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Notre Dame of Paris, Ansel's True Cross Relic of 1120 and the Power of Relic Narratives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 April 2025

M. CECILIA GAPOSCHKIN
M. CECILIA GAPOSCHKIN*
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College
*
E-mail: cecilia.gaposchkin@dartmouth.edu
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Abstract

In 1120 Notre Dame of Paris received a fragment of the True Cross from a former canon, Ansel, who had joined the First Crusade and become cantor of the Holy Sepulchre. The history of the relic was sought out, documented, inserted into the liturgy and in time revised according to political and cultural developments. This article reconstructs the story of the relic's arrival in Paris, and the way in which, through the successive narratives attached to it, it slowly gained and grew in meaning, giving definition to the Church of Paris and ultimately to the kingdom of France.

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The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 76 , Issue 4 , October 2025 , pp. 723 - 759
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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press

This article begins with the premise that space and place in the Middle Ages were sacralised by relics, and that relics – the stories attached to them, the hagiographies devoted to them and the liturgical rites that sustained their cults – were part of the history of place that in turn embedded the local within the providential story.Footnote 1 These stories – often liturgical stories – were invariably sacred histories, specifically designed to be understood within the broader arc of salvation history, which usually began and ended with Jerusalem. And this was never more true than with cross relics. Despite Paulinus of Nola's (d. 431) famous claim in the fourth century that the relic of the cross was almost infinitely divisible, that any single sliver contained the power of the whole, in fact not all cross relics were valued equally.Footnote 2 Particularly after the flood of cross relics that inundated the western landscape following the First Crusade, and then again after the Fourth Crusade, what distinguished one cross relic from another was not (mostly) its size, but more its provenance and pedigree. These often depended on the different narratives associated with or attached to a relic that authenticated it, that often furnished its particular history and that could do all sorts of ideological, devotional and political work.

This was certainly the case for the stories attached to the single cross relic that arrived in Paris in 1120. In that year, the Cathedral of Notre Dame of Paris received a prestigious relic of the True Cross directly from the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. By all accounts this was an important event in the devotional and liturgical life of the cathedral. The relic came as a gift from a former canon of Notre Dame, a cleric named Ansel (Latin: Ansellus, French: Anseau), who had joined the First Crusade in 1095 or 1096 and had, at some point after the capture of Jerusalem in 1099, become cantor at the Holy Sepulchre, tasked with implementing and celebrating the Latin rite in Jerusalem.Footnote 3 The cross is known today, in French-language scholarship, as the Croix d'Anseau. In Paris, the canons added a new feast to the Parisian liturgical calendar. This was the feast of the ‘Reception of the Holy Cross in the Church of Paris’,Footnote 4 celebrated annually through and into the eighteenth century.Footnote 5 The relic itself survives to this day in Notre Dame's treasury.Footnote 6 What follows is a case study that traces the meaning of this single relic through space and time, with the aim of demonstrating that the narratives and associations attached to this fragment distinguished it from other cross relics and made particular claims for the sacrality of the Church of Paris, and indeed, the entire Gallic Church.

Relics and the True Cross in Paris before 1120

When Ansel's cross relic arrived to Notre Dame in 1120 Paris did not yet have a particularly strong cross cult. Other fragments of the True Cross certainly existed in ecclesiastical collections. We can point to several relic lists, including one from the ninth century, purportedly from Saint-Denis, that includes a fragment.Footnote 7 By 1100, the monastery of Saint-Denis claimed a piece of the True Cross as part of a larger gift of relics that Charles the Bald had granted in the ninth century.Footnote 8 The monastery of Saint-Germain-des-Prés may also have had a cross relic, but this is uncertain.Footnote 9 For the most part, these fragments were catalogued as parts of larger collections of relics representing ‘all saints’, not revered centres of focused veneration or cults that generated texts, activities or rituals. The church on the Île-de-la-Cité dedicated to the Holy Cross (ecclesia sancta crucis) is first attested only in 1136, and does not even seem to have had its own cross relic.Footnote 10 Rather, before 1100, the city's central relic cults revolved around local, Frankish or Gallic saints. Best known were the cult centres that had grown up over the burial sites of St Denis, St Geneviève, St Germain of Paris and St Marcel to become powerful monastic institutions.Footnote 11 These foundations, not the cathedral, were the principal cult sites of the city. And yet, all churches would have necessarily possessed some relics.Footnote 12

