Sacred Plunder. David M. Perry
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.