himself, and an (accidental) enabler of crimes.
Having missed out on the first harvest of relics, Capuano seems to have become a voice of authority on the dispersal of relics in the second phase of their translation. For example, he took control of a trove of relics belonging to a deceased crusading bishop, Garnier of Troyes. Like Nivelon and Conrad, Garnier had provided an episcopal presence on the crusade. He, like his fellows, acquired relics immediately after the conquest, though not, I argue below, in any official capacity. He sent his chaplain to Troyes with the arm of St. James the Greater, the head of St. Philip, a cup that was allegedly the Holy Grail, and the body of St. Helen of Athyra.77 Thanks to a letter from 1222, we know that Garnier sent additional relics with the chaplain, along with orders on how to distribute them. John of Poitiers (Iohannes Pictaviensis), canon of St. Victor of Paris, wrote to Peter, canon of St. Martin of Troyes and chaplain to Bishop Garnier, asking him to write an account of how Garnier had sent them the head of St. Victor. Both John’s request and Peter’s reply survive.78 Peter recounts that the bishop found the head of St. Victor in a church dedicated to the saint inside the walls near Constantinople’s Golden Gate.79 Garnier ordered Peter to take the head and “other relics of the saints” back to France.80 There, Peter gave the head to Archbishop Peter de Corbolio of Sens, who later gave a portion of it to John the German (Iohannes Teutonis), the abbot of St. Victor’s.81 On the ides of April, Peter concludes, the relic was met with a procession and much rejoicing.82 This short letter is particularly compelling because it describes not only the translation of the head from a church in Constantinople to Garnier’s hands to the Abbey of St. Victor but also all of the intermediate chains of transmission. The process of exchange and division that took place in this case allows us to conjecture that this process of secondary gifting and sundering of larger relics may have happened often after they arrived in the West.
Garnier sent some of the relics that he had collected to France but died within a year of the conquest. As recorded in the “Historia translationum reliquiarum Sancti Mamantis” (history of the translation of the relics of Saint Mamas), or “Translatio Mamantis,” Capuano took control of the rest upon his arrival in Constantinople.83 In this text, an anonymous canon of Langres describes the actions of Walon of Dampierre, also a canon of Langres, who returned home from the crusade with the head of St. Mamas in 1209. This text is the third part of a larger translatio that describes the process by which various relics of the martyr came to Langres over the centuries, in order to authenticate each item.84 The translatio contains a compelling description of the looting of relics, as well as the steps that Walon took to authenticate his relic. The relevant portion of the text reads,
When Constantinople had been captured, the victorious Latins exulted over the booty which they had seized, for they had a vast amount of spoils. But blind greed, which persuades so easily, took the hands of the conquering conquerors, so that not only were the churches violated, but so were the vessels in which the relics of saints were resting, [their hands] shamelessly smashing the vessels [and] repulsively pulling off the gold, gems, and silver, and they thought nothing of the true relics. Having heard of this, senior officers of the army grieved greatly, and feared that this destruction might undo their victory. They therefore took counsel with the legates . . . and with the archbishops and bishops, who threatened to excommunicate anyone who unsealed the containers of relics. . . . After this [threat of excommunication] the head of the glorious martyr [St. Mamas] was found.85
This paragraph is at best a secondhand account of the looting. Later, I argue that it responds to Innocent’s successful employment of sacrilegious looting as a polarizing issue, the subject of the next chapter. This is the only Latin text that explicitly includes reliquaries among the sacred objects that the Latins despoiled for the sake of the external gold, silver, and gems; more important, it presents the responses of the crusade leadership to the sacrilege. According to the translatio, the leading crusader clerics gathered, threatened the defilers of relics with excommunication, and then took personal control over rounding up and redistributing the relics. If this account contains any truth at all, no wonder the bishops were able to send home such copious sacred largesse. Capuano would have had considerable clout in such proceedings, thanks to his lofty ecclesiastical status as papal legate and cardinal. He could not easily undo distribution decisions previously made by other high clerics on the crusade, but he could take charge of the deceased Garnier’s relics.
According to the “Translatio Mamantis,” the priest Walon visited Capuano and informed him that Garnier had planned to send the head of St. Mamas to Langres, long a center of the cult of St. Mamas, before he died. Agreeing that this seemed just, Capuano let Walon take the relic. The head thus passed to Walon through the legate’s judgment that this was the best possible outcome, not through one of the acts of looting previously deplored by the text’s anonymous author.86
By the time Walon spoke to Capuano, the time of chaos had long since passed. The acquisition of St. Mamas clearly belongs to the second phase of relic movement. The passage above indicates that later authors, concerned about the provenance of their new relics becoming tainted, took steps to make it clear that their relics had not been obtained through sacrilege. This concern has led to significant scholarly confusion about the looting of relics. Several medieval texts, including the “Translatio Mamantis,” imply that Garnier had been put in charge of many relics in the city before he died.87 Riant decided that this attribution was correct and argued that the crusader clergy had officially appointed him to that position.88 Over the last century, other scholars have followed Riant’s lead in arguing that Garnier was the official procurator sanctorum reliquarum.89 This title implies a level of organization and oversight that simply did not exist until late in the second phase, probably after Garnier was dead. Most sources on relics never mention Garnier at all. The texts that do elevate him to such an official rank derive from sites that, like Langres, directly or indirectly benefited from relics that he collected in Constantinople. Such sources cannot be trusted because their authors wanted to de-emphasize the possibility of any sacrilege staining their new possessions. No neutral texts mention Garnier, in particular, as being more important than any other bishop; the situation was fluid until Capuano arrived. However, Capuano could not restore precrusade conditions and then reapportion relics. All he and his co-legate Benedict could do was try to control the situation as it developed after their arrival. The translation of St. Mamas offers one example of such attempts at control and regulation.
The papal legates’ efforts to regulate the translation of relics, however, could backfire. Sometime after March 1206, according to the “Narratio exceptionis apud Cluniacum capitis beati Clementis,”90 the legates accidentally enabled a brazen relic theft. We know very little about the two knights, Dalmacius of Serciaco and Poncius of Busseria, who stole the relic. The author refers to the former as “well learned,”91 along with the more usual epithets for crusading knights (“noble,” “faithful,” and “good”). Once these two had served out their term in Constantinople, they tried to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. They failed, due to dangers on both land and sea, and found themselves back in Constantinople, disappointed. Dalmacius therefore went to the two legates to ask for permission to acquire a relic. The legates, speaking in “one voice,” granted the request on one condition: the knight could not purchase a relic because of canonical prohibitions against the sale of such items. Undeterred, the knights went to the Monastery of St. Mary Peribleptos, where Dalmacius asked the monks, who appear to have been Greeks, about St. Clement.92 Many Greek monks remained in their religious houses after the conquest until they were driven away by a new papal legate, Cardinal Pelagius, around 1213, so this encounter is plausible. While Dalmacius distracted the monks, his colleague, Poncius, simply walked off with St. Clement’s head. The two returned home and gave it to the Abbey of Cluny.93
If this story reflects an actual conversation between the legates and the knights, it would give the impression that the legates were comfortable with the notion that crusaders might seek out relics to take home with them. Their concern was that such activity not be commercial in nature. On the other hand, the knights may have just bought the