For Notre Dame in particular we have the evidence of a relic list copied into BNF, ms Latin 2294, a tenth-century sacramentary probably representing our earliest liturgical evidence for the cathedral.Footnote 13 The list includes relics of SS Denis, Geneviève, Marcel, Germain – the four principal Parisian saints – and a series of other local saints (figures such as Bricius, and Eutropius, etc.) who, to the extent that they can be identified, hailed from Auxerre, Tours, Orleans and Saintes. As a group, these represented the saints who propagated and then confirmed the Christianisation of Gaul in the period between the third and seventh centuries, and evokes the ecclesiastical network that existed between Merovingian-era episcopal cities before the mid-seventh century. By the turn of the twelfth century, the cathedral's major relic was of St Marcel, the shadowy fifth-century bishop whose relics were probably transferred to Notre Dame in the tenth century and whose shrine was kept on the Trinity altar in the chancel. There is no evidence that Notre Dame possessed any cross relics before 1120. In the period before 1100 the dominant narratives of sanctity were those of local, Gallic Christianisation.

Liturgical stories

The other measure of devotion to the cross in Paris before 1100 or so was the liturgy. By 1100, the liturgical cursus included three feasts dedicated to the cross: Good Friday, commemorating Christ's death on the cross during holy week, the Feast of the Invention of the Cross, celebrated on 3 May, recounting the story of Helena's discovery of the cross in the fourth century, and the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, celebrated on 14 September, which told the story of Heraclius’ recovery of the cross in the seventh. These feasts, which were celebrated widely in the Latin liturgy and were hardly unique to Paris, provided the True Cross with a fulsome history as a material object of devotion over time. Together, they furnished the basic information about the True Cross that would have been commonly known and generally available when Ansel's relic arrived in Paris.

The liturgy of Good Friday commemorated the event that introduced the wood of the cross into the history of Christianity to begin with. Intense focus on the relic of the True Cross in the Good Friday liturgy can be traced back to fourth-century Jerusalem, where the pilgrim Egeria described the ceremonies she observed there in the 380s.Footnote 14 The Good Friday observance was disseminated throughout Christendom alongside the first wave of the dispersal of cross relics, beginning at the end of the fourth century.Footnote 15 As transmitted to the Latin West, by the twelfth century, the office did not rehearse the crucifixion narrative itself, but it did, when possible, incorporate public veneration of a relic of the True Cross which was exposed in ceremony for adoration.Footnote 16

The feasts of the Invention and the Exaltation commemorated the subsequent history of the True Cross. Both feasts were introduced to the Latin rite in the early medieval period: the May feast of the Invention of the Cross first in the Gallican calendar, probably in the fifth or sixth century, and the September feast of the Exaltation of the Cross in the Roman calendar, adopted on the heels of the energising news of Heraclius’ restoration of the True Cross to the Holy Sepulchre in 629.Footnote 17 By the eleventh century, the two feasts had been adopted widely such that most uses, including Paris, celebrated both.Footnote 18 Although we are generally ill-informed about the Parisian liturgy before 1200, a rare surviving sacramentary from the cathedral dating to the late ninth or tenth century confirms that both the Invention and the Exaltation feasts were part of the yearly cursus, since it includes blessings explicitly rubricated for both feasts.Footnote 19 By the time we have evidence for the liturgical readings used in the Church of Paris, they unsurprisingly follow the standard texts found in lectionaries of the period.Footnote 20

