Halberstadt; and St. Andrew went to Amalfi. In 1208, Henry of Ulmen brought the head of St. Pantaleon to Abbot Henry of the Monastery of St. Pantaleon in Cologne.¹⁰² Henry of Ulmen also brought a spectacular cross reliquary to Limburg, although the precise provenance remains a subject of debate among scholars.¹⁰³ In 1222, the canon John the German of St. Victor’s asked Garnier’s former chaplain for letters of authentication concerning the relic of St. Victor that the abbey had received in 1205—yet another example of the trend. Many Western sites were dedicated to saints whose relics had long been housed in Constantinople; apparently, some of the leading figures on the crusade chose to use the conquest of 1204 as an occasion to fill these voids.

Dandolo, Baldwin, and Garnier sent relics west, but all of these men died in the East. For others, the voyage home marked the occasion when crusaders finally translated their gains, as well as the end of the second phase in the movement of the relics of 1204. Nivelon, Conrad, Capuano, and Martin are well known because they had the means to commission translatio narratives in their homelands. We know about the Venetian men who stole the body of St. Simon because a text that tells their story happens to have survived. A few fragmentary and non-narrative texts provide additional examples. According to one of these, Walon of Sarton, canon of Picquigny near Amiens, became a canon of a church in Constantinople. Having decided that he had experienced enough of the East after the disaster of Adrianople, he took a few silver reliquaries that he had found hidden in his new church and sold them to finance his journey home. He then gave the relics (a finger of St. George and yet another head of St. John the Baptist) to the cathedral at Amiens.¹⁰⁴ In another legend, an English priest who served as Baldwin’s chaplain was sent back to the capital from the battle of Adrianople to fetch the Holy Rood, a relic of the True Cross traditionally borne into battle by the emperors of Constantinople, but which Baldwin had accidentally left behind. Unfortunately, Baldwin was killed before the chaplain made it back to the battlefield, so the chaplain hid the cross and took it with him back to Bromholm.¹⁰⁵ Henry of Ulmen’s gifts also generated surviving documentation, including a new reliquary for the relic of St. Matthias that he had donated to Trier, with an inscription commemorating the donation.¹⁰⁶ Several seventeenth-century French church historians describe two cross-shaped reliquaries holding fragments of the True Cross that Robert of Clari had allegedly brought to the Monastery of Corbie from the imperial palace chapel. The reliquaries and inscriptions that attributed these items to Clari were lost, probably during the French Revolution, but an inventory from Corbie from 1283 mentions the relics that “Robert of Clari, soldier, brought from Constantinople.”¹⁰⁷ The attribution is credible; as noted above, Clari catalogued some of the more important relics of the imperial chapel in his chronicle. It is interesting that he returned with objects from the chapel but never described his acquisitions. Does this represent an outright theft or evidence of sacrilegious looting in the first three days, or did Nivelon perhaps give Clari, his soldier, the tiniest of fragments of the relics that the bishop claimed from the palace churches? The sole complete copy of Clari’s chronicle exists in a vellum book once belonging to Corbie’s library, so one can at least note a connection between the knight and the monastic institution.¹⁰⁸ There must have been many more such relic translations as crusaders finished their terms of service or simply gave up. Clari made no note of his own translation, although Corbie’s inventory did. Surely other soldiers offered similar gifts to their favored churches.

Not only have accounts of relic translation been lost to modern historians, but some relics themselves were lost during the transition from Greek to Latin rule. Three of the bishops on the crusade took or sent relics home. A fourth prelate, bishop-elect Peter of Bethlehem, could not have returned to Muslim-controlled Bethlehem, and he died at Adrianople before he might have selected an alternative site for his sacred plunder. A Greek text blames Conrad of Halberstadt and bishop-elect Peter for stealing the relic of consecrated bread from the Last Supper.¹⁰⁹ The “Gesta episcoporum Halberstadensium” never mentions this relic and most certainly would have noted its possession if Conrad had held on to it. Alfred Andrea speculates that Peter lost the relic at Adrianople. No post-Adrianople record of the relic’s presence has been found.¹¹⁰

The second phase witnessed many translations of relics—some seized during the first weeks, some obtained later. Within about five years, although these dates are not firm, most of the people who participated in the crusade had died, gone home, or settled permanently in the Latin Empire. Many acquired relics—by theft, by gift, by purchase, or by authorized acquisition. As the participants’ movements ceased, the great exodus of relics slowed, but it never stopped. Forgeries complicate the matter. As late as 1215, criticisms of relic-selling in Canon 62 of the Fourth Lateran Council indicate that relics, including forgeries, were being sold and distributed throughout Europe.¹¹¹ Invented items no doubt joined and perhaps even comprised the majority of the mass of looted relics in this black market of the sacred. When perusing the lists of Fourth Crusade relics, one sees many heads of St. John the Baptist, True Cross fragments, and other easily fabricated fragments of various objects. Authentication proved difficult, and the looting of Constantinople gave a reasonable provenance for the unscrupulous forger to employ.

