Sacred Plunder. David M. Perry
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,