DOCUMENT I.  THE NARRATIO DE IMAGINE EDESSENA 944

On August 15, 944, amidst great celebrations, the Mandylion arrived in Constantinople from Edessa.  It was still stretched out against a board and sealed inside its oblong case, the face visible in the circular central opening, as it was subsequently seen by artists who made copies of it.¹⁰ 

The entire cycle of the Mandylion’s legend and history can be found in this first document from Constantinople, the lengthy Narratio de imagine Edessena, written in or shortly after 944 (Weitzmann thinks on the first anniversary of its arrival in the capital), under the auspices of the scholarly future Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus.¹¹  On the day of its arrival,  Constantine and his two brothers-in-law, sons of Emperor Romanus Lecapenus, had a private viewing of the icon.  The Narratio retells in detail the Abgar legend and relates that Ma’nu, grandson of the now-Christian Abgar V, still in the first century, returned to paganism and that the cloth was kept safe by Christians by being sealed in a niche in the city wall above the Sacred Gate.^{1 2} 

In time it was forgotten.  The Narratio recounts its miraculous rediscovery and cites Evagrius for its storied protection of Edessa in 544.  However one need not accept the story of its being hidden or its defense of the city as literal truth.  The Narratio continues with the legend that a lamp, placed in the niche with the cloth centuries earlier, was miraculously still lit, and a tile placed protectively over the cloth now contained an identical miraculous image.^{1 3}

What interests us now is Constantine’s personal description of the image: It was extremely faint, more like a “moist secre­tion without pigment or the painter’s art.”^{1 4}  Equally curious‑‑and increasingly significant in light of Documents III and IV‑-is a second version of the origin of the Edessa cloth which comes later in this same Narratio and which Constantine says he preferred:

There is another story: . . . When Christ was about to go voluntarily to death . . . sweat dripped from him like drops of blood.  Then they say he took this piece of cloth which we see now from one of the disciples and wiped off the drops of sweat on it.^{1 5}

This version would be inexplicable unless we suppose that traces of blood were noticed on the face.  Since the Edessa versions of the Abgar story exclude any idea of blood, the Narratio, product of an eyewitness, offers this variation along with the original version.^{1 6} 

DOCUMENT II.  SYMEON MAGISTER 944

     The Narratio’s account of a nearly imperceptible image is corroborated and embellished by Symeon Magister, writing his Chronographia also in the tenth century and likely also under the influence of Constantine VII.  He asserts that while Constantine could see the faint image in its details (eyes and ears: ophthαlmoύς  κaι  oτα) his two brothers‑in‑law and rivals for the throne could barely make out an outline.^{1 7}