This image is from Folio 210V of the Madrid Skylitzes, a manuscript of the “Synopsis of Histories” by John Skylitzes, copied in the twelfth century and currently in the Biblioteca Nacional de España in Madrid. It illustrates a short story whose words appear immediately above and below it:
αὐχμοῦ δὲ γενομένου, ὡς ἐπὶ μῆνας ὅλους ἓξ μὴ καταρραγῆναι ὑετόν, λιτανείαν ἐποιήσαντο οἱ τοῦ βασιλέως ἀδελφοί, ὁ μὲν Ἰωάννης βαστάζων τὸ ἅγιον μανδύλιον, ὁ μέγας δομέστικος τὴν πρὸς Αὔγαρον ἐπιστολὴν τοῦ Χριστοῦ καὶ ὁ πρωτοβεστιάριος Γεώργιος τὰ ἅγια σπάργανα. καὶ πεζῇ ὁδεύσαντες ἀπὸ τοῦ μεγάλου παλατίου ἀφίκοντο ἄχρι τοῦ ναοῦ τῆς ὑπεραγίας θεοτόκου τῶν Βλαχερνῶν.
“Because there was a drought and for six whole months no rain had fallen, the emperor’s brothers held a procession, John Bastazon carrying the Holy Mandylion, the Great Domestic the Letter of Christ to Abgar, the protobestiarios George the Holy Swaddling Bands. They travelled on foot from the Great Palace to the church of the exceedingly Holy Mother of God at Blachernae.”
The three men carrying caskets are identified as: “ὁ Ἰωάννης”, “ὁ μέγας δομέστικος,” and “ὁ πρωτοβεστιάριος,” i.e. John, the Great Domestic, and the Protobestiarius.”
This event is dated 1036, during the reign of Michael IV the Paphlagonian.
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Almost two hundred pages earlier, at the top of Folio 26V, is this:
It is part of a pair of images, one of which is at the bottom of the previous page. The text immediately above reads:
Ἀνῃρημένου δὲ τοῦ Λέοντος οἱ ἀνῃρηκότες σύροντες τὸν τούτου νεκρὸν ἀνηλεῶς διὰ τῶν Σκύλων εἰς τὸν ἱππόδρομον ἐξήγαγον, παντὸς αὐτοῖς περιῃρημένου φόβου διὰ τὸ τὴν βασίλειον αὐλὴν ὅπλοις οἰκείοις πάντοθεν περιφραχθῆναι.
“After Leo was put to death, his assassins callously dragged his corpse through the Skyla gate and brought it into the Hippodrome, fearing nothing because the imperial palace was guarded at all points by their own forces.”
The text immediately below the illustration above is:
κατέσπασαν δὲ τῶν βασιλείων καὶ τὴν αὐτοῦ γαμετὴν σὺν τοῖς τέσσαρσι τέκνοις αὐτῆς, Συμβατίῳ τῷ κατὰ τὴν ἀνάρρησιν μετονομασθέντι Κωνσταντίνῳ, Βασιλείῳ τε, καὶ Γρηγορίῳ συνάμα Θεοδοσίῳ, οὓς καὶ ἀκατίῳ ἐνθέντες πρὸς τὴν Πρώτην νῆσον ἀπήγαγον, κἀκεῖσε τῶν πάντων ἐκτμηθέντων συνέβη τὸν Θεοδόσιον τὴν ἑαυτοῦ καταλῦσαι ζωὴν καὶ ταφῆς τῷ ἰδίῳ [κεκοινωνηκέναι πατρί.]
“His wife was hauled off from the palace together with her four children, Symbatios (whose name was changed to Constantine after his proclamation as co-emperor), Basil, Gregory and Theodosios. They were thrust into a skiff and brought to the island of Prote where all four were castrated. Theodosios succumbed and went to share his own father’s grave.”
It seems that the pictures are in the wrong order. Perhaps the illustrator felt that there wasn’t enough room for the main picture at the bottom of the previous folio, so placed the banishment of the royal family there, so that he could use more space, at the top of the next page, for the hauling of Leo around the streets after his murder.
The caption closest to the men carrying the dead body of Leo V (literally a “stiff”) is: “σῦποντες τόν Βασιλέα Λέοντα ἐζάγουσιν εὶς τόν ´Ιππόδρομον,” or “The Emperor Leo is carried to the Hippodrome,” and the other two, next to the soldiers, read “τό Βασιλκόν παλάτιον καὶ οὶ τὴν αὐλήν φυλάττοντες μετά τῶν τοῦ Mιχαὴλ,” and “οὶ περι τόν Mιχαὴλ,” emphasising that they are Michael’s men, not Leo’s, a detail mentioned in the text to explain why nobody protested at the emperor’s treatment. Although these illustrations and descriptions appear at the beginning of the chapter devoted to Michael I, they refer to the murder of his predecessor Leo V in 820 AD, and the subsequent disposal of his body.
