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

San Nicola of Casole

But, and as Scavone and other historians note, Nicholas d’Orrante may have also suggested that the burial cloth was in Constantinople. He was the abbot of San Nicola of Casole monastery at the bottom of the heel of the boot of southern Italy. Tradition has it that the monastery was founded by the Norman Robert Guiscard, who had defeated the Byzantine forces of Alexios I in the years leading up to the First Crusade. (San Nicola of Casole may be older).

The monastery was a center of learning where manuscripts were copied, translated between Greek and Latin and archived in a vast library. Though not a university, like the first university created in Constantinople in 425 or the Jami'ah universities founded throughout the Muslim world starting in the 9^th century or the universities of Salerno, Paris, Bologna and Oxford, which all were founded before the sacking of Constantinople, it was nonetheless a center of scholarship and learning.