The Templars and the Shroud of Christ (14 page)

Four times double

Once this new reality with its valuable political aspects was accepted, the problem remained not to make gaping breaks with tradition: the ancient tale of the
mandylion
could hardly be discarded and on the other hand there was no desire to renounce what had just been newly discovered. In 944 an anonymous intellectual at the court of
Constantine VII, or possibly even the Emperor himself, who was a talented writer, wrote a new version of the legend of
Abgar. The ancient tale was preserved, but the miraculous formation of the icon was now set exactly during the Passion: no wonder, then, if the linen cloth of the
mandylion
showed thick drops of blood. The new version had a very sick
Abgar resolving to send to Jesus a messenger of his, one
Ananias, who also happened to be a painter; Jesus cannot go to Edessa because his mission in Jerusalem is coming close to its fulfilment, so he decides to let Ananias paint his portrait for the King to have. Ananias tries desperately to render his features and fails, because that Face seemed to change mysteriously in shape; then Jesus, touched and wishing to help the ailing King, takes a handkerchief and, on his way to Golgotha, rubs it over his face, so that his features remain miraculously impressed. An interesting and possibly not casual coincidence: a magnificent Byzantine miniature from the 14th century represents the arrival of the
mandylion
in
Constantinople, and the Emperor
Constantine VII receives from
Gregory the Referendarius, not a simple towel, but a very long cloth where can be seen the image of the Holy Face.

The new version of the legend of
Abgar sought to reconcile as much as possible the discrepancies between the tangible form of the
mandylion
, bearing the imprint of a man with his chest torn by a spear-blow, and the older tradition, which made of it only a realistic portrait for which Jesus had sat while alive.
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The result is naïve and hardly believable: Jesus is staggering towards Golgotha, surrounded by mocking soldiers who will not let anyone near him, and those are the conditions in which he would have a towel handed to him to be able to leave his portrait to the King’s envoy. At that time the image was supposed to have formed by miracle; but the spear-thrust that can be seen on the
mandylion
was only inflicted later, after Jesus had died on the Cross. That it was judged acceptable to manipulate the story to this extent surely has an important historical significance. What meaning does this curious contradiction have?

Ian
Wilson has noticed that as early as the Doctrine of Addai, the
mandylion
was described by a strange adjective,
tetràdiplon
, that is to say “folded double four times”. It is an adjective that cannot possibly make sense if the
mandylion
had really been a piece of linen the size of a towel or of a handkerchief: once that had been folded eight times, what would be visible would be smaller than a school notebook, and could not allow anyone to see anything. When folded in eight parts, as the ancient sources describe the
mandylion
, the Shroud of Turin takes exactly the appearance of a towel, and all that can be seen is the imprint of the face alone. Linen, if kept long enough folded in the same way, will keep its imprint in the shape of slight deformations that can be seen very well by a grazing, sideways light source: the Shroud keeps the marks of these ancient foldings, and among them there is precisely an eightfold one which, once completed, shows only the face just as it appears in ancient reproductions of the
mandylion
.
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Therefore, Ian
Wilson feels that in Edessa the cloth was kept in an eightfold form and concealed inside a wooden case covered by a textile covering which bore on its front an opening through which the head alone could be seen. It was a reliquary, but at the same time also a kind of mask designed to show only the most indispensable features, and above all conceal the most striking bloodstains, which it left inside. We are allowed to have a fairly clear idea of the form of this case, which bore decorations similar to those of royal clothes in ancient Turkey: according to Ian
Wilson, it was
Abgar V himself, or else one of his descendants, who prepared this purpose-made reliquary to disguise the real nature of the object and make it seem a towel.
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This trick was probably thought up because the Edessa region was rife with
Monophysite ideas, and tended to see Jesus as a being of wholly and only divine nature: an image showing him as a corpse riddled with wounds would have seemed disgraceful, and risked even being destroyed. One of the finest representations of the
mandylion
can be found in the manuscript
Rossiano Greco 251
of the Vatican Apostolic Library, and presents it curiously twice over in a peculiar manner, as if it were the negative imprint of a positive real object. This expensive Codex was made in
Constantinople in the 12th century, and at that time the theology of icons had triumphed long since, even so, a vandal’s hand has ripped into the magnificent Byzantine miniature. This tells us much about the long survival of a certain kind of bitter hostility against the cult of images.

