Sacred Plunder. David M. Perry
been products of looting. A contemporary Greek writer, Nicholas Hydruntinus, accused Conrad of being a relic thief, but Conrad’s own 1208 proclamation of celebration for the sacred items (making August 16 a feast day) describes them as gifts from Alexius.34 The claim is supportable. The extant reliquaries, small and ornate, are comparable to other types of reliquaries long used by Byzantine rulers in sacral diplomacy.35
If Alexius favored Conrad, the short-lived emperor perhaps favored other elite Latins similarly. While Conrad might have acquired additional pieces after the conquest, as there were plenty of relics to be gained and his hoard is impressive, the physical evidence supports the bishop’s statement that at least some were gifts. The Halberstadt trove, overall, suggests that at least a fraction of the relics taken west after the conquest were not stolen, looted, bought, or otherwise acquired as a result of war; they were diplomatic mementos of contact with the last of the Angeloi emperors.36 Such gifting served as one, largely unconsidered, vector by which relics of Christ proliferated in the West after 1204.37
One of the more precise descriptions of a relic muddies the water. Conrad acquired “a [portion of] the skull of St. Stephen the protomartyr, along with his elbow,” in order to bring Halberstadt a relic belonging to its patron saint.38 Venice had laid claim to the relics of St. Stephen, stealing them from Constantinople in 1107 or 1108. Nearly a century later, Conrad and others found more. We cannot say whether these relics were simply pieces the Venetians had missed, forgeries created by the Greeks after Venice’s theft, or a postconquest invention by Greeks or Latins. Regardless, Conrad did not acquire a relic of his cathedral’s patron by chance. Other crusaders made similar acquisitions. Conrad’s conduct, in conjunction with several examples discussed below, suggests that instead of just grabbing whatever sacred item was at hand, some crusaders sought out objects of special personal significance.
Bishop Nivelon de Chérisy of Soissons
The “Gesta episcoporum Halberstadensium” is suggestive about the postcrusade environment but not definitive. No sources attest to Conrad’s whereabouts in the days after the sack, so one is left with some questions, especially given the mystery of St. Stephen’s head and elbow. Thanks to Robert of Clari’s description of the relics of the churches in the Bucoleon Palace complex, we know somewhat more about the activities of Nivelon de Chérisy, who served as the bishop of Soissons from 1176 to 1207 and was another notable translator of relics. The sacred items that Nivelon brought back to Soissons are recorded in “The Land of Jerusalem,” an anonymously authored text that he presumably commissioned. The author framed the translatio within a discussion of the larger struggle to redeem the Holy Land, placing the recent conquest of Constantinople in the context of that struggle. The text begins with the loss of Jerusalem and the famed relic of the True Cross to Saladin in 1187 and ends with Nivelon’s return to Soissons with four Constantinopolitan fragments of the True Cross, along with other relics.39 Nivelon was one of the most important clerics on the crusade; he led the army’s clergy, just as Boniface of Montferrat led the secular force. At the end, he served as one of the twelve electors of Baldwin of Flanders and crowned him emperor in Hagia Sophia.40 While Peter Capuano, the papal legate, came and went (depending on the army’s current relationship with Rome), Nivelon was the constant leading ecclesiastical presence on the crusade.41
Nivelon’s relics, according to “The Land of Jerusalem,” included another head of St. Stephen the Protomartyr, a finger and the head of the Apostle Thomas, the crown of the head of Mark the Evangelist, a thorn from the Crown of Thorns, a belt of Mary and a piece of her robe, a piece of the towel with which Christ girded himself at the Last Supper, a forearm and the head of St. John the Baptist, a rib and the head of the blessed Blaise, the pieces of the True Cross, the staff of Moses, and many other objects.42 The text tells us that Nivelon divided them among churches in his diocese, where the newly translated saints began to work miracles.
“The Land of Jerusalem” does not record how Nivelon actually acquired his relics, but, as a source on the relic looting, it does permit some modest deductions. First, one can correlate its list with relics described by Clari. He lists the Crown of Thorns, the Virgin’s robe, the head of St. John the Baptist, and two large pieces of the True Cross as residing in the church of the Blessed Virgin of the Pharos, which was located in the Bucoleon Palace.43 Boniface of Montferrat, a friend of Nivelon’s, took control of the Bucoleon in the initial weeks after the conquest.44 A month later, Doge Enrico Dandolo of Venice suggested that everyone vacate their (fortified) palaces before the election of the emperor, presumably to stave off any thought of armed resistance from the loser. That month gave Nivelon ample time to organize the churches, go through the inventories, and take whatever he wanted. Indeed, the March Pact specifically stated that “the clerics of each party ought to organize those churches that have come into the possession of their party.”45 Nivelon followed the agreed-upon arrangement.
Thus, we can place Nivelon and the relics that he eventually took home in the same place at the same time and speculate about what might have happened. Regardless of what Nivelon did in the privacy of the Bucoleon’s treasury—even if he personally went in with a tool or snapped finger bones off a dead saint’s hands—his actions cannot be characterized as looting or relic theft. The bishop encountered no danger, which, as we will see, is a prerequisite for the narrative traditions relating to relic theft. Nivelon was organizing the churches that his faction controlled. As the leading clerical overseer of these churches, he was within his canonical rights to translate relics—hence, no sacrilege. Too often scholars have conflated the activities of marauding soldiers with those of confiscatory bishops or princes. In a brief summary, Donald Queller and Thomas Madden use the words “stole” and “seized” to describe the deeds of Bishops Nivelon and Conrad, linking them to the “hundreds of relics pilfered by the crusaders.”46 I suggest here that the looting of soldiers and the secretive thieves discussed below varies significantly from confiscations by commanding bishops, especially in terms of how such deeds are memorialized. The elites could authorize their own activity; the common crusaders could not. Surely Nivelon was not the only Latin cleric to extract a few sacred fragments from a newly possessed church’s inventory.
Abbot Martin of Pairis
In the initial chaos, many crusaders no doubt plundered Constantinople’s churches, but the record of their misdeeds emerges only in sources distancing themselves from such behavior. Bishop Garnier of Troyes seems to have tried to put a stop to the sacrilege; one source from a site that received a relic from Garnier labeled him procurator sanctorum reliquarum (manager of holy relics), but this is an uncertain attribution at best and is probably untrue, as will be argued below.47 He certainly failed to contain the actions of Abbot Martin of Pairis, his ecclesiastical peer.
Abbot Martin’s actions lie somewhere between the authorized, careful deeds of the bishops and the indiscriminate and largely untraceable looting that was not memorialized. Martin had left the main force of the crusade to protest the diversion to Constantinople, but he returned before the final conquest and entered the city after it was taken. According to the Historia Constantinopolitana, a text Martin commissioned from Gunther of Pairis once he returned home, he witnessed bands of soldiers ripping through the abbey church of the Pantocrator and decided to seek relics in a remote section of the monastic complex. These scenes may well accurately recount events that Martin actually witnessed, but as with all translatio narratives, one must be cautious. The neat positioning of Martin’s pious looting against the impious looting of secular crusaders, for all its plausibility, may well function as a rhetorical device rather than correlate to fact.
By implication, Martin worried that he might lose his sacred plunder to the secular throng. Within the complex, he found a Greek priest hiding and threatened him with death if he did not yield the most powerful relics up to him. The priest, “thinking it more tolerable that a man of religion violate the holy relics in awe and reverence, rather than that worldly men should pollute them, possibly, with bloodstained hands,”48 eventually submitted to Martin’s demands. Martin took the best relics and hid them, then offered his protection to the priest and found him safe lodgings in the city.49
St. Simon and the Seven Thieves
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