The Markwardt Hypotheses (4)

I had been looking forward to this. Jack Markwardt is usually as thorough a researcher as one could wish to find, and his history of the Shroud before Lirey has been comprehensive and meticulously researched. Needless to say, I have been reviewing his presentations with equal rigour, and do not come to the same conclusions, but that doesn’t make them any less valuable. Unfortunately his latest presentation, ‘Shroud Wars: Panel Review (Part 19) – Shroud History from 1001-1207 A.D.,’ at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6QrnSefEww&t=8970s, does not live up to its promise.

It starts well enough, with conclusions drawn from sources, which Markwardt thinks are justified and I don’t, but towards the end drifts away into fantasy and rather desperate condemnation of anybody who doesn’t think the same, some of which is distinctly unworthy of Markwardt’s scholarship. But we’ll get to that.

According to Markwardt, the year 1000 saw two sacred cloths stored in Constantinople, one from Edessa, and one from Camuliana. The Edessan one was sometimes called the Mandylion (but not as often as sometimes supposed) and is usually accompanied by an associated tile, which also bore a miraculous face. The Camulianan one, according to Markwardt, was what people meant when they talked about the ‘sindon’ or burial cloth/s which could be visited by pilgrims. There is no evidence for this at all, except that apart from some brief publicity after it was brought to Constantinople neither the Image of Camuliana, or the Image of God Incarnate, are ever heard of again, while after about a hundred years the burial cloths of Christ are mentioned, and it is Markwardt’s contention that the one transmogrified into the other. Generally, it seems, the cloths were enclosed in reliquaries, and not exposed to view except on very special occasions, or to very special people, such as the emperor.

in 1036, according to the Skylitzes manuscript, Constantinople suffered a severe drought, and the Mandylion was carried in procession from the Great Palace to the Blachernae, together with Christ’s letter, and his swaddling-clothes, which seem to have represented the most valuable relics the city possessed. The accompanying illustration shows them being carried in three small caskets.¹

The result of this proclamation of sanctity was a severe hailstorm that broke down trees and wrecked the tiled roofs of the houses, and a famine which required a hundred thousand bushels of corn to be bought from the Greeks. ‘Mandylion’ (the word) is almost never heard of again, the image being instead referred to as a towel or sheet or cloth, always with an image on it, and almost always in association with the name Abgar, which is how we distinguish it.

Of the other cloth, although various later visitors speak of the sindon which wrapped Christ’s corpse, we know absolutely nothing. It is never described at all, let alone as having any image on it. Accordingly, Markwardt is constrained to find oblique references, and allusive images, which he hopes will substantiate his case that the Image of God Incarnate and the Shroud of Turin are the same.

His first literary source is the Tarragona Manuscript, which I looked at in The Antioch Hypothesis (2) and (3). It seems to have been written by a pilgrim, in about 1100, and describes the sights and legends of the city. He begins with a list of relics: Jesus’ swaddling clothes, the Magi’s gold, a large piece of cloth, a crucifixion nail, the crown of thorns, the sceptre of reed, Jesus’ sandals, the spear, the stone his head was laid on in the tomb, the basin he used to wash the apostles’ feet, letters to King Abgar of Edessa, the baskets of crumbs from the feeding of the five thousand, and the “figure domini nostri Ihesu Christi vultus eodem in linteolo” – the figure of the face of our Lord Jesus Christ on a little linen cloth. The story of how this came about, and why nobody was allowed to see it any longer, is about 200 words long, among which the image is described, as ‘vultus’ six times and ‘facies’ three times. Curiously, Markwardt translates ‘vultus’ as ‘visage’ and thinks that it applies to the whole body, and that ‘facies’ applies to the face. Actually it is ‘facies’ that occasionally applies to the whole, as in ‘facàde,’ while ‘vultus’ only ever means the face, so a full-body image is definitely contra-indicated. And it came about because of King Abgar’s request for a portrait. To argue, as Markwardt does, that this actually refers to a full-body image, and that the Abgar legend was tacked on in error by a casual tourist, is not, to my mind, justified.