Liturgical offices, and in particular the readings (lections) read during Matins, were known in the Middle Ages as historia and were specifically designed to recount the sacred history of the saint or event being commemorated, and to place that saint or event within the history of the Church.Footnote 21 The readings for the Feast of the Invention of the Cross recounted the story of Empress Helena's purported discovery – inventio – of the True Cross in the 320s.Footnote 22 The attribution of the discovery of the True Cross to Helena, the mother of Constantine, had coalesced in Eastern sources sometime around the turn of the fifth century. Rufinus’ (d. 411) Latin translation of Greek source material made that story available to Latin audiences, among whom someone produced an embellished account that would form the basis of the liturgical narrative in the Latin Church.Footnote 23 The Latin Inventio narrative was known in the Western sources by the sixth century, and was thus adopted for liturgical use when the Feast of the Invention of the Cross was introduced. The account begins with Constantine's victory over ‘a great nation of barbarians’ and his famous vision of a cross bedecked with a sign reading ‘in hoc vinces’. Following his victory, he ‘sent his mother, Helena, to seek out the holy wood of the Lord's Cross’. In Jerusalem she strong-armed information out of the local Jewish community and dug up three crosses. The True Cross was revealed when it alone among the three fragments brought a dead man back to life. Helena enshrined the cross in a silver casket, and then went in search of the Holy Nails, which, in the end, she had placed in a bridle for Constantine's horse.

The Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross recounted the story of the Byzantine emperor Heraclius’ retrieval of the Jerusalem relic of the True Cross from the Sassanian king Coesroes ii in 629, and its restoration to the Holy Sepulchre.Footnote 24 Unlike the story of Helena's inventio, which was essentially mythic, this story was rooted in the historical event of Heraclius’ counter-offensive of 627–9 against the Sassanids following Khusrow ii’s (= Latin Coesroes) conquest of large parts of Syria and his removal, in 614, of Jerusalem's True Cross.Footnote 25 Shortly after the relic's return in 629, in the face of the Umayyad conquest of Jerusalem, Heraclius had the great relic brought to Constantinople, which probably also marked the instigation of the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross in that city.Footnote 26 Heraclius’ recuperation of the True Cross, a comparatively minor episode in the Greek sources, was the kernel of the popular narrative in the West. According to Stephen Borgehammar, an otherwise unknown Greek text for Heraclius’ retrieval of the Cross in the 620s was probably the source for the account that entered the liturgical bloodstream in the Latin West in the seventh century.Footnote 27

The liturgical readings for the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross actually began with a short recap of the inventio story, with Constantine's victory, and Helena, after the inventio, dividing the cross into two parts and sending one part to her son, Constantine, in Constantinople, and placing the other, in a silver casket, in Jerusalem ‘where it belonged’.Footnote 28 Then the legend recounts how, ‘after a long succession of years had passed’, the king of the Persians, Coesroes, conquered Syria, Palestine and Egypt, entered Jerusalem, and carried off ‘the portion of the salvific wood that the pious Empress had left there’.Footnote 29 The bulk of the account recounts Heraclius’ battle with Coesroes's son, his victory over Coesroes and of course his restoration of the True Cross to the Holy Sepulchre. This last episode is the source for the famous image, depicted frequently in later years, of Heraclius entering Jerusalem in pomp on horseback, only to be stopped by an angel reminding him that Christ, rex caelorum, had entered the holy city on the back of a donkey, upon which Heraclius stripped himself of his finery and, barefoot and penitent, entered the holy city with the holy cross.

Together the historiae of the Inventio crucis and the Exaltatio crucis provided the Latin West with the information known about the cross as a relic and a material object with an ongoing history. Centred in the Holy Land and on Jerusalem, recited yearly and evoked frequently, these were the defining narratives of the cult of the cross throughout Latin Christendom, and the important frame for any veneration of cross relics in the West.

The gift itself

The arrival of a portion of the True Cross in Paris in 1120 updated that story, bringing the history of the cross into the Paris of the early twelfth century. The story of the relic and its arrival in Paris is documented by: (1) two letters thought to have been written by Ansel himself which survive in the Archives nationales; (2) the confirmation of a liturgical feast to celebrate it issued by Cuno of Praeneste, the papal legate and cardinal-bishop of Palestrina, probably in 1120 at the council he oversaw at Saint-Germain-des-Prés; and (3) the liturgy instituted to commemorate the relic that survives in Parisian liturgical volumes of the Middle Ages.Footnote 30

