DOCUMENT VI.  ALEXIUS I COMNENUS

A letter which bears the date 1095 falls next under our purview.  It  purports to be an invitation sent by Byzantine Emperor Alexius I Comnenus (1081‑1118) to his friend Robert the Frisian, Count of the Flemings (1071‑1093) and to all the princes of the realm (the Holy Roman Empire?).  The letter announces that the Greek Empire was under constant siege throughout by Patzinaks and Turks and bemoans the attrocities perpetrated by these pagans.  They are, it goes on, lately invading the area of Constantinople itself and will soon take the capital.  Alexius then asserts that he prefers that the capital should be captured (sic) by western Christian knights rather than by the abominable Turks, moreso because the city houses great treasures as well as the precious relics of the Lord.  These are then named, and include, unequivocally for the first time in these sources, “the linen cloths found in the sepulchre after his resurrection.” 

To dismiss this letter as a spurious piece of Latin propaganda virtually making the Byzantine emperor beg for the Latins’ expropriation of the imperial relics during the Fourth Crusade is to miss its significance as a Byzantine document referring to the presence of Jesus’ burial wrappings in Constantinople.  Indeed, were it not for the enigmatic Document IV, this letter would be the first such reference.  Most historians have agreed that Alexius would not have written such words, but they also concur that this epistula probably “depends on an authentic letter of the basileus”  written with another end in mind and that it dates, variously, from 1091 to 1105. 

Kurt Weitzmann and Hans Belting have shown that by c. 1100 Byzantine iconography had evolved a new style in the depiction of the events of Easter: the threnos or “Lamentation.”  The contemporaneity of this epistula and the developed threnos art in Byzantium is striking, for thus it signals with a twin corroboration what the large burial cloth icon of Christ must have looked like.  Jesus is now shown lying upon a full‑length shroud after being removed from the cross; in many examples he is naked and with hands folded upon his abdomen or over his loins.  In addition to this new mural art, Byzantine epitaphioi or embroidered cloth, symbolizing Jesus’ shroud in the Good Friday liturgy, show Jesus in full-length, i.e., in the threnos attitude.^{2 3} 

Before the next document from Constantinople may be studied, a group of Latin texts should be considered.  The Abgar legend had already come to the West and was known to the Aquitainian pilgrim Egeria at the time when she visited Edessa (ca. 394).  Rufinus’ 5th c. Latin translation of Eusebius’ Church History included the latter’s Abgar account.  These early versions did not mention the image, but only Jesus’ letter to Abgar promising to send a disciple to heal him.  But in a sermon pronounced in 769 Pope Stephen III employed the story of Abgar--this time reciting the episode of the miraculous Jesus image--to oppose the iconoclast movement then current in the Greek church.  He seems to translate directly the received Greek form of Jesus’ letter responding to Abgar’s request for a cure:  “Since you wish to look upon my physical face, I am sending you a likeness of my face on a cloth . . .”  With these words, the Pope urges, Christ himself was advocating the use of religious images.^{2 4}