Templars and the Shroud of Turin

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I’ll give you a weekend update, but first, via a Steven, we have this Times Online link with the latest on the lengthy saga of the Shroud of Turin:

    "Barbara Frale, a researcher in the Vatican Secret Archives, said the Shroud had disappeared in the sack of Constantinople in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, and did not surface again until the middle of the fourteenth century. Writing in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, Dr Frale said its fate in those years had always puzzled historians.

    However her study of the trial of the Knights Templar had brought to light a document in which Arnaut Sabbatier, a young Frenchman who entered the order in 1287, testified that as part of his initiation he was taken to “a secret place to which only the brothers of the Temple had access”. There he was shown “a long linen cloth on which was impressed the figure of a man” and instructed to venerate the image by kissing its feet three times…

    They had rescued it to ensure that it did not fall into the hands of heretical groups such as the Cathars, who claimed that Christ did not have a true human body, only the appearance of a man, and could therefore not have died on the Cross and been resurrected…"

Now, I’m not a medieval historian, and I’m basing this on a second-hand account, but this doesn’t make much sense.  Historians seem to be of an accord that the Knights Templar were not present at the siege of Constantinople in 1204.  In addition, the Cathars were located in the south of France, which is pretty far from Constantinople.

Thus, the story presented by the Times is that an organization that wasn’t at the siege grabbed the shroud to protect it from a religious movement that also wasn’t at the siege.

I’m hoping that more will be published on this so we can get a better sense of what’s going on.

http://danharms.wordpress.com/2009/04/06...-of-turin/

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Did the Templars Take the Shroud of Turn from Constantinople?

A frequent Papers reader, once in training to be a medieval historian, has weighed in on the questions regarding the Templars removing the Shroud of Turin from Constantinople in 1204.  I’ll present his comments, with some editorial cleanup, below:

    I’m pretty confident there were not any Templars at Constantinople in 1204… if I recall correctly, the various sources of the 4th Crusade are easily available and don’t mention the Templars or the Shroud at all.
    See:
    http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/4cde.html (a quick summary)
    http://www.crusades-encyclopedia.com/pri...usade.html (variety of links to primary sources)

    I think the Templars were far to busy dealing with the loss of Jerusalem in 1194 to much about with some wayward Norman looters and their Venetian friends.

    Various relics were uncovered during the Crusades (the Holy Lance in Antioch during the 1st Crusade for example), so it is unlikely that something as important as the burial shroud of Christ would be unmentioned in the sources…

    It looks like the notion the Shroud was in Constantinople comes not from the primary sources directly, but by inferences drawn from certain comments by Robert of Clari (one of the main sources) about a handkerchief belonging to St. Veronica.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shroud_of_Turin (see the middle portion starting with the Image of Edessa).  I buy the argument that people interpreting this cloth to the the Shroud are wrong; the Byzantines were intermittently gripped by waves of anti-iconography and having something like this around would either A) be a big damn deal and made a big deal of or B) have been destroyed in one of these anti-icon frenzies.

    I hate to always play the skeptic, but I can’t take the Turin Shroud seriously, let alone claims like these.

We don’t have anything definitive yet, and I hope that Frale comes forward with a more in-depth explanation soon.

http://danharms.wordpress.com/2009/04/09...antinople/