Why an Atheist Thinks the Shroud of Turin is the Real Deal

Constantinople’s Vast Treasury

If there is any truth to be recovered from the list of relics in the purported letter from Alexios I to Robert of Flanders—not that these relics were real deals—then we can at least understand that there was an understanding in this time that Constantinople had a vast treasury, perhaps more than one treasury of relics in the city. Alexios or the author of the propaganda piece gave us at least a taste even if imaginative in its detail. The author said the list was too vast to itemize completely. Robert of Clari, seemingly more reliable, tells us:

And all these marvels which I have related to you, and still many more which we cannot relate to you, did the Franks find in Constantinople when they had conquered it. Nor do I believe, of my own knowledge, that any man, be he never so skilled in accounting, could number all the abbeys of the city, so many were there of them, both of monks and of nuns, to say nothing of the other minsters [=churches] in the city. And they counted, in round numbers, some thirty thousand priests in the city, both monks and others.

Of the other Greeks - the high, the lowly, the poor, the rich; of the greatness of the city, of the palaces, and of the other wonders which are therein - will we forbear to tell you further; for no earthly man, though he abode never so long in that city, could number or relate all this to you. And if he were to describe to you the hundredth part of the riches and the beauty and the magnificence which were to be found in the abbeys and in the minsters and in the palaces and in the city itself, it would seem that he was a liar, nor would ye believe him at all.

It is not hard to picture a city brimming with relics, fake and real. It is not hard to imagine that there might not be a sudarium of the tomb, a sudarium of the Abgar legend distinct and different from the burial cloth, a Veronica and maybe something else as well. Robert provides context. There is no reason to doubt that Robert de Clari did not see what he said he saw.