Furthermore, it is Markwardt’s contention that the various types of icon that began to be produced about now, especially of the ‘Lamentation of Christ’ and ‘Imago Pietatis,’ were based on the emperor leaking certain information about the relic to the artists, because he was allowed to see what they weren’t. However this is based on a mistranslation of “nec ipsi Constantinopolitano imperatori,” which does not mean that nobody could view the relic “except the emperor of Constantinople” but “not [even] the emperor of Constantinople himself.”

Markwardt also claims that “by this time the Mandylion is known as the Mandylion. If he wants to describe the Mandylion he could just say, ‘there’s the Mandylion relic.’ He could say, ‘there’s a relic that used to be the former Image of Edessa.’ But in fact, by this time, nobody calls this relic either of those things, and they hardly ever did, until long after the sack of Constantinople to the Crusaders in 1204. The story remained, but the nomenclature was lost.

Finally, the Tarragona manuscript recounts how this image had had to be locked away because its exposure had stimulated a period of constant earthquakes. Markwardt, referring to Glanville Downey,² claims that there were no such continuous earthquakes during the period when the manuscript was written, although in fact Downey, quoting John Skylitzes, does say that there were earthquakes in Constantinople in 1010, barely fifteen years after the Image of Edessa’s arrival in Constantinople, from January to March, destroying several churches, which rather neatly serves a late 11th century date for the original of the manuscript. Markwardt asks, “How do you explain the history of the continuous earthquakes when Constantinople had only one earthquake after 944?” I think I just have. [Not to mention the less continuous earthquakes of 1037, 1038, 1041, 1042, 1064 and 1081, all of which are also mentioned by Downey.]

Bizarrely, at this point in the podcast Markwardt, whose hypothesis that the Shroud is the Image of God Incarnate has never enjoyed much popularity, feels the need to attack Mark Guscin, who thinks the Shroud is the same as the Image as Edessa, and Andrea Nicolotti, who thinks that the Shroud is medieval, and makes a mess of it both times. Why, he wonders, might Guscin conclude that the Tarragona manuscript describes the Image of Edessa? Could it be because it specifically claims that the relic was the one commissioned by Abgar? And why, he wonders, might Nicolotti conclude that the cloth was quite small? Could it be because the subject is introduced using the word ‘linteolo,’ which deliberately has the diminutive suffix ‘-olo,’ indicating a diminutive cloth? Markwardt claims that these scholars are deriving their readings of the manuscript from their hypotheses, when really it’s exactly the other way round.

And, says Markwardt, it’s not true that “only the emperor” (or as I corrected him, “not even the emperor”) was allowed to see the Image of Edessa. Gregory Referendarius saw it. Indeed, but that was before the earthquakes of 1010. Of course, it is Markwardt’s contention that the Tarragona Manuscript refers to the Image of God Incarnate, which he thinks was closed up after a much earlier earthquake, in 740, but there’s nothing in the text to suggest that.

During the 12th century, Jesus’s burial cloths begin to be mentioned separately from the Abgar image. In about 1150 an anonymous English pilgrim to Constantinople reported seeing, “in cappella imperatoris,” various relics, including “Sudarium quod fuit super caput eius, et lintheum quo precinctus fuit quando lavit pedes discipulorum. […] Pera dominica & littere quas in eadem scripsit Dominus, que pera cum litteris consignata est signo imperatoris in capsula aurea, et in alia capsula est Mantile, quod, visui Domini applicarum, imaginem vultus eius retinuit.”³

“The sudarium which was on his head, and the linen cloth with which he was girded when he washed the disciples’ feet. […] The Lord’s purse and the letters which the Lord wrote in it, which purse with the letters is sealed with the emperor’s sign in a golden capsule, and in another capsule is the Mantle, which, when applied to the Lord’s face, retained the image of his face.”