Once it had been triumphantly placed as the central and most precious part of the imperial collection of relics, the
mandylion
was not touched again even by the Emperor himself, and its obstension only took place rarely and in special circumstances. The sanctuary of Pharos chapel was inviolate, its security awe-inspiring. Experience taught that it had to be defended both from the greed of potential thieves and from the fanaticism of believers. After Helena, the mother of Constantine, had rediscovered the pieces of the True Cross in Jerusalem, these relics used to be freely exhibited to the faithful, who could touch and kiss them without protection; but it was soon realised that this freedom needed limitation, since a pilgrim pretending to kiss the Cross managed to bite off a bit of wood. Sometimes, during ceremonies of particular solemnity, the Emperor could grant some illustrious guest, ambassador or head of State, the supreme honour of a visit to the chapel of Pharos; a privilege certainly granted in 1171 to
Amaury, the King of Jerusalem, when he visited the court of Emperor Manuel I Komnenos, according to the chronicle of William of Tyre, while an Arab writer called Abu Nasr
Yahya had been able to see the
mandylion
exhibited in Hagia Sophia during a solemn procession in 1058.
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The original container made in Edessa was probably preserved, to judge by the many artistic reproductions, but it is possible that at some point the Emperors may have chosen to have an identical copy of the Shroud’s face to place in this ancient reliquary, so as to be able to exhibit the Shroud wholly open, for the purpose of showing the whole picture of the body; in fact, many ancient authors describe a shroud in Constantinople’s imperial collection that looks much like that of Turin, and speak of it and of the
mandylion
as of two different objects. This however might have a very simple explanation. According to some Byzantine sources, the usual place for the
mandylion
was the imperial chapel at Pharos, where it was kept together with another famous relic: the
keramion
, that is the tile which, in the city of Edessa, closed the hideout where the miraculous icon of Jesus had been kept for a long time. According to tradition, the image of Christ’s face had been miraculously impressed on the tile’s terracotta, so the
keramion
had also been taken to Constantinople to be exhibited to the veneration of the faithful; placed one next to the other, the two relics formed an impressive whole that focused minds on the Passion. But the Flemish crusader
Robert de
Clari, the last witness who ever saw the shroud before the great looting, describes a peculiar ceremony of obstension:

Among these is also a monastery called Our Lady of Blahernae, where is found the shroud wherein Our Lord was shrouded: all [Good] Fridays, it is raised wholly upright so that the figure may be seen. Nobody, neither Greek nor French, knows what happened to this shroud when the city was conquered.
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In the church of the Blachernae, the shroud was opened in a frame thanks to a mechanism that slowly lifted it, so that the faithful could see body of Jesus as though he were slowly and gradually rising from the grave. The cloth, therefore, was earlier kept folded, then very slowly spread out. According to Robert de
Clari, the Blachernae ceremony took place every Friday, but it is more likely that he intended to mean only Good Friday rather than every week; his description, together with the other sources, suggests that on special occasions the Shroud-
mandylion
was removed from its holder in the chapel of Pharos and taken to Blahernae where the faithful could contemplate it, even spread out, in the impressive liturgy of the “ascent” (in Greek
anàstasis
, “resurrection”).
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At the present stage of our knowledge it is clear that the Shroud of Turin had once belonged to the Byzantine Emperors, since the descriptions of ancient authors are fairly precise; on the other hand, it is certain that until the time of
Constantine VII Porphyrogenitos the traditions about the
mandylion
speak of a head-and-shoulder portrait of Jesus alive, while later – as I will point out shortly – this object is always described as a cloth on which is outlined the image of a full body. At present we have no clear idea how this change could come about; a credible idea suggested by historians is that there was in Edessa an attempt to mask in any possible way the funeral nature of the
mandylion
, because the marks of suffering and death on the figure of Christ might create a scandal that would not be endurable in that particular historical context. But this explanation might be incorrect, or might be accompanied by other issues unknown to us at present. It is evident that we know some moments of the Shroud’s millennia of history in detail, while we know nothing of others. To strain to tell its vicissitudes date after date is in my view unhelpful, because it means, over so many stretches, dressing up as ornately as possible incomplete or highly dubious notices; rather, it is wiser to arrange in their place the pieces of the puzzle on which we can rely, waiting for further discoveries to give us other convincing information.

