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Translation and Appropriation: Greek Relics in the Latin West in the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 May 2017
Abstract
Following the fall of Constantinople to French, Flemish and Venetian forces at the conclusion of the Fourth Crusade, an unprecedented number of relics and other holy objects poured into the West between 1204 and c.1240. Sent as personal and diplomatic gifts, most holy objects moved in the open, with letters of authentication and identification, and not (as has often been suggested) as sacred theft. This article traces the work of translation, carried out by clerics, chaplains, monks, and laymen and women, and the mechanisms of appropriation that gave meaning to these objects in their new devotional contexts. Relics were demanding things; they needed to be enshrined, venerated, described and contextualized, and their movements needed to be accounted for and included within a broader Christian narrative that served to anchor the crusade movement to the apostolic past and to Christ's material presence in the West. Moreover, the materiality of the relics that moved from Constantinople was an important part of their significance and shaped devotional practices and connections, bridging differences between Greek and Latin culture and fostering conceptions of the material that facilitated other acts of Christian translation in the centuries to come.
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2017
Footnotes
Research and writing of this article was conducted while I was a Derek Brewer Fellow at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge and before that during the time I held a Charles L. Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. I am grateful to both institutions for their support. I wish to thank Liesbeth Van Houts, Julie Barrau, Cecilia Gaposchkin, Julia M. H. Smith and Scott Bruce for their generous support and comments. I would also like to thank Simon Ditchfield for the invitation to speak at the EHS summer conference in York.
References
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7 Jannic Durand is probably correct that what is here described and enumerated are fragments of relics set within larger gold and crystal reliquaries. It is not clear, however, whether these reliquaries were made after the reception of the relic fragments (the most likely scenario, to my mind) or whether they travelled as complete Byzantine reliquaries. It is possible that the Latin texto is a rendering of the Greek theke, a box or container. Robert may have transported several Byzantine theke as well as other fragments, which were reassembled into new Gothic containers: Durand, Jannic, ‘Une Prétendue Relique de Constantinople. La “Véronique” de Corbie’, in Cutler, Anthony and Papaconstantinou, Arietta, eds, The Material and the Ideal (Leiden, 2007), 205–18Google Scholar, at 210–12.
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18 Glenn Peers, ‘Translating Edges in Art of the Medieval Middle East: On the Resafa Hoard and a Painted Bottle from Liechtenstein’, in Zaza Skhirtladze, ed., On the Edge: Time and Space (Tbilisi, forthcoming). I thank Glenn Peers for sharing this piece with me before its publication.
19 For a correction of this oversight, see Paul, To Follow in their Footsteps, 90–133.
20 See, in this volume, Simon Ditchfield, ‘Translating Christianity in an Age of Reformations’, 164–95.
21 One of the best short accounts of the preparation for the crusade is Jonathan Riley-Smith, ‘Toward an Understanding of the Fourth Crusade as an Institution’, in Laiou, ed., Urbs Capta, 71–87; see also Alfred J. Andrea, ‘Innocent III and the Byzantine Rite, 1198–1216’, ibid. 111–22. For translations of Innocent's bulls and events leading up to the crusade, see Bird, Jessalynn, Peters, Edward and Powell, James M., eds, Crusade and Christendom: Annotated Documents in Translation from Innocent III to the Fall of Acre (Philadelphia, PA, 2015), 24–66Google Scholar.
22 This is the narrative recounted in most modern histories, see n. 16 above.
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26 The overviews of the Fourth Crusade by Queller and Madden, Angold and Phillips cited in n. 16 are all laudable examples of this approach; see also Madden, Thomas F., ‘The Fires of the Fourth Crusade in Constantinople, 1203–1204: A Damage Assessment’, Byzantinische Zeitschrift 84–85 (1992), 72–93Google Scholar.
27 An exception is the Byzantine and Christian Museum, Athens, which has addressed the religio-cultural impact of the crusade. I thank one of the reviewers for this insight.