The Third Phase: The Height of the Latin Empire

During the relatively short life span of the Latin Empire, Latins continued to send relics from Constantinople to the West. Again, one can divide the known cases of relic acquisition into two groups: authorized and unauthorized. The rulers of the Latin Empire and other newly conquered lands continued to use their relics as diplomatic gifts. The most important and best studied of these cases concerns the translation of the relics of the Passion to King Louis IX of France in 1239. But there were others. Emperor Henry (r. 1206–16) followed his brother’s pattern of doling out minor, or small, relics, as did his successors.¹¹² Meanwhile, Latin clergy in Constantinople mined their treasuries for suitable objects for translation. In some cases, the clergy simply sent the relics west in their original reliquaries. At other times, they seem to have shaved off small parts in order to form new relics. The Venetians proved particularly interested in claiming relics from their churches in an expanded Venetian quarter of Constantinople, and our sources present some of these translations as unauthorized.¹¹³

Riant’s collection of “Epistolae et Instrumenta” provides ample evidence of Henry of Flanders’s emulation of his brother. The letters and grants are all relatively short and contain little information about where and how Henry obtained relics. As emperor he would have encountered no difficulty in doing so, and he sometimes provided bills of authentication for them. A testimonium de reliquiis found in Lyons, dated April 6, 1208, bears witness to the transfer of relics of the True Cross, St. Stephen the Protomartyr (yet again), St. Thomas, and St. Eustachius to Archbishop Raynaldo. Pontio de Caponay bore the relics, and Henry provided him with this short authentica.¹¹⁴ Other texts give even less information. One simply records that Henry sent “infinite relics of the Savior, Mary, the apostles, the evangelists, the prophets, the martyrs, the confessors, and female saints, and pious benefactors” to two German monks, Thomas and Gerard.¹¹⁵ What could this list mean? Did Thomas and Gerard somehow acquire dozens of tiny fragments one by one, or did Henry give them a sack filled with them? A 1215 document from Clairvaux is clearer. Hugo, formerly abbot of St. Ghislain in Hainaut (Henry’s homeland), delivered a relic of the True Cross from Constantinople to Clairvaux as a gift from the emperor. The document provides a very brief history of the Fourth Crusade in order to show how the relic came to be in Henry’s hands. Again, the purpose of this account was authentication.¹¹⁶

Documents that testify to the movement of relics out of newly Latinized churches by their new owners demonstrate that the phenomenon spread beyond Constantinople and lasted for decades. In 1215, Archbishop John of Neopatras, from Thessaly, sent a finger of St. Nicholas “and other relics” to the Monastery of Gembloux in Belgium.¹¹⁷ In 1216, Archbishop Warinus of Thessalonica sent a finger of St. John the Baptist to a monastery in Phalempin, Flanders.¹¹⁸ In 1218, the Cathedral of St. Albans in Namur, Flanders, catalogued its relics, which included a spine from the Crown of Thorns and some of Christ’s blood, both from Constantinople.¹¹⁹ We do not know their provenance, but Baldwin’s and Henry’s generosity to the religious houses of their region has already been noted. A 1224 testimonial on relics is attributed to William of Villehardouin but was almost certainly produced for Geoffrey I Villehardouin, “prince of Achaia” and nephew to the marshal of Champagne.¹²⁰ The prince sent a reliquary to the church of St. Remigius in Reims, Champagne, his family’s home city, via an old monk named Arnuld de Lotti. Inside the reliquary were drops of blood that he “believed” to have been shed from the side of Christ on the cross.¹²¹ We do not know where the prince acquired this relic. In 1230, Walter, reeve of Beata Maria of Cinctura in Constantinople, sent relics to Lambert, the reeve of Beata Maria in Bruges. These included an arm of the Apostle Bartholomew, an arm of St. Blasius, and relics of St. Laurence and Stephen the Protomartyr (again). In 1232, Anselm, the procurator of St. Mary Magdalene in Constantinople, brought together multiple relics of, yet again, St. Stephen the Protomartyr. Anselm, like Walter, sent these to Lambert of Bruges.¹²²

The above are just a sampling of the relics sent from the Latin Empire and Frankish Greece to Western Europe. Relics had always flowed licitly from church to church in the Middle Ages at semiregular intervals. Guardians of relics rewarded friends and curried favor by offering small pieces of relics. Bishops redistributed relics within their sees.¹²³ But now there was a sudden influx of relics, some very important, coming from long-established religious institutions in the East, all of which were under new ownership.¹²⁴ Such institutions, backed by the Greek nobility and their churchmen, had gathered relics for centuries. Perhaps the Western clerics lacked a long-term commitment to their new properties and felt free to use them to enrich their old friends and allies back in the West. It is not clear that anyone tried to strip a newly acquired religious building of value entirely, but a certain amount of careful siphoning on behalf of the homeland definitely took place.

