The Fifth Gospel(97)
I pause and look more carefully. This isn’t what I thought Ugo had discovered. This sermon was given in 944 AD, long before the Crusades. Which means we Catholics didn’t rescue the Shroud from Edessa. Before the first Catholic knight ever went crusading, the Orthodox had already rescued it and moved it out of Edessa. So then, how did we get it?
The next gallery is the end of the line. The walls are painted dark gray, but as my eyes adjust, I notice shapes. Glossy silhouettes of ships and armies, domes and steeples. An ancient city skyline at night, painted in a dozen shades of black. There’s nothing else but a single, small display case, and behind it a pair of doors that lead to the next corridor. When Peter rushes forward to test the doors, he finds them locked. Perhaps the Diatessaron is being kept back there. I turn back toward the display case. Inside is a solitary sheet of parchment, written in Greek, with a regal-looking red seal. It is dated 1205 AD.
A knot forms in my stomach. This is out of sequence. Ugo’s Latin manuscripts, two galleries earlier, were older than this parchment. The Greek manuscripts I just saw were far older. 1205 reverses direction. Ugo must be introducing something new. A different line of argument. And 1205 hovers uncomfortably close to an event in Eastern history that this exhibit must never, ever invoke.
The placard beside the parchment says I’m looking at a document from the Vatican Secret Archives. A letter sent to the pope by the Byzantine imperial family.
An ache travels through my body. There’s only one reason the Eastern emperor would’ve written the pope in 1205.
Words flit by under my eyes. Thieves. Relics. Unforgivable. I’m filled by a leaden sensation that makes it impossible to turn away. This can’t be.
Finally my eyes find the lines that must’ve thrilled Ugo when he first discovered this letter, and horrified him when Simon explained what they meant.
They stole the most sacred relic of all. The linen cloth in which our Lord Jesus was wrapped after his death.
I recognize the image on the wall now. I understand why Ugo had it painted black. This is why Ugo was concerned about the Crusades. This is how we got the Shroud. We didn’t rescue it from Edessa. We stole it from Constantinople.
* * *
1204 IS THE DARKEST year in the history between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Far darker than the year of our schism, a century and a half earlier. In 1204, Catholic knights sailed for the Holy Land, bound for the Fourth Crusade. But they stopped first, on their way, in Constantinople. Their intention was to combine forces with the Christian armies of the East, to join their Orthodox brethren in the greatest of all religious wars. But what they found in the Orthodox capital was unlike anything they had seen in the Catholic West. Constantinople was then the stronghold of Christendom. Ever since the fall of Rome it had been the protector of all Europe. Not once had its walls been conquered by barbarian invaders, so within those walls lay a thousand years of unspoiled wealth. Treasures from the ancient world, side by side with the greatest collection of Christian relics that has ever existed on earth.
In the West, meantime, it had been eight centuries since the fall of ancient Rome, eight centuries of barbarian invasions and foreign overlords and chaos. We Catholics were poor. We were hungry. We were weary. We owed money on the ships we sailed in and couldn’t afford the contract on our own holy war. Seeing the riches of the Orthodox capital, Catholic knights made the greatest mistake in the thousand-year schism between our Churches.
Instead of sailing to the Holy Land, they attacked Constantinople. They raped Orthodox women and killed Orthodox priests. They put fellow Christians to the sword and burned whole swaths of the city, erasing the magnificent library of Constantinople off the face of the earth. In Hagia Sophia, the Saint Peter’s of the East, Catholics put a prostitute on the throne. And when the emperor couldn’t pay the huge ransom we demanded as the price of his city’s freedom—not even by melting his gold—we broke into Orthodox churches and looted his city’s relics.