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Alexius I Comnenus

Alexius I Comnenus

A letter which bears the date 1095 falls next under our purview. It purports to be an invitation sent by Byzantine Emperor Alexius I Comnenus (1081-1118) to his friend Robert the Frisian, Count of the Flemings (1071-1093) and to all the princes of the realm (the Holy Roman Empire?). The letter announces that the Greek Empire was under constant siege throughout by Patzinaks and Turks and bemoans the attrocities perpetrated by these pagans. They are, it goes on, lately invading the area of Constantinople itself and will soon take the capital. Alexius then asserts that he prefers that the capital should be captured (sic) by western Christian knights rather than by the abominable Turks, moreso because the city houses great treasures as well as the precious relics of the Lord. These are then named, and include, unequivocally for the first time in these sources, the linen cloths found in the sepulchre after his resurrection."

To dismiss this letter as a spurious piece of Latin propaganda virtually making the Byzantine emperor beg for the Latins’ expropriation of the imperial relics during the Fourth Crusade is to miss its significance as a Byzantine document referring to the presence of Jesus’ burial wrappings in Constantinople. Indeed, were it not for the enigmatic Document IV, this letter would be the first such reference. Most historians have agreed that Alexius would not have written such words, but they also concur that this epistula probably "depends on an authentic letter of the basileus" written with another end in mind and that it dates, variously, from 1091 to 1105.

Kurt Weitzmann and Hans Belting have shown that by c. 1100 Byzantine iconography had evolved a new style in the depiction of the events of Easter: the threnos or "Lamentation." The contemporaneity of this epistula and the developed threnos art in Byzantium is striking, for thus it signals with a twin corroboration what the large burial cloth icon of Christ must have looked like. Jesus is now shown lying upon a full-length shroud after being removed from the cross; in many examples he is naked and with hands folded upon his abdomen or over his loins. In addition to this new mural art, Byzantine epitaphioi or embroidered cloth, symbolizing Jesus’ shroud in the Good Friday liturgy, show Jesus in full-length, i.e., in the threnos attitude.2 3

Before the next document from Constantinople may be studied, a group of Latin texts should be considered. The Abgar legend had already come to the West and was known to the Aquitainian pilgrim Egeria at the time when she visited Edessa (ca. 394). Rufinus’ 5th c. Latin translation of Eusebius’ Church History included the latter’s Abgar account. These early versions did not mention the image, but only Jesus’ letter to Abgar promising to send a disciple to heal him. But in a sermon pronounced in 769 Pope Stephen III employed the story of Abgar--this time reciting the episode of the miraculous Jesus image--to oppose the iconoclast movement then current in the Greek church. He seems to translate directly the received Greek form of Jesus’ letter responding to Abgar’s request for a cure: "Since you wish to look upon my physical face, I am sending you a likeness of my face on a cloth . . ." With these words, the Pope urges, Christ himself was advocating the use of religious images.2 4

Somehow--via returning crusaders?--the Abgar story became quite popular in the West in the 12th c. Von Dobschütz (138**) included a tractate which he called the "Oldest Latin Abgar Text."25 Von Dobschütz thought it derived from a lost Syriac original of the 8th c. In addition, two other western writers of the Abgar story provide an important clue in the emergent and widening awareness both that the Edessa cloth was larger than originally thought and that it contained a full-body image of Jesus. They are the Ecclesiastical History of the English monk Ordericus Vitalis, ca. 1141; and the otia imperialia of Gervase of Tilbury, ca. 1211.

In Edessa, it seems, the image was always described as a face only. What is remarkable about these Latin Abgar accounts is the fact that in all of them, what Abgar received was not just a facial image, but one which enabled the viewer to discern the form and stature of Jesus’ entire body.2 6 If they truly derive from a lost Syriac original from Edessa’s archives, as they claim, each one drawing its claim from its own immediate source, they open the possibility (only hinted at in the sources) that already in Edessa someone had known that the Mandylion was an icon of Christ’s entire body.

The clue leading to the conclusion that the lost Syriac original used by the western sources was written before the Mandylion left Edessa in 944 is the line in all three Latin texts that "this linen from antiquity still remains uncorrupted in Syrian Mesopotamia in Edessa". (Qui linteus adhuc vetustate temporis permanens incorruptus in Mesopotamia Syrie apud Edissam civitatem.) Again, the descriptions of the image, no longer as face-only but now as entire body, relate chronologically to (a) the emergent threnos and epitaphios scenes in the East, which themselves suggest b) an awareness of an imaged shroud of Jesus, and (c) could be witnessed by Western Crusaders in Byzantine churches. Yet only in our Document VI was the much larger and imaged Mandylion recognized as a burial sindon. The Abgar/Mandylion mind-set retained its hold on the authors of the Latin versions, even while they (and possibly their original Syriac source-text) had altered the legend in a significant manner.