We know little about Ansel before his arrival in Jerusalem. Although we know that he was born in Paris, we do not know how long he had been a canon at Notre Dame, why he decided to join the First Crusade, or how he obtained permission to resign his ecclesiastical post. But once in the Holy Land, he appears in institutional registers as a cantor of the Holy Sepulchre, identified by the name Ansellus de Turre or Anselmus de Turre David.Footnote 31 Whether he had access to a relic that had somehow entered the Holy Sepulchre's treasury, or whether he acquired it through private channels (as Heribert Meurer assumed), clearly his elevated position within the new ecclesiastical hierarchy in Jerusalem put him in a position both to obtain and to give away the relic.Footnote 32 As Nikolas Jaspert has argued, in most cases the ‘transmitters of these staurothekai [cross reliquaries containing fragments of the True Cross] were definitely or at least very probably the canons of the Holy Sepulchre’.Footnote 33 Ansel's cross is in fact our first example of the practice of exporting this most valued of sacral commodities.Footnote 34

Some of what we know about the story of Ansel's gift comes from the incorporation of the story into the new liturgical office. The historia for the feast of the Susceptio crucis recounts that having joined the ecclesiastical staff at the Holy Sepulchre, Ansel wrote to his former bishop and former fellow canons ‘whom he held as family’ to say that if he could entrust it to someone trustworthy, he would make a most precious gift to the Church of Paris.Footnote 35 Hearing this, it was arranged that a certain ‘Ansel of Paris’ (sometimes called Anselino; in the original letter he is called Anselm) would go to Jerusalem to fetch the proffered gift. When Ansel ‘of Paris’ arrived, after some hesitation over his earlier promise, Ansel ‘the Jerusalemite’ entrusted the relic to Ansel of Paris and the latter's son, Fulk, who was with him, for the return journey to Paris. Ansel the Parisian, the liturgy recalls, died en route, but Fulk continued on with the sacred charge, arriving at the town of Fontenay outside Paris where word was sent to the bishop and prefect of the cathedral, to whom on 31 July 1120 the relic was quietly handed over.Footnote 36 The relic was then transferred to the town of Saint Cloud, a dependency of Notre Dame, west of Paris, in advance of a great ceremonial reception into Paris, assisted and attended also by the bishops of Senlis and Meaux, on 1 August, a Sunday.

The letter that arrived in Paris with the relic (and still survives) was addressed to the bishop of Paris (Guibert of Paris, 1116–23), the cathedral's archdeacon (Stephen of Garlande, who was also royal chancellor), the precentor Adam (later known as Adam of Saint Victor, the celebrated liturgistFootnote 37), other deacons and the entire congregation. The author, drawing on information he says he learned from the Greeks and Syrians in Palestine, tells the story of a certain Georgian queen (never securely identified) who, in her widowhood, retired to a convent in Jerusalem, bringing with her this piece of the cross that had belonged to King David of Georgia, and later selling it in an effort to support her community.Footnote 38 Although we cannot confirm this phase of the relic's history, this detail accords with what we know about Georgian devotion to the Holy Cross and the presence of Georgian royalty in Jerusalem in the period just before the First Crusade.Footnote 39 The relic, Ansel explained in his letter, was formed from two fragments of the four pieces of wood that formed the original cross, one a fragment from the piece upon which Christ's body was suspended and the other a fragment from the wood that supported the cross. Ansel ends his letter by asking that the community at Notre Dame make sure to recall ‘in your books’ that it was he, Ansel, who had gifted it, and that the relic came from Jerusalem. (And indeed, in the following century, the cathedral's martyrology would commemorate Ansel as the ‘precentor of Jerusalem who gave to us the extremely precious piece of the Lord's cross, whose anniversary ought to be done on the first Sunday of August, which we solemnly celebrate in honour of that same cross that he had sent to us’.Footnote 40)

