DOCUMENT XIV.  NICHOLAS OF OTRANTO 1207

In the years immediately after the Latin takeover of Constantinople in 1204, a series of discussions took place between Greek clergy and papal envoys, often presided over by the newly seated Latin Patriarch, dealing with their disagreements over dogma and how to reconcile them and bring the Greek Orthodox Church back into the Roman fold.  These differences included the filioque issue, the Greek use of leavened as against the Latin church’s use of unleavened bread in the Eucharist, and the general but ultimate question of papal primacy.^{4 3}

One of the interpreters at these meetings, a man fluent in both Latin and Greek, was Nicholas of Otranto, abbot of Casole monastery in southern Italy.  In 1205 he greeted the new papal legate, Benedict of St. Susanna,^{4 4} then on his way to Constantinople via Brindisi, and accompanied him through Greece to the capital.  There he served as Benedict’s personal interpreter and translator.  The literary legacy of this little‑known scholar includes some poetry and at least three reports of the disputations in which he served as interpreter.  These were written both in Greek and in his own Latin translations.^{4 5}

     His reference to the shroud of Jesus comes in the midst of his discussion in 1207 of the use of yeast in the Eucharistic meal of the Last Supper.  A portion of that very bread had been present, the Byzantines had asserted, in the imperial relic collection.  Among the relics of the Passion, which he now enumerated, were a portion of that bread and Jesus’ spargana, Greek for “linens.”  This word normally renders infant’s swaddling clothes, and the fascia of his Nicholas’ Latin translation does not help.  Since, however, Nicholas was listing relics of the Passion, he must mean burial linens.  Here is the crucial passage:

     When the city was captured by the French knights, entering as thieves,

     even in the treasury of the Great Palace where the holy objects were

     placed, they found among other things the precious wood, the crown

     of thorns, the sandals of the Savior, the nail (sic), and the spargana/fascia         which we (later) saw with our own eyes. ^{4 6}

This passage, too, has been assumed to prove that the burial shroud was still in the capital in 1207.^{4 7}  Certainly Nicholas Hydruntinus, as this Nicholas is sometimes called, as the  interpreter for a western prelate, was more likely than Mesarites to know the contents of the relic treasury in 1207.  It is possible that he may have been admitted among the relics, not because he clearly claims so, but only as an inference from Benedict’s high rank among Latin prelates: he was the papal legate, who himself shipped a large consignment of relics to Pope Innocent III in the spring of 1205.^{4 8}  More promising, however, is the fact that Nicholas says something in another context which may be decisive in any efforts to discover the whereabouts of Jesus’ reputed blood-stained shroud after 1204.  Benedict and he had in 1206 traveled in Thessalonika and Athens debating the same questions of Church unification with the Greek theologians in those places.^{4 9} It is the reference to Athens which is significant, for it may be there that Nicholas saw the burial linens “with our own eyes,” which is such a peculiar part of the passage cited at length above.^{5 0}  If he had seen the linens and other relics in the capital, he would not likely make such a comment.  Further he seems to say he saw them after the Crusaders looted the treasuries.  The next document fortifies the possibility of the linens in Athens.