And in 1157, Nikulás Saemundsson also listed relics, including “í pollutum enum fornum’ (in the ancient palace), a ‘Mattull,’ a ‘kyrtill,’ and ‘Likblaejur med Sveitadùk, ok Blódi Crists.’ In this case the ‘Mattull’ may be the ‘Mandil,’ which is listed separately from the ‘Likblaejur,’ or burial cloths (plural) including the ‘Sveitadùk’ (sweat cloth), and the blood of Christ, though whether the blood was on the cloth or in a separate phial is not clear.³

And in 1190, an Imperial Relic Inventory also distinguishes between ‘pars Linteaminum, quibus crucifixum Christi corpus meruit involvere iam dictus Arimatensis loseph’ (‘Part of the linen cloths (plural) in which the body of the crucified Christ was respectfully wrapped by Joseph of Arimathea’), and the ‘Manutergium, regi Abgaro, a Domino, per Thadeum apostolum, Edesse missum, in quo ab ipso Domino sua ipsius transfigurata est ymago’ (‘The Handtowel, sent by the Lord, via the apostle Thaddeus, to King Abgar, in Edessa, in which his own image was transfigured by the Lord himself’).³

Moving into the 13th century, Markwardt quotes Nicolas Mesarites, the Sacristan of the Pharos Chapel in 1201, writing very shortly after an abortive coup by John Komnenos, about how he defended the chapel against a band of rioters, eventually quelling them by the power of his rhetoric. Instead of the Ten Commandments, the chapel holds Ten Relics, which serve to brings Christ’s life and death from Israel to Constantinople, so that sacking the chapel would be sacrilege.⁴ Among the relics are:

“the Burial sindones of Christ: these are of linen. They are of cheap and easy to find material, and defying destruction since they wrapped the uncircumscribed, fragrant-with-myrrh, naked body after the Passion.”⁵ The list is followed with a passionate but powerful evocation of the sanctity of the chapel. “This temple, this place, is another Sinai, Bethlehem, Jordan; it is another Jerusalem, Nazareth, Bethany, Galilee, Tiberias, it is another basin, another upper room, another Mount Tabor, another pretorium of Pilate and another place called the Skull, in Hebrew Golgotha. Here he is born, here receives the grace of baptism, walks on the sea, walks the earth, performs his magnificent miracles and humiliates himself even to the tomb. This tomb did not snatch only one or two Lazaruses from death and bring them back to life, but every day and every hour it saves from the tomb thousands of bodies of the dead and the dying. Thus it gives us the strength to weep and pray for our sins. Here he is crucified and whoever wants can see the foot-board. In this place he is buried and the rolling-stone of the tomb is in this temple to bear witness to what I say. In this place he rises again and the sudarium and the holy sindons can prove it.”⁶

Whatever these were, of plain linen and smelling of myrrh, they certainly weren’t the Shroud, nor the Image of Edessa, nor the Image of God Incarnate.

Next, in 1204, comes Robert de Clari, the Crusader, whom we have discussed before. He lists many of the wonders of Constantinople, including the “towel” and the “tile” hanging in golden caskets from the roof of the Bucoleon chapel. They are clearly the Image of Edessa and its acolyte, but de Clari makes a complete hash of the story. According to him a man laying tiles on a roof had a vision of God, who asked for the towel he had tied round his waist and wrapped his face in it, leaving his image; then told him to use it for healing the sick. The man didn’t re-wrap it round his waist, but laid it under a tile till he had finished his work, only to discover that the tile had a copy of the face on it too.

And right at the end of his description of the city, de Clari also tells the story of the Church of St Mary of Blachernae, where the shroud of Jesus raised itself upright every Friday, “so that the form of Our Lord could clearly be seen.” Considering we know from several different sources that in the same place an image of the Virgin Mary was exposed after a sheet was raised every Friday, I think medievalists can be forgiven for treating de Clari’s version with some scepticism.⁷

Markwardt’s next document is by Nicholas of Otranto, the new papal legate, in 1206. According to Markwardt, “he filed what they call a disputation report, and in that report he recited than when the city was captured, French knights found, in the treasury of the Bucoleon Palace, Jesus’ burial shrouds, and that, after the sack, he himself (that’s Nicholas of Otranto) in an inspection saw these burial linens in that treasury.”

