The Medieval Relic Trade

In the late Roman world, Christians began to gather at the graves of martyrs, those who had died for their faith. They believed the martyrs were already with God and could intercede for the living, and that their remains kept a share of their holiness. Churches rose over these graves, and from the fourth century relics were moved to new churches and placed beneath altars. The historian Peter Brown has described this as a revolution: the dead, once kept outside the city walls, were brought into the centre of Christian life.

Relics took many forms. The most valued were the bodies of saints, whole or divided, but there were also secondary relics: clothing, objects the saint had touched, or cloths that had touched a tomb. Most precious of all were relics linked to Christ himself, such as fragments of the True Cross, which tradition says Helena, mother of Constantine, discovered in Jerusalem in the fourth century. Relics were kept in reliquaries of gold, silver and gems, many of which are now masterpieces in museum collections.

For a church or a city, a famous relic brought pilgrims, offerings, prestige and the protection of a heavenly patron. Kings collected relics to display their piety and power, and emperors sent them as diplomatic gifts. In 787 the Second Council of Nicaea ruled that churches should be consecrated with relics, which made them necessary for every new altar. Demand grew faster than supply. In the Latin West, where relics were scarcer than in the Byzantine East, churches looked to Rome and the Holy Land, and the bodies of Roman martyrs were taken from the catacombs and sent north of the Alps, sometimes with papal blessing and sometimes without. Pilgrim routes, such as the road to Santiago de Compostela, grew around the shrines of famous saints.

The Church tried from early on to control the movement of relics. A law of Emperor Theodosius I in 386 forbade moving, dividing or selling the bodies of martyrs. Yet relics were bought and sold throughout the Middle Ages, often through travelling dealers, and they were also stolen. The historian Patrick Geary called these thefts furta sacra, holy thefts, and showed that medieval writers often celebrated them in accounts known as translationes. A saint, they argued, could not be moved against his will; a successful theft proved that he wished to go.

The most famous case is that of St Mark. In 828 two Venetian merchants, named in the tradition as Buono of Malamocco and Rustico of Torcello, took the body believed to be the evangelist’s from his church in Alexandria, then under Muslim rule. According to the Venetian account, they hid it under a load of pork so that Muslim officials would not search it. The relic made Venice the city of St Mark, and the basilica built to house it became the symbol of the republic. In 1087 sailors from Bari carried off the relics of St Nicholas from Myra in Asia Minor, and the saint’s new shrine made Bari a major place of pilgrimage.

The greatest transfer of relics came with the Fourth Crusade. In April 1204 crusaders, diverted from their goal of Egypt, sacked Constantinople, the capital of the Christian Byzantine Empire and home to the richest collection of relics in Christendom. Churches were stripped, and relics were carried to Venice, France, Germany and beyond. The monk Gunther of Pairis wrote an account praising his abbot, Martin, for securing relics for their monastery in Alsace. A canon of Picardy brought a relic believed to be the head of John the Baptist to Amiens in 1206. Byzantine writers, such as the historian Niketas Choniates, recorded the sack as a catastrophe and a sacrilege. In 2001 Pope John Paul II expressed regret to the Orthodox Church for the events of 1204, and in 2004 he handed the Ecumenical Patriarch relics of Saints Gregory of Nazianzus and John Chrysostom, believed to have been taken from Constantinople at that time.

Where relics were valuable, forgeries followed. Several churches claimed the same saint’s head or body, and fragments of the True Cross were scattered across Europe. Some forgeries were deliberate frauds; others arose from honest confusion, when a saint’s relics were divided, renamed or attributed by later generations. Not everyone was credulous. Around 1120 the monk Guibert of Nogent wrote a treatise on relics criticising a monastery that claimed to own a tooth of Christ, and warning against relics without reliable history. In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council forbade the sale of relics and their display outside a reliquary, and ruled that newly discovered relics required papal approval.

Satire sharpened the criticism. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written in the late fourteenth century, the Pardoner carries a glass full of ‘pigges bones’ to deceive country people. In the sixteenth century Erasmus mocked pilgrims who kissed doubtful relics, and in 1543 John Calvin published a Treatise on Relics, listing duplicate heads, bodies and objects and claiming that the fragments of the True Cross would fill a ship. In the nineteenth century a French scholar, Charles Rohault de Fleury, measured known fragments and concluded that together they amounted to far less than a single cross.

The Reformation brought the destruction of many shrines in Protestant lands, where reformers saw the cult of relics as superstition. The Council of Trent, in 1563, defended the veneration of relics but ordered bishops to remove abuses and banned the pursuit of profit from them. Catholic canon law today still forbids the sale of sacred relics.

Relics remain important in Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, and their veneration has parallels in other traditions, such as the Buddhist veneration of relics of the Buddha in stupas. Many medieval relics are now studied by scientists as well as historians, and some, such as the Shroud of Turin, remain the subject of debate. The story of the relic trade shows how sincere devotion, civic pride, money and power could become inseparable in the medieval world.