The bishop and canons quickly instituted a new feast to commemorate the Reception of the Holy Cross. We assume it is at this stage that Adam of Saint Victor, still cantor at Notre Dame, composed the sequence Laudis crucis that would be used in celebration of the mass, and was also adopted quite widely beyond Paris for the mass for the Invention of the Cross.Footnote 41 Shortly after, probably in the autumn of 1120 at a council held at Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the legate Cuno of Praeneste confirmed the feast and its yearly celebration on the first Sunday of August, and he granted an indulgence to anyone who would attend it.Footnote 42 Meanwhile, Bishop Guibert of Paris wrote to Ansel the Jerusalemite to ask for more information about the relic and its origins. The letter was probably entrusted to a certain Bernard, precentor at Sainte-Geneviève (the abbey on the Left Bank), who was the one to bring back Ansel's response a year or so later, along with a second relic (this one of the Holy Sepulchre). In this letter, written in the same hand as the one that had previously accompanied the cross relic, Ansel provided a longer history of the True Cross, and the origins of this part of it. He repeats a point made in the first letter – that he has learned information from ‘conversation with Syrian elders and that he has read in books … since the Greeks have [knowledge of] many things the Latins do not have’.Footnote 43 He acknowledges that the Latins already know from their own writings about Helena's division of the cross into two pieces – one for Jerusalem and one for Constantinople – and also the story of Heraclius’ retrieval from Coesroes. And indeed, these two stories are the very stories preserved and recounted in the Latin liturgy in the West – particularly the liturgical account for the Exaltation feast, which begins with the first detail and ends with the second.Footnote 44 Ansel then, as he explains, drawing on local and oral traditions encountered on the ground in the Levant, relayed the subsequent story of the portion that had remained in Jerusalem. In Jerusalem, after Heraclius’ death, he explained, the infidel, wanting to destroy the cross, sought to extinguish its memory, burn down the Holy Sepulchre and incinerate the relic with it. The Christians hid it, and then cut it up to be shared among churches, ‘so that if one piece should be taken and burned the others would survive’.Footnote 45 He describes twenty-four individual fragments spread from Cyprus to Crete to Alexandria (see Figure 1): ‘The patriarch of the Georgians has one and the king of the Georgians had the one that is now in your possession.’Footnote 46

Figure 1. Fragments of the True Cross distributed from the Jerusalem relic of the True Cross, 629–36, according to Ansel's first letter. The cross in grey in Georgia finished up in Paris.

Map courtesy of A. Christesen.

This story points to conversations that Ansel was having with his Greek and Syrian colleagues in Jerusalem in the early decades of the Latin Kingdom, suggesting that a certain amount of the knowledge about these sacred objects as they came into the orbit of Latin control and ownership was oral, local and informal.Footnote 47 This demonstrates one of the multiple ways in which relics could accrue new narratives, and then could carry these new stories with them as relics moved from place to place.Footnote 48 In this instance, this story was needed to distinguish this specific cross relic from all the others, particularly given the influx of new cross relics brought back to Western Europe following the First Crusade.Footnote 49 It clearly served to lend the gift greater pedigree. It also cemented a relationship between the clergy of Notre Dame and the Holy Sepulchre, which had become intensely valued in the devotional climate that sparked the First Crusade. Once Ansel's relic had arrived in Paris, these narratives also updated the story of the cross, extending the history already known from what the existing liturgical feasts furnished up to the present day (that is, the twelfth century) and all the way to Notre Dame.

All the evidence suggests that the arrival of the cross relic was a major event for the cathedral and the city. The devotional meaning and importance of the cross, and cross relics in particular, had been galvanised by the events of the First Crusade.Footnote 50 Not only had the cross become the central symbol of the crusade, the First Crusade heightened awareness of contemporary Jerusalem and devotional interest in the physical testimonies of the life of Christ. The extraordinary success of the First Crusade, which succeeded in taking Jerusalem in 1099, after which the Franks discovered, hidden in or near the Holy Sepulchre, their great cross relic, further heightened the prestige of cross relics in general, particularly ones that came from Jerusalem.Footnote 51 Most cross relics in the preceding period, as Holger Klein has demonstrated, had been distributed from Byzantium, as part of a programme of diplomacy and patronage.Footnote 52 But Jerusalem, following the success of the First Crusade, quickly became another source for cross relics. Among the flood of cross relics that made their way back to Western Europe, few had the pedigree of Ansel's cross, and its pedigree was crucial to its importance. At the cathedral, the liturgical rite that commemorated the relic's arrival emphasised the context of the First Crusade, stating that Ansel had ‘gone with his fellow soldiers of Christ for the liberation of Jerusalem. The city was captured, and freed from the filth of idolatry’.Footnote 53 This must have been one of the reasons that the bishop went through the considerable effort of having Ansel clarify just ‘how and why this piece of Christ's cross was removed [from the original relic]?’Footnote 54 In a period that also produced Guibert of Nogent's searing critique of false relics (written in 1119, just a year before the arrival of Ansel's cross relic),Footnote 55 the bishop's effort demonstrates both a hunger to understand what distinguished this relic from the other fragments that were making their way West in the wake of the crusade, and, as the liturgy exclaimed explicitly, to document its authenticity.