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29 On the looting of the city, see, for example, the letter from Innocent III to Thomas Maurocenus, patriarch of Constantinople, in which the pope condemns the taking of icons and other holy objects: Riant, Exuviae, 2: 76–8 (no. 26); cf. Maguire, Henry and Robert S. Nelson, eds, San Marco, Byzantium, and the Myths of Venice (Washington DC, 2010)Google Scholar; Perry, David M., Sacred Plunder: Venice and the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade (University Park, PA, 2015)Google Scholar.
30 The fact that contingents of the Fourth Crusade divided before they reached the East, with nearly half the French and Flemish crusaders continuing on to Syria, while the rest remained with the Venetians bound for Constantinople, is indicative of this shift and needs further study: see Queller, Donald E., Compton, Thomas K. and Campbell, Donald A., ‘The Fourth Crusade: The Neglected Majority’, Speculum 49 (1974), 441–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Benjamin Z. Kedar, ‘The Fourth Crusade's Second Front’, in Laiou, ed., Urbs Capta, 89–110. These divisions are also noted throughout Longnon, Les Compagnons. On the general shift in crusading during the thirteenth century, see Tyerman, Christopher, The Invention of the Crusades (Houndmills, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
31 Khanmohamadi, In Light of Another's World, 88–9.
32 The early letters the crusaders sent to the pope and to kin in the West speak of the confusion of the conquest and military engagement, but also of their understanding of God's role in assuring their victory. Many of these have been assembled and translated in Andrea, Alfred J., ed., Contemporary Sources for the Fourth Crusade (Leiden, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
33 On patterns of relic translation, see Malcolm Barber, ‘The Impact of the Fourth Crusade in the West: The Distribution of Relics after 1204’, in Laiou, ed., Urbs Capta, 325–32; Perry, Sacred Plunder, 13–45. These practices are also discernible in the correspondence amassed by Riant, Exuviae, vol. 2. For his synthesis of this, see Riant, Paul, Des Dépouilles religieuses enlevées à Constantinople au XIIIe siècle et des documents historiques nés de leurs transport en occident, Société nationale des antiquaires de France, Mémoires 36 (Paris, 1987)Google Scholar; see also Frolow, Anatole, Recherches sur la déviation de la IVe croisade vers Constantinople (Paris, 1955)Google Scholar.
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36 See the literature cited in n. 33 above. Scholars such as Riant and Frolow have attempted to enumerate the relics that moved West, but as Jannic Durand has noted, such attempts remain imprecise as it is very hard to know from the written sources how many fragments were included in every reference to relics or how many fine pieces could have been kept within each reliquary, bourse or stavrotheke. Moreover, new discoveries of relics have since been made: Durand, Jannic, ‘La quatrième croisade, les reliques et les reliquaries de Constantinople’, in Villela-Petit, Inès, ed., Quatrième Croisade: de Blois à Constantinople et éclats d'empires, Revue Française d'héraldique et de sigillographie 73–75 (Paris, 2005), 55–78Google Scholar.
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39 Riant, Exuviae, 2: 56–7 (no. 2), 61–2 (nos 7–8), 64–5 (no. 14), 74 (no. 23), 79–80 (no. 28). Both Baldwin I and Henry I commissioned a host of lesser lords and knights to transport relics to the West: Jean Longnon, Les Compagnons, 137–93.
40 Klein, Holger A., ‘Sacred Relics and Imperial Ceremonies at the Great Palace of Constantinople’, in Bauer, Franz Alto, ed., Visualisierungen von Herrschaft. Frühmittelalterliche Residenzen, Gestalt und Zeremoniell, BYZAS 5 (Istanbul, 2006), 79–99Google Scholar; Bacci, Michele, ‘Relics of the Pharos Chapel: A View from the Latin West’, in Lidov, Alexei, ed., Eastern Christian Relics (Moscow, 2003), 235–46Google Scholar; Lidov, Alexei, ‘A Byzantine Jerusalem: The Imperial Pharos Chapel as the Holy Sepulchre’, in Hoffmann, Annette and Wolf, Gerhard, eds, Jerusalem as Narrative Space / Erzählraum Jerusalem (Leiden, 2012), 63–103Google Scholar.