Gervase of Tilbury had certainly heard of a cloth bearing the full image of Jesus. Besides giving the old Abgar/Edessa version, he even gives a second account of a bloodied full-body image on a cloth, this time in a context related to the burial of Christ; it has no parallel in Byzantium, to my knowledge; but it is acheiropoietos. He writes:

There is another figure of the Lord expressed on cloth which has its origin in Gestis de Vultu Lucano (the events surrounding the Volto Santo of Lucca). When the Lord our Redeemer, hung from the cross stripped of his clothing, Joseph of Arimathea approached Mary, the mother of the Lord, and the other women who had followed the Lord in His Passion, and said: Do you love Him so little that you allow him to hang there naked and not do anything about it? Moved by this castigation, the mother and the others with her bought a spotless linteum so ample and large that it covered the whole body, and when He was taken down the image of the whole body hanging from the cross appeared expressed on the linen.2 7

Note that it is certain from his writings that Gervase never saw the actual cloth.

Deriving, as they claim, from a pre-944 Edessan text, all three Latin texts include information about the rituals associated with the image when it was in Edessa. And this lends credence to their claim of a Syriac model. Most notably, they state that the cloth with full-body image was kept in a gold chest (scrinium) and that:

[when displayed] on Easter it used to change its appearance according to different ages, that is, it showed itself in infancy at the first hour of the day, childhood at the third hour, adolescence at the sixth hour, and the fullness of age at the ninth hour, when the Son of God came to His Passion for the weight of our sins and endured the awful sacrifice of the cross.

Oddly this did not appear in the "Liturgical Tractate" where Edessan rituals were earlier described. What can these words mean? The most acceptable answer is one that harmonizes with two other eyewitness descriptions of the cloth in Documents XI and XII. Accepting from the texts already discussed that Edessa’s cloth bore a faint painting of an entire body, we may infer from Documents XI and XII that the image of the full and bloodstained body was revealed gradually by the unfolding of the cloth in sections, beginning with the feet and lastly showing the whole bloodstained body. The comparison of the gradually unfolded increments of the body with successive periods of Christ’s life would thus have been symbolic, part of the belief-system of the Edessenes. It may be instructive to notice that the Byzantine cross has a diagonal suppedaneum (foot-rest), for which the Greek Orthodox Church has no standard explanation. But it suggests a belief that one of Christ’s legs was shorter than the other. Supporting this are many medieval iconic depictions of the Virgin and Child in which one of Jesus’s feet seems deformed. In addition, the coins of Basil I (867-886) show Christ enthroned on the obverse, but with one foot deformed. Thus by this interpretation, something in the appearance of the feet of the Jesus image on the Edessa cloth would have suggested "infancy." The final stage (entire body) clearly relates to the Passion. How the two intermediate relationships (legs with lower torso and then upper torso below the neck) fit this interpretation is not immediately apparent to a modern non-Byzantine.

What determinations can be made from all this? Eusebius and others had long since made reference to Syriac archives in Edessa. From these archives Eusebius (d. 340) related the account of the exchange of letters between Abgar and Jesus. He omitted any mention of an image, whether painted or acheiropoietos. Others, beginning with the Doctrine of Addai (ca. 390) made more of the painted image in the cure of Abgar than of the letter of Jesus. The Syriac archives remain a constant. The Acts of Thaddeus (6th c.) made the image miraculous on a tetradiplon on which Jesus wiped his face. About 594 Evagrius told a story about the icon saving Edessa during the siege of Chosroes of Persia in 544. The Latin discourse (769) of Pope Stephen seems to retain the face-only icon, his terms being faciem and vultus, the latter capable of expressing the entire person. The Narratio of Constantine VII (944) still presented us a miraculous Christ-face icon. At some time after 769 but before 944, it would seem that some Syric document (as the western Latin Abgar texts claim) attested to a full-body image on this cloth and also related an Edessan ritual connected with the city’s special and very secretly kept icon. Even if the western documents misunderstood their source, and the ritual was one practiced not in Edessa but after 944 in Constantinople, where the threnos or burial shroud art was emerging and would by 1100 have been known to westerners, it would not materially alter the conclusions of this paper.

Scavone Introduction to Several Documents Scavone Summary of Several Documents

English Pilgrim 1150 Nicholas Soemundarson 1157 William Of Tyre Nicholas Mesarites 1201 Antonius Of Novgorod Robert Of Clari 1203 Nicholas Mesarites 1207 Nicholas Of Otranto 1207 Theodore Angelus’ Letter 1205 Baldwin II: Golden Bull 1247 Narratio De Imagine Edessena 944 Symeon Magister 944 Gregory Referendarius 944 Letter Of Constantine VII 958 Liturgical Tractate CA. 960 Alexius I Comnenus