Veneration and liturgy after 1120

What do we know about the subsequent veneration of the Ansel cross relic in Paris? Cuno of Praeneste's letter, issued probably in 1120, confirms the feast, adding papal authority to an indulgence evidently already granted. The feast was set for the first Sunday of August rather than 1 August (which could fall on any day of the week), in order to increase its solemnity. By the time we have direct evidence of its rank, it is listed as a duplex feast. Within a decade of its arrival, in 1129, the relic was displayed for veneration to the faithful who had come to the cathedral seeking aid during an outbreak of holy fire (ergotism).Footnote 56 It was displayed to the public each year on Good Friday.Footnote 57

Our sources make no mention of whether it had arrived, as did so many other relics of the True Cross in this period, already encased in a reliquary, but if it did, the reliquary probably resembled the other double-armed cross reliquaries fabricated in Jerusalem workshops that made their way to France, Italy and Germany with returning pilgrims and crusaders in the twelfth century.Footnote 58 At some point it was held in an ivory box, either called or placed in a spot known as the sanctuarium sancte crucis.Footnote 59 In the fourteenth century, the relic was removed from its ivory container and placed in a cross reliquary of gilded silver bearing images of Mary, John and the four evangelists.Footnote 60 By the later Middle Ages, we know that the reliquary was kept upon the Trinity altar, the so-called Autel des ardens, which was the altar at the eastern-most end of the chancel.Footnote 61 Although we have no evidence one way or another for the period before that, it is likely that the relic had been there since the twelfth century.

The new feast for the reception of the Holy Cross required a liturgy with which to celebrate the mass and the office. Initially the canons simply adopted the liturgy for the Exaltation of the Cross for both.Footnote 62 This made sense since the cross fragment, coming from Jerusalem, was believed to be the same one that Heraclius had retrieved from Coesroes in 629. Moreover, the story as recounted in the lections for the feast of the Exaltation – the story of Heraclius’ campaign against the Sassanids – was understood in this period as a protocrusade, making the crusading context for the Ansel relic part of the same broad narrative.Footnote 63 For the mass, the one new item was probably the famous sequence, Laudes crucis, composed by none other than Adam of Saint Victor while he was still cantor at Notre Dame.Footnote 64

At some point someone at the cathedral developed a set of proper lections specific to this relic. Two manuscripts, Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève, ms 2618 (311r–312r) and Charleville, BM 86 (236r–v), attest to the first layer of this tradition. Both are Paris breviaries produced in the third quarter of the thirteenth century but representing a usage of the 1220s.Footnote 65 The lections are comprised of an initial narrative frame followed by selected but extensive quotations taken from Ansel's two letters (see Appendix I, column 2). The narrative frame of the first four lections recounts the story of Ansel's journey, the offer of the relic and its arrival to Paris. It is from this evidence that the story of the relic's transfer is known. Then, starting in the fifth lection, ‘In order to remove any doubt of those to whom he had sent the said glorious cross’,Footnote 66 the readings borrow selectively but directly (in lections 5–9) from the two autograph letters that were at the time in the cathedral's chapter archives.Footnote 67 They repeat both Ansel's original history of this relic fragment following its return by Heraclius from Ansel's first letter, and the subsequent explanation of the longer history and dissemination of the cross detailed in the second. The liturgy was thus clearly designed to authenticate and valorise this particular relic and its prestigious pedigree. It also placed Notre Dame within a broader Christian geography of sacred places graced with pieces of the True Cross, and tied the Church of Paris to the Holy Land and specifically to the Holy Sepulchre, weaving the story of the First Crusade into the salvation narrative performed throughout the year in the liturgy. That is, the transfer of the relic placed Notre Dame within the shared space of a Christendom centred on Jerusalem and rooted in the early providential history of Christian salvation.

