Somehow--via returning crusaders?--the Abgar story became quite popular in the West in the 12th c.  Von Dobschütz (138**) included a tractate which he called the “Oldest Latin Abgar Text.”²⁵  Von Dobschütz thought it derived from a lost Syriac original of the 8^th c.  In addition, two other western writers of the Abgar story provide an important clue in the emergent and widening awareness both that the Edessa cloth was larger than originally thought and that it contained a full-body image of Jesus.  They are the Ecclesiastical History of the English monk Ordericus Vitalis, ca. 1141; and the otia imperialia of Gervase of Tilbury, ca. 1211. 

In Edessa, it seems, the image was always described as a face only.  What is remarkable about these Latin Abgar accounts is the fact that in all of them, what Abgar received was not just a facial image, but one which enabled the viewer to discern the form and stature of Jesus’ entire body.^{2 6}  If they truly derive from a lost Syriac original from Edessa’s archives, as they claim, each one drawing its claim from its own immediate source, they open the possibility (only hinted at in the sources) that already in Edessa someone had known that the Mandylion was an icon of Christ’s entire body. 

The clue leading to the conclusion that the lost Syriac original used by the western sources was written before the Mandylion left Edessa in 944 is the line in all three Latin texts that “this linen from antiquity still remains uncorrupted in Syrian Mesopotamia in Edessa”.  (Qui linteus adhuc vetustate temporis permanens incorruptus in Mesopotamia Syrie apud Edissam civitatem.)  Again, the descriptions of the image, no longer as face-only but now as entire body, relate chronologically to (a) the emergent threnos and epitaphios scenes in the East, which themselves suggest b) an awareness of an imaged shroud of Jesus, and (c) could be witnessed by Western Crusaders in Byzantine churches.  Yet only in our Document VI was the much larger and imaged Mandylion recognized as a burial sindon.  The Abgar/Mandylion mind-set retained its hold on the authors of the Latin versions, even while they (and possibly their original Syriac source-text) had altered the legend in a significant manner. 

Gervase of Tilbury had certainly heard of a cloth bearing the full image of Jesus. Besides giving the old Abgar/Edessa version, he even gives a second account of a bloodied full-body image on a cloth, this time in a context related to the burial of Christ; it has no parallel in Byzantium, to my knowledge; but it is acheiropoietos.  He writes:

There is another figure of the Lord expressed on cloth which has its origin in Gestis de Vultu Lucano (the events surrounding the Volto Santo of Lucca).  When the Lord our Redeemer, hung from the cross stripped of his clothing, Joseph of Arimathea approached Mary, the mother of the Lord, and the other women who had followed the Lord in His Passion, and said: Do you love Him so little that you allow him to hang there naked and not do anything about it?  Moved by this castigation, the mother and the others with her bought a spotless linteum so ample and large that it covered the whole body, and when He was taken down the image of the whole body hanging from the cross appeared expressed on the linen.^{2 7}