There are anomalies regarding this image. For a start the main text describes in some detail how Leo’s head and one arm were cut off, which is not represented in the picture, and also the troops looking on are depicted with particularly distinctive weapons, identifying them as the Varangian Guard, an elite troop of Viking mercenaries who did not appear in Constantinople until about fifty years after Leo’s murder, and were not formally constituted as a unit until a hundred years later still.
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This is a reliquary now in Limburg, Germany, but made around 970 AD in Constantinople under the patronage of Basil Lekapenos. It is the size of large atlas (48 x 35 x 6 cm), and was made to hold a relic of the true cross, in a detachable thin cruciform reliquary of its own, made by two of Basil’s predecessors, Constantine VII and Romanos II.
Around the cross are ten little compartments for other relics, each labelled. They are (reading across from top left to bottom right): Jesus’s swaddling clothes, the towel used to wash the Apostles’ feet, the crown of thorns, Jesus’s purple robe, his burial shroud, the sponge, a head-shawl and two girdles of the Virgin Mary, and the hair of John the Baptist. Obviously none of these things would fit into the compartments, and most of them are attested elsewhere anyway, so presumably only fragments of each relic were intended to be placed in each one.
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This is the reliquary of the Holy Blood of Bruges:
It is a Byzantine perfume bottle, about 25cm long, made of rock quartz in the eleventh or twelfth century. In it is a roll of cloth supposedly stained with the blood of Christ. It was probably brought from Constantinople after its sack in 1204, but local tradition holds that it came from Jerusalem in the second crusade, about fifty years earlier.
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All this brings us to a paper presented at the Ancaster Shroud conference of 2019, ‘Three Treasures of Constantinople: The Holy Blood of Bruges, a relic; the Limburg Staurotheke, a reliquary, and the Madrid Skylitzes, an illustrated manuscript all provide historical evidence that the Shroud of Turin is much older than the 1988 radiocarbon dating suggests.’ Well, no; they don’t, but the methods by which the author attempts to connect them are instructive in the lengths some authenticists will go to establish a historical provenance for the Shroud of Turin.
The Holy Blood of Bruges has never been examined. We do not know if the cloth is a ‘bandage,’ as the paper assumes, or even if the blood is blood at all. Neither have even been looked at closely, let alone carbon-dated or blood-typed. The author accepts without question that it is genuine, and wanders into realms of biblical speculation about Joseph of Arimathea and burial practices about which we know practically nothing. The Holy Blood of Bruges provides no evidence whatsoever that the Shroud of Turin is authentic.
Next, from the adulatory inscriptions on the side of the Limburg Staurotheke, the author speculates that it was not originally what it quite obviously is, but may have been the lid of another reliquary, which could hold the Shroud of Turin, folded into thirty layers, which she identifies with the Image of Edessa, later known as the Mandylion. There is no evidence for this whatever, and she seems not even to know about the compartments. Her interpretation of the inscriptions is based entirely on a single translation, and seem to miss the point of both. The first is about the cross reliquary insert, and consists of two antitheses: firstly, as Christ dignified the cross by lying against it, so the joint emperors have done the same by beautifying it with jewels, and secondly, as Christ used the cross to crush Satan, so perhaps this relic could be used to crush the unbelievers of its own time. The second inscription consists of one antithesis, a little more elliptical: as Christ’s nature was enough to beautify his apparent disfigurement, so Basil’s beautifying the reliquary might be enough to overcome his (he was castrated in youth). The idea that the expression clumsily translated as “he did not have form” refers to the Shroud because it is indistinct, is supposititious in the extreme.
Perhaps neither of the foregoing would have raised any hope that they may be references to the Shroud without the other of the ‘Three Treasures’, the illustrations from the Skylitzes copy, which the author would like to imagine are two views of the same event, even though they are two hundred pages apart and clearly captioned to fit the text in which they appear. The author thinks that the earlier image depicts the front of the procession, with two unidentified men carrying the Shroud folded in four, and the later one the rear. She seems to think that after the copyists of the text had finished, illustrators filled in the gaps from a pile of original images which were not in the correct order or sufficiently clearly labelled, and mistook a picture showing a stretched cloth with a naked man on it being carried in procession, for a picture of a dead emperor being taken through the streets. They placed it in the wrong place, redrew the body, giving it imperial clothing, and miscaptioned it. They also mistook a picture of three men carrying three reliquaries for the three brothers of the emperor carrying reliquaries, and mislabelled them too. However, they forgot that the Varangian Guard had not been formed at the time of Leo V, and faithfully copied them in, thus providing the crucial clue to their mistake.
Moonshine.