Developments in the liturgical narrative

The crusades, both because of the opening up of travel and communication with the Holy Land, and because of the new valorisation of the cross as part of crusade ideology, galvanised veneration of the cross throughout the West. After 1120, either because of a growing interest in the cross or because of greater documentation, we have mounting evidence of interest in the cross and cross relics throughout Western Europe. Most notably, following the fall of Constantinople to the combined forces of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, as Paul Eduoard Riant and Anatole Frolow have thoroughly documented, a flood of new relics, and especially new cross relics, came west, not this time from Jerusalem but from Constantinople.Footnote 68

By far the most important new cross relics to arrive to Paris in the thirteenth century came in 1241 and 1242, when Louis ix acquired from Baldwin ii the imperial relic collection that included the Crown of Thorns, for which the young king constructed the luminous Sainte Chapelle, often described as a monumental reliquary. By 1242, the collection included three relics of the cross, one of them the cross relic, called the cross of victory that was said to have brought Byzantine emperors victory in war. Unlike Notre Dame's cross relic, which was associated with Jerusalem, these relics carried with them the history of Byzantine imperial ideology and military victories.Footnote 69

In this context – the context of these new relics pouring into the city and a discourse developing about the sanctification they ushered in with them – let us return to Ansel's cross and its liturgical celebration. Because, sometime in the middle of the thirteenth century, the readings for ‘the feast of the reception of the holy cross done in the church of Notre Dame in Paris’ were updated.Footnote 70 The original readings, as found in Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, ms 2618, and Charleville, BM ms 86, were clunky, awkwardly using the first person of Ansel's letter, ending abruptly with materials from the second letter and lacking narrative and rhetorical closure. The new lections, Inter cetera dei magnalia, retained the core narrative but cut out most of the material derived from Ansel's second letter, did away with the direct quotation of the originals, and reframed the text within new opening and closing materials in which the dominant theme now was of God's great gift of the cross to Paris and the translation of divine favour to the West.

The first lection reads:

Among the many other mighty works of God, we have taken care to entrust to the memory of those who come after us this one as well: God, in his ineffable grace, looking down from on high, thought it worthy to visit the Church of Paris. For, just as if someone were to cut off a branch from a tree so that he might transplant it to another place, thus did our Lord Jesus Christ, by his own wondrous plan, allow a piece from that glorious cross on which he truly and mercifully deigned to suffer for us to be transferred from the East into the West, so that from that point on he might illuminate the Church of Paris for the honour of his mother; and from its brilliance, he might give glory to all of Gaul.Footnote 71

The plant metaphor was apt for the cross, often described as the living cross or the tree of life. The translation of the relic thus was planting the new shoots of Eastern sanctity in Paris, and specifically at Notre Dame. It was God Himself who did this, who from on high ‘thought it worthy to visit the church of Paris’. Likewise a more fitting rhetorical end was added. The final lection lauded the relic as a sign of God's favour for the Church of Paris, and Paris herself as a second Jerusalem (‘altera Ierusalem’). It said that the entirety of the Western Church (‘tota occidentalis ecclesia’) should rejoice. It repeated that the Church of Paris had been visited by God himself, and that she was now in possession of ‘that incomparable wood’, the source of redemption. The Church of Paris now proceeds like the rising sun, beautiful as the moon, having risen from slumber in the shadows, now awakened by the rays of the cross, and is now frequented and honoured by believers. Sanctity had been transferred to the West, and Notre Dame, having inherited this cross relic from the Holy Land, was the centre of this new Jerusalem. The liturgy was not celebrated only at the cathedral, but throughout the diocese. By the end of the thirteenth century, these new lections were included in virtually any breviary ‘of Paris use’, and indeed, this is often the means of being able to identify one as such.Footnote 72

The idea that a relic transfer signalled the transferred favour of an individual saint was well known from earlier narratives of relic transfers and thefts.Footnote 73 These narratives – known best through Patrick Geary's Furta sacra – usually served the local legitimacy of a particular monastery. What is notable here is the role that these relics played in confirming the idea of God's will (rather than a saint's), and thus of the providential movement of sacrality westward. That is, it was not an individual saint expressing a desire to be moved from, for example, Angers to Conques to be properly venerated at a new location or pilgrimage site, as was known from the relic narratives of the central medieval period.Footnote 74 The claims here, rooted in God's universalising will and focused on the relics of his sacrifice, were broadened. This was God himself confirming the transfer of his favour and grace from the Holy Land to the West.