Venice figures prominently in the history of this siphoning. In 1222, the abbot of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice’s principle monastery, ordered the translation of a relic out of a daughter monastery, Christ Pantepoptes, which it had obtained in Constantinople after 1204. The prior of San Giorgio, who ruled the Pantepoptes, enlisted the help of the podestà, the chief official in Constantinople’s Venetian quarter, in finding transport for the relics of St. Paul the New Martyr.¹²⁵ The translatio recording this story casts it as a sacred theft, as the abbot commands the prior to send the relic to him secretly (abscondite sibi mitteret). But it is not clear who the Venetians feared might catch them. The prior controlled the monastery. The podestà had absolute power within the Venetian quarter. Thus, we are left to question whether the translation of St. Paul’s relics was authorized or unauthorized.¹²⁶ The timing is curious. Venice’s leading monastery had acquired this property after 1204 but decided to send the relic to Venice fifteen years later. Other Venetian sources describe the acquisition of the relics of St. Helen, John the Martyr, and Paul the First Hermit (taken to Venice in 1211, 1214, and 1239, respectively), and the purchase of precious objects for the express purpose of decorating the churches of Venice. Venice also acquired the relics of St. Theodore the Martyr (1257) and St. Barbara (1258) just as the Latin Empire was weakening in the face of the Palaiologoi threat.

The translation of the relics of the Passion to King Louis IX, in 1239, is justifiably famous for its transformative effect on French royal iconography and Western devotional practice.¹²⁷ The art of Sainte-Chapelle, the eventual house for the relics, depicts the only two prior acts of translation in Christian history to rival it—the inventio of the True Cross by Constantine and his mother, Helen, and the recovery of the cross by Heraclius.¹²⁸ This chapter demonstrates that the translation of relics to Louis, although exceptional in scale, occurred within a larger ongoing pattern. Many relics were taken out of the Latin Empire. More specifically, Baldwin I gave relics of the Passion to Philip II Augustus, setting a precedent for the later translation. Baldwin II had used the Crown of Thorns as collateral on a loan from Venice. He saw the translation to Louis as a better deal for him than any other. Louis had to send two Dominicans to redeem the crown before the king would choreograph the great translation.¹²⁹ Using the great relics of Constantinople at the highest levels of statecraft was nothing new to the Latin emperors.

Unlicensed relic trafficking during the life of the Latin Empire completes the picture. We have almost no evidence of trafficking beyond the complaints of those who wanted to stop it.¹³⁰ These relic sales most likely happened on a retail level—not from a commoner to a church, but from one commoner to another. Such transactions would not have been recorded. Forgeries, as well as actual bits and pieces of relics stolen by common crusaders, probably flooded the West, but, again, details about these were not preserved by the sources. Capuano and Benedict’s prohibition against purchasing a relic offers one piece of evidence for the phenomenon.¹³¹ Canon 62 of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) represents a later, and broadly applied, attempt by the Church to restrict the unauthorized translation of relics. By this point, a decade after the conquest, Rome would have had a solid understanding of the problem it was trying to solve. The canon forbids the sale or unauthorized exhibition of relics. It also establishes that only Rome may approve new relics, giving it control of the means of authentication.¹³² While one cannot base claims about the quantity or frequency of the unauthorized sale of Constantinople’s relics on the canon, the law does indicate the existence of the problem.

Conclusion

The details of the long process of stealing, looting, and redistributing Constantinople’s relics after 1204 remain murky. The general patterns, however, are clear. The process began with a vow not to harm the Greek churches, but in the chaos of the conflict, that vow fell by the wayside. Undoubtedly, the translatio of St. Mamas, Niketas’s lament, and Innocent’s diatribe contain elements of truth in blaming the crusaders for destroying and desecrating relics, smashing altar plates, and breaking other sacred items in order to acquire gems and precious metals. During such acts of pillage, some crusaders, who had long venerated the relics of Constantinople, must have stolen tiny pieces and risked death in doing so. This type of theft led to trafficking, forgeries, and the widespread, uncontrolled, and largely undocumented dispersal of relics in Europe over the decades to come. Furthermore, various individuals took advantage of the chaos to pick and choose the relics they most desired. Abbot Martin and the Venetians of St. Simon’s parish are the two best-documented examples. The abbot valued ease of access and safety, whereas the Venetians chose a specific relic that they wanted to steal regardless of the risk.

Once things had settled down, the leaders of the crusade began to claim the relics for themselves. The Latin bishops in Constantinople at the time of the conquest had prime access to the relics of their choice and also received important items as gifts. Garnier of Troyes died before he could disperse much of his collection, and papal legate Peter Capuano, who had missed the free-for-all of the initial conquest, took control of these relics. The secular leadership joined the bishops, perhaps using the power of confiscation to gain their plunder. By around 1210, the initial appropriation and apportioning of relics and territories in the East among Latins from and in the West had been accomplished. Many relics remained in the churches and monasteries of Constantinople, but they continued, in whole or in part, to be sent westward from time to time. The slow process of licensed relic translation joined with more illicit forms of relic trafficking to drain the sacred wealth of Constantinople; these translations included those that propagated the grand myths associated with the relics of the Passion, as well as the peripatetic wanderings of the Shroud on its way to Turin. In 1261, the “new Constantine,” Michael VIII Palaiologos, had to begin Constantine’s work of creating a “new Jerusalem” all over again.¹³³