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42 Riant, Exuviae, 2: 73 (no. 22), 183 (no. 2), 184–5 (no. 4); cf. Lester, ‘What Remains’, 317–21. In 1203 the household which Louis of Blois took with him to the East consisted of ‘five knights, two of whom were accompanied by their own sergeants, and two churchmen, one of them the count's chancellor’: Riley-Smith, ‘Toward an Understanding’, 82.
43 The object is described in successive inventories drawn up by the monks of Clairvaux between 1405 and 1741. Parts of the inventories have been edited in Charles Lalore, Le Trésor de Clairvaux du XIIe au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1875), 25–6 (no. 49). On the Limburg staurotheke, see Sevçenko, Nancy, ‘The Limburg Staurothek and Its Relics’, in Andreade, Rena et al., eds, Thymiama ste mneme tes Laskarinas Boura (Athens, 1994), 289–94Google Scholar.
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45 On Wilbert, see Riant, Exuviae, 2: 17; Longnon, Les Compagnons, 179–80.
46 For the charters, see Riant, Exuviae, 2: 69–70 (nos. 19–20); for the lections, ibid. 2: 10–22; cf. Riant's comments about this text: ibid. 1: cxxvii–cxxxv.
47 Ibid. 2: 16–17.
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50 The lections (that is, the readings for this office) are reproduced in Riant, Exuviae, 2: 36–7; they follow closely the Historia translationum reliquiarum S. Mamantis: ibid. 1: cxxxviii–cxl, 22–34. The historia dates the receipt of the relics to 1209. On Wallon, see Longnon, Les Compagnons, 219.
51 For the role of these two bishops, see Barber, ‘Impact of the Fourth Crusade’.
52 Longnon, Les Compagnons, 205–7.
53 Riant includes two versions of this text, the longer historia attributed to Richard de Gerberoy, bishop of Amiens (d. 14 May 1211) (Exuviae, 1: lxiii–lxvii, cxxxvii, 35–44) and the lections drawn from the historia (ibid. 2: 26–30). The lections can be found in a fourteenth-century breviary: Amiens, Bibliothèque municipale, MS lat. 113, fols 221–2. On Richard's compositions, see Durand, Georges, ‘Richard de Gerberoy, évêque d'Amiens. Ce qu'on peut savoir de son oeuvre littéraire’, Bibliothèque de l’école des chartes 99 (1938), 268–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brook, L. C., ‘La translation de la relique de Saint-Jean-Baptiste à la cathédrale d'Amiens. Récits latin et français’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 91 (1990), 93–106Google Scholar.
54 Riant, Exuviae, 2: 26–30.
55 Ibid.
56 On the face relics of John the Baptist, see Cange, Charles du Fresne du, Traité historique du chef de S. Jean Baptiste (Paris, 1665)Google Scholar; Carr, Annemaire Weyl, ‘The Face Relics of John the Baptist in Byzantium and the West’, Gesta 46 (2007), 159–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
57 For Hugh, see Lalore, Le Trésor, 18, 27, 31, 44–5, 60–4, 124–6, 156; King, Archdale, Cîteaux and her Elder Daughters (London, 1954), 265–6Google Scholar, 306–7; Longnon, Les Compagnons, 193; Van Tricht, Latin Renovatio, 256–8, 262, 265–6. Van Tricht explains that Hugh is also referred to as a clericus and magister, implying that he had been educated outside the monastic context: ibid. 266.
58 Van Tricht, Latin Renovatio, 132; Riant, Exuviae, 2: 99–100 (no. 44). The position of clavicularius corresponded to that of the Byzantine imperial skeuophylax, who was responsible for the relics and religious treasures of the Great Palace.