Well, 5/10, I suppose. Wikipedia calls him Nikolaos of Otranto, or Nektarios of Casole, and you can find more about him under Nicholas Hydruntinus. He was abbot of Casole, and became the interpreter to the actual papal legate, Benedict of Santa Santa. He wrote his report in both Greek and Latin, and it is instructive to see how he translates his own references. Of the relics in the palace, he lists: “τὰ τίμια Ξύλα, ὁ ἀκάυθινος Στέφανος, τὰ τοῦ Σωτῆρος Σανδάλια, ο Ἦλος, καὶ τα Σπάργανα…” which are “preciosa Ligna, Spinea Corona, Salvatoris Sandalia, Clavus & Fascia…” Note that the Latin ‘Fascia’ which normally means ‘bands’ rather than ‘sheet,’ is translated from the Greek ‘Σπάργανα,’ which only ever means ‘swaddling bands.’ Daniel Scavone, who first assembled most of these alleged references to the Shroud in English, dismisses this with: “this word normally renders infants’ swaddling clothes, and the fascia of his Nicholas’ Latin translation does not help. Since, however, Nicholas was listing relics of the Passion, he must mean burial linens.”³ I’m afraid I disagree. The swaddling bands were very important relics and usually appear high among the top ten in medieval relic list, behind the crown of thorns, the cross and the holy blood, and well above any other ‘cloths.’ Nicholas was not specifically listing Passion relics; it’s just that some of the most important relics, understandably, happened to be so.

In the same year, 1207, Nicholas Mesarites, who had been dismissed after the Latins had deposed the Greeks from all the important roles in the city, nevertheless returned to deliver a eulogy at the funeral of his brother John. In it he mentions the burial cloths again, which Markwardt takes, not unreasonably, as evidence that they were still in the city. However, Scavone notes that the passage in which they appear is really only a paraphrase of Mesarites’ Palace Revolution speech of six years earlier, and does not necessarily reflect the current situation. Scavone says: “Since, additionally, every existing document dealing with the Latins’ disposition of the relics and with the diminished role of the Greek clergy after the sack is evidence that Mesarites no longer had any knowledge of the whereabouts of the relics of which he had been the solicitous guardian in 1201, the Epitaphios of 1207 clearly is not a proof that the shroud of Jesus was still in Constantinople at that time, but only that Mesarites and his audience of Greek prelates thought it was.” I don’t think I would even go as far as that. Markwardt doesn’t seem to understand this, and supposes the information to be freshly acquired.^8,9

So much for the written sources. However they are ‘supported’ by some artwork, but not, I think, very successfully. Artwork can only be supportive if you can claim that it must have derived from a knowledge of the Shroud itself, and simply showing Christ lying down with his hands crossed over his groin is not, I’m afraid, good enough. Unfortunately Markwardt’s scholarship rather fails in this part of his presentation. He begins with this:…

…which is so blurry and indistinct that he and Glover spend several minutes wondering what Jesus is wearing. The relief is from the Victoria and Albert Museum and is the lower part of a 12th century Byzantine ivory. In common with most crucifixion images of the time, Jesus wears a long perizoma throughout.

Markwardt dates this to the early 11th century, which suits his hypothesis better than the date given, on stylistic grounds, by the V & A itself, and not because of any extra information on his part. It seems that the Lamentation of Christ developed from images of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary, which occur about a hundred years earlier. There are plenty to choose from, and their arms are as often as not by their sides as crossed à la Shroud, so I don’t believe a derivation of the one from the other can be concluded.

Next Markwardt chooses the ‘imago pietatis,’ and develops the hypothesis that it derives from a metaphor for the fabled origin of the Image of Camuliana, being found in a well, based on a couple of representative images he has found of the typical half-body of Christ, hands crossed at his waist, apparently emerging from a square hole in the ground delineated by masonry. Although the iconography originates from the 11th or 12th century, Markwardt chooses a couple of 20th century versions of the icon to illustrate his point. I think this is a mistake. Earlier versions do not show this ‘pediment style’ tomb that Markwardt identifies as a well. Where they show an edifice at all (the earliest ones don’t), they clearly make it as wide as a tomb, and often show the shroud draped over it. Undeterred, Markwardt finds a Byzantine image of a well, and claims that it illustrates his point, without apparently noticing that the pediment is just that, the pediment, and not the well at all.

I’m sorry to say that this podcast does not end as well as it promised.