In effect, the religious tradition that went into the making of some icons of the
mandylion
associates this image to Christ dead in the sepulchre, as shown for instance by a superb item in the St. Petersburg Russian State Museum, painted by Prokop
Tehirin in the early 1600s: the dead body of Jesus, with his hands joined over the pubis as in the Shroud, arises from the sepulchre, while two angels above him display the
mandylion
, which is not a towel, but a fairly long sheet.
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Thanks to public showings and the narratives of foreign ambassadors who had been able to be present at private ones, the fame of the
mandylion
spread as far as the West as early as the 11th century; but in Europe it was never described as a towel and, as soon as it was mentioned, it was a sheet that bore the image of the whole body of Jesus Christ. To the text of a sermon ascribed to Pope
Stephen III (768-772 AD), someone added in the 11th century a bit of a speech retailing the “updated” version of the legend of
Abgar with the extra bits added on in Constantine Porphyrogenitus’ time:

So, fully to please the sovereign, the mediator between God and men lay the full length of his body over a sheet of snow-white linen; and upon this linen, wonderful to relate or to hear, the most noble form of his face and of his whole body was divinely transfigured, so that to be able to see the transfiguration impressed upon that linen should be enough even for those who had not been able to see the Lord in the flesh.
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More or less at the same time, between 1130 and 1141, the monk Orderic Vitalis clearly stated, in his
Historia Ecclesiastica
, that the
mandylion
of Edessa bore the image of Jesus’ whole body:

Abgar reigned as toparch of Edessa. To him did the Lord Jesus send [...] the most precious linen, wherewith he dried the sweat from his face, and upon which the features of the Saviour appear, miraculously reproduced. It showeth to those who behold it the image and proportions of the body of the Lord;
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and in
Gervase of Tilbury’s Otia Imperialia
, written in 1218, the fact was asserted again:

It has been ascertained, thanks to the story told in ancient documents, that the Lord lay the whole of His body down upon the whitest of linen, and so thanks to divine power there remained impressed on the linen the fairest image not only of the face but also of the body of the Lord.
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In 1957, historian Pietro
Savio pointed out that a Vatican Library manuscript contained a different testimony, going back to the twelfth century, with an “altered” version of the legend of
Abgar. Jesus had written to the king: “If thou truly desirest to see my face as it physically is, I shall send thee a piece of cloth; know about it that upon it is divinely transferred, not only the image of my face, but of my whole body”.
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Around 1190, Pope
Celestine III received from Constantinople the gift of a luxurious liturgical canopy for use in solemn processions, a masterpiece of sacred art which represented the
mandylion
as a sheet bearing the image of the dead Christ with his hands joined over his pubis; and Gino
Zaninotto has recently found in another tenth-century Greek codex a further confirmation that the famous Byzantine relic bore the image of the whole body.
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From Byzantium to Lirey?

Ian
Wilson believes that the Shroud-
mandylion
vanished from Constantinople during the terrible sack suffered by the city in the days of the
fourth crusade (1204). It remained hidden over long decades, then reappeared in the year 1353 near Lirey, a small town in north-central France: in that year, the knight
Geoffroy de Charny, Bearer of the Oriflamme in the army of King John the Good, and widely popular at court, made a gift of the singular relic to the collegiate church he had just founded in the town. The Shroud started being exhibited to popular veneration as the true shroud of Jesus with a series of solemn obstentions that drew the enthusiasm of the faithful and the jealousy of the local bishop; in the end, after several events, it passed into the hands of the Dukes of Savoy, who had it kept first in their then capital Chambéry, in the sumptuous
Sainte-Chapelle of the Ducal Palace, then moved to their new capital Turin, where it is to this day. The link with the Templar order was first suggested to Ian
Wilson by the fact that the man who died at the stake together with Jacques de
Molay was called
Geoffroy de Charny, the exact same name of the owner of the Shroud in Lirey.
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