59 Riant, Exuviae, 2: 78 (no. 27, Constantinople, July 1207).
60 Ibid. 2: 99–100 (no. 40, Clairvaux, 3 June 1215). This was either the fragment of the cross that was incorporated into the reliquary made during the abbacy of Matthew, c.1319 (Lalore, Le Trésor, 16–18) or (more probably) a relic of the cross set into a gold reliquary made when Dreux was sacristan, thus before 1233, which is carefully described in the 1504 inventory (Henri D'Arbois de Jubainville, ‘Trésor de Clairvaux’, Revue des Sociéte de la France et de l’étranger 5th ser. 5 [1873], 490–508, at 497–8).
61 Lalore, Le Trésor, 14, 19, 20–1, 24, 26, 38, 51–3, 64, 124–5.
62 Many more such chaplains and clerics are identified in my forthcoming book, Fragments of Devotion: Relics and Remembrance in the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade.
63 On ideas of reassembly, see Bynum, Caroline Walker, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1226 (New York, 1995)Google Scholar.
64 Riant, Exuviae, 2: 58–60 (no. 4, March 1205), 65–6 (no. 15, October 1205), 67 (no. 16, 13 October 1205), 75 (no. 24, March 1206).
65 For Langres, see ibid. 2: 70–3 (no. 21, 1205); for St Anne, ibid. 2: 73 (no. 22, 1205).
66 Ibid. 2: 97–8 (no. 38, May 1210).
67 The scripting of prayers, praise and adoration are noted in the charters listed in nn. 64–6 above. For the Sequence of Soissions, see Riant, Exuviae, 2: 43–5.
68 The ‘Ordinarius et processionale ad usum episcopi Suessionensis’, is now in BnF, MS Lat. 8898. Unusual in shape and size, it measures 365 mm x 165 mm and is written on parchment. It can be viewed on Gallica, online at: <http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8432463d.r=ms+8898>. An edition of the text was first produced by Poquet, Alexander, ed., Rituale seu mandatum insignis ecclesiae Suessionensis (Paris, 1856)Google Scholar; the section pertaining to the celebration of Nivelon's relics from Constantinople (ibid. 265–90) was reprinted by Riant with minor changes: Exuviae, 1: 3–9. Andrea has produced a new edition of these same folios: Andrea, Alfred J. and Rachlin, Paul I., ‘Holy War, Holy Relics, Holy Theft: The Anonymous of Soissons's De terra Iherosolimitana: An Analysis, Edition, and Translation’, Historical Reflections / Reflexions historiques 18 (1992), 147–56Google Scholar. On this form of liturgical book, see Hamilton, Sarah, ‘The Rituale: The Evolution of a New Liturgical Book’, in Swanson, R. N., ed., The Church and the Book, SCH 38 (Woodbridge, 2004), 74–86Google Scholar. Cecilia Gaposchkin is currently writing an article on this text, provisionally entitled ‘Nivelon of Soissons's 1205 Relics in their Liturgical Contexts’; I thank her for sharing this piece with me and for subsequent discussion of the manuscript and genre.
69 BnF, MS Lat. 8898, fols 211r–224v; Poquet, Rituale, 265–90.
70 Riant, Exuviae, 2:43–5.
71 For the details, see Poquet, Rituale, 265–90. This point is made by Gaposchkin, ‘Nivelon of Soissons's 1205 Relics’.
72 ‘[C]ontulimus ecclesie beati Petri Suessionensis, ob reverentiam beatorum martyrum quorum reliquias de Constantinopolitanis partibus Suessionem nuper attulimus’: Riant, Exuviae, 2: 75 (no. 24).
73 This is clear from the many feasts Riant amassed and the liturgical texts he excerpted. A study of the surviving manuscripts forms a chapter of my forthcoming Fragments of Devotion.
74 This rhetoric appears in the liturgical evidence Riant gathered: Exuviae, 1: 3–50.
75 On this concept, see Gosden, Chris and Marshall, Yvonne, ‘The Cultural Biography of Objects’, World Archaeology 31 (1999), 169–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
76 See Perry, Sacred Plunder, 77–134, who addresses the multiple uses of narrative.
77 This was the case with the charter that Hugh of St-Ghislain drew up authenticating the relics he brought to Clairvaux: Lalore, Le Trésor, 124–6.