At 2:28:59, we get the definitive statement, “In around 1193 there was a king of Hungary called Bela, King Bela III actually, and he ordered the preparation of a codex […] and he decided that he wanted various things illustrated, so he used an artist, probably a Hungarian artist, to do a whole lot of illustrations.” Later Markwardt speculates wildly about the purpose of other Three Marys drawings, but says that the Pray Codex illustrations were “done under the direction of a king. […] This was done by Bela. Bela was the one who ordered the codex. Bela’s the one that would have had to approve the illustrations.” This is such fantasy that we need not pursue Markwardt’s train of thought further than this. Not only is there absolutely no evidence for any such commission, but the whole nature of the book, and especially the two folios (out of 175) with their five rather clumsy illustrations of the Crucifixion, Deposition, Anointing, Three Marys and Triumph of Christ, suggests anything other than than royal command. It does not appear that Markwardt knows much about the codex, or Three Marys iconography, so I won’t pursue this theme.¹⁰

Then he moves onto the Hymn of the Pearl, which, he thinks, not unreasonably and not alone, was written by the Syrian scholar Bardaisan (Latin: Bardesanes), who was a childhood friend and later senior courtier of King Abgar IX of Edessa (not Abgar VIII, ‘The Great,’ but his son), and may have been instrumental in the gradual conversion of the royal family to Christianity around the end of the 2nd century. According to Markwardt, however, this historical context is enough to substantiate the idea that the robe which is mentioned at the beginning and end of the poem is the Shroud. It’s an opinion, but I don’t agree with it, and neither do any other of the scholars who have studied it. I don’t think that makes any of us poor historians compared to Markwardt.

The podcast ends with some quite tantalising glimpses into what may have happened to these relics after the sack of Constantinople. I’ve no doubt that Markwardt will pursue every lead in his next podcast, and very interesting listening it will be. After all, even though none of them was the Shroud of Turin, they certainly existed, and shreds of various burial cloths seem to have ended up all over Europe – a church near Troyes ended up with a bit even before the Lirey affair. Rather like Calvin’s thinking you could build a ship with all the fragments of the true cross, I think you could probably equip it with a full set of sails if you collected the fragments of the shroud.

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1). I mention this in more detail in the blogpost, ‘Moonshine.’

2). Glanville Downey, ‘Earthquakes at Constantinople and Vicinity, AD 342 – 1454,’ Speculum, Vol. 30 No. 4, 1955

3). In Paul Riant, Exuviae Sacrae Constantinopolitanae, Vol 2.

4). The Greek can be found in August Heisenberg, Nikolaos Mesarites, die Palastrevolution des Johannes Komnenos, 1907, which is at archive.org

5). Translation is from Daniel Scavone, Acheiropoietos Jesus Images in Constantinople: the Documentary Evidence, at https://www.sindonology.org/scavone-acheiropoietos.pdf.

6). Translation is anonymous, from ‘Excerpts from the Palace Revolution of John Comnenus,’ Shroud Spectrum International, Vol 17, at https://www.shroud.com/pdfs/ssi17part4.pdf.

7). A good translation is Edward Stone, Three Old French Chronicles of the Crusades, online at De Re Militari (https://deremilitari.org/2014/01/robert-of-claris-account-of-the-fourth-crusade/)

8). Daniel Scavone, op. cit.

9). The original is hard to find. It’s in August Heisenberg, Neue Quellen zur
Geschichte des lateinischen Kaisartums und der Kirchenunion. I. Der Epitaphios des
Nikolaos Mesarites auf seinem Bruder Johannes, which can be found at the Digitale Bibliothek – Münchener Digitalisierungszentrum website, at https://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/0008/bsb00084346/images/index.html?id=00084346&groesser=&fip=193.174.98.30&no=&seite=28

10). A good review of the codex is Írások a Pray-Kódexröl, edited by Bartók Ágnes and Horváth Balázs. It’s online, it’s in Hungarian, and no authenticist has read it or anything like it.
For the Three Marys, my own ‘Three Marys Iconography’ (at https://www.shroud.com/pdfs/anc-farey-pos.pdf) may be helpful.