Numerous documents describe in important detail the presence in Constantinople of an icon of Jesus’s face on a cloth which in the year 944 had come from the city of Edessa, modern Urfa in southern Turkey.  This icon, known also as the Mandylion,¹ was said to be miraculously imprinted, a likeness not made by human hands, or acheiropoietos.  In this chapter I have selected sixteen of these documents for close scrutiny.  The documents span the period 944 to 1247.  Four of the earliest documents, datable from 944 to 960, refer to the Mandylion alone.  Six others, those dating from 1150, 1200, 1201, 1203, 1207, and 1247 also assert the presence in Constantinople of Christ’s burial wrapping, or portions thereof, along with the Mandylion.  Six different documents from 958, c. 1095, 1157, 1171, 1205, and 1207, attest the burial wrappings but not the face cloth  (Mandylion).

           The emphasis upon a singular imaged cloth icon considered to be the actual burial wrapping in this study of acheiropoietos Jesus images is appropriate chiefly because one most important document of 1203, the memoire of Robert of Clari, a knight of Picardy, reported seeing “the burial cloth (sydoines) with the figure of the Lord on it.  This text is considered below in chronological order.  In addition, numerous other documents beginning from the period of the Fourth Crusade, 1204, record the transfer of fragments of Christ’s reputed burial linens to various cathedrals in western Europe.² These include the above-mentioned 1247 document, which is  also the only record of the departure of the Edessa icon from Constantinople.³ 

One difficulty which presents itself to the historian is the great variety of terms used by these medieval sources to designate these two objects, the imaged face cloth and the linen(s) of burial.  For the first we get sancta toella, imago Christi Edessena, ektypoma, linteum faciem Christi repraesentans, mantile, soudarion, mandylion, manutergium, sudarium super caput, ekmageion, prosopon, opsis, acheiropoietos, morphe, cheiromaktron tetradiplon, himation, and peplos.  Of these, the last three suggest a cloth larger than a mere face-towel-sized icon.  For the latter we have sindon, sudarium, linteamina, fasciae, panni, spargana, othonai kai ta soudaria, entaphioi sindones, and Clari’s Sydoines (sing.).⁴  Most of these latter are plurals, evidencing the likelihood that besides a large shroud icon other auxiliary linens associated with the burial of Jesus were claimed to be present.

A second problem addressed in this paper concerns the time of the arrival in the capital of the reputed burial shroud icon of Christ.  Whereas the Mandylion was received in Constantinople with a great celebration (Documents I and III), not a single source records the arrival there of any larger Jesus-icon.  It is, however, included in a number of documents, as already noted, and at least once explicitly with a Christ-image on it.