78 Riant, Exuviae, 2: 105–6 (no. 44); cf. Constable, Giles, ‘Troyes, Constantinople, and the Relics of St Helen in the Thirteenth Century’, in Mélange offerts à René Crozet, à l'occasion de son 70e anniversaire, ed. Gallais, Pierre and Rion, Yves Jean, 2 vols (Poitiers, 1966), 2: 1035–42Google Scholar; Geary, Patrick J., ‘Saint Helen of Athyra and the Cathedral of Troyes in the Thirteenth Century’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 7 (1977), 149–68Google Scholar; repr. in idem, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 1994), 221–42.
79 Poquet, Rituale, 270–90; idem, Notre-Dame de Soissons, son histoire, ses églises, ses tombeaux, ses abbesses, ses reliques (Paris, 1855).
80 BnF, MS Lat. 8898, fols 214r–224v, treats the augmentation of the liturgies; cf. Poquet, Rituale, 270–90.
81 ‘Fourth Lateran Council – 1215’, in Tanner, Norman P., ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols (Washington DC, 1990), 1: 263–4Google Scholar (Canon 62).
82 Riant, Exuviae, 2: 65–7 (no. 15).
83 Klein, ‘Eastern Objects, Western Desires’, 299–305; Hahn, Cynthia, Strange Beauty: Issues in the Making and Meaning of Reliquaries, 400–circa 1204 (University Park, PA, 2012)Google Scholar; Bagnoli, Martina, ‘The Stuff of Heaven: Materials and Craftsmanship in Medieval Reliquaries’, in eadem et al., eds, Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe (New Haven, CT, 2010), 137–47Google Scholar. On enshrinement, see Chaganti, Seeta, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary: Enshrinement, Inscription, Performance (New York, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
84 An example of such crystal reliquaries is that made for Louis IX and given to the canons of St Maurice d'Agaune: see Anne E. Lester, ‘Confessor King, Martyr Saint: Praying to Saint Maurice in Senlis’, in Center and Periphery: Studies on Power in the Medieval World in Honor of William Chester Jordan, ed. Guy Keltner, Katherine L. Jansen and Anne E. Lester (Leiden, 2013), 195--210.
85 See, for example, Smith, Julia M. H., ‘Care of Relics in Medieval Rome’, Rome and Religion in the Early Middle Ages: Studies in Honor of Thomas F. X. Noble, ed. Garver, Valerie L. and Phelam, Owen M. (Farnham, 2014), 179–205Google Scholar.
86 Smith, Julia M. H., ‘Relics: An Evolving Tradition in Latin Christianity’, in Hahn, Cynthia and Klein, Holger A., eds, Saints and Sacred Matter: The Cult of Relics in Byzantium and Beyond (Cambridge, MA, 2015), 41–60Google Scholar, at 57.
87 Smith, ‘Portable Christianity’.
88 Kumler, Translating Truth, 241.
89 For an early general history of the objects, see William Curtis Farabee, ‘Recent Discovery of Ancient Wampum Belts’, Expedition Magazine [Penn Museum] 8, no. 81 (March 1922), unpaginated, online at: <http://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/?p=17237>.
90 See the materials in Chartres, Archives départementales Eure-et-Loir (Fonds du chapitre de Notre-Dame de Chartres), G 340, 347, 351, 445 (1674–1702). For selections of this material, see Jules Doublet de Bois Thibault, Les voeux des Hurons et des Abnaquis à Notre-Dame de Chartres (Chartres, 1857). On the communicative role of wampum, see Becker, Marshall Joseph, ‘Small Wampum Bands used by Native Americans in the Northeast: Functions and Recycling’, Material Culture 40 (2008), 1–17Google Scholar; Haas, Angela M., ‘Wampum as Hypertext: An American Indian Intellectual Tradition of Multimedia Theory and Practice’, Studies in American Indian Literatures 19 (2007), 77–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
91 Amiens, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 527. I have reedited the text here and the translation is my own.
92 All of the fragments listed are set off by ‘de’, possibly implying that that are all together in the crystal container with the thorns from the crown of thorns.
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