This new framework of theodicy (which demonstrates the workings of God in and through history) had been introduced after 1204 by the narratives of relic translations following, and perhaps justifying the outcome of, the Fourth Crusade.Footnote 75 In a series of contributions building on Riant's pioneering work on the relics of the Fourth Crusade, Anne Lester is demonstrating just how profound the influx of relics from Constantinople was in newly sacralising the French landscape.Footnote 76 The notion that the transfer of relics signalled the transfer of God's favour accelerated wildly after the importation of relics from Constantinople following Frankish conquest. It was articulated with particular clarity in Paris after Louis's acquisition of the Passion relics. The liturgy for the feast of the Crown of Thorns confected for Paris claimed that:

[J]ust as Christ had chosen the holy land for his Incarnation and Redemption, so he specially chose ‘our Gaul’ for the veneration of the Triumph of His Passion, so that, from the rising to the setting of the sun [that is, east to west], the name of God might be praised, provided that, from the region of Greece, which is said to be closer to the East, into Gaul, which is contiguous and adjoining to the West, our Lord and Redeemer transmitted the most holy instruments of his most sacred Passion. And so, just as with shared honours, He made one region equal to the other.Footnote 77

Others echoed the sentiment. The poet Henry of Avranches, writing probably in 1243 specifically about Louis’s cross relics, stated that Paris had surpassed and indeed replaced Jerusalem.Footnote 78 A Benedictine monk writing about Louis's new relics around 1248, also spoke of Paris as a second Jerusalem (‘ipsa civitas quasi altera Iherusalem’).Footnote 79

Let us return to where we began, which is the way in which relics, and in particular cross relics, were nodes within larger narratives of place, locality, identity, universal history and salvation. This one relic – this little piece of the wood of the cross – claimed to be a piece of the wood upon which, in the first century, Christ was crucified and redeemed mankind, which was buried at Golgotha, was discovered by St Helena in the fourth century, was part of the half of the cross retained for Jerusalem, placed there in a silver reliquary, then captured by Coesroes ii in 614 and carried off to Ctesiphon (the capital of the Persian Empire at the time), was retrieved and returned to the Holy Sepulchre in 629 by the Byzantine emperor Heraclius, and then in the decade between 629 and 636 was one of twenty-three pieces cut from the Jerusalem segment and distributed throughout churches in the region – this piece itself being sent to King David of Georgia – then brought back to Jerusalem by the wife of one of his descendants, subsequently sold back to the Holy Sepulchre or someone in its orbit, possession of which was then, in 1099, taken by the Latin ecclesiastics who had joined the First Crusade, among whom was a certain Ansel of Paris, promised to the Church of Paris, entrusted to a trustworthy messenger, and carried from Jerusalem to Paris to be given, on the first Sunday in August, as a pledge of God's love of the West, of Gallia in particular, and of the cathedral Church of Paris specifically. In this way did Ansel's relic place Paris within sacral history and geography. And this, in turn, was all encoded into the iterative liturgical life of the city.

And so, this relic did all sorts of work: ideological work, devotional work and political work. The meaning that was built upon the narratives it carried, meaning that was inscribed and sacralised in the liturgy, imbricated individual stories, and in turn local histories, on to the broader schemes of Christian providence. Initially, Ansel's cross relic – the Dominical and Holy Land relic par excellence – was attached to Notre Dame, to a local personality (‘Ansel, born in Paris’Footnote 80), and to the immediate context of the First Crusade. These were the very years that a new historiography around the First Crusade was formulated which saw the crusade as a divinely ordained event that showcased the Franks as the new chosen people, participating in Providence and even being the leaders in the movement towards God's will. And so, the Parisian narratives attached to this relic integrated Notre Dame and her city into a broadly imagined Christian geography and heir to Christian history, in line with the reimaginations of Christian space that took place after 1099. In the thirteenth century, following the arrival of ever more relics from the East and the consequent idea that God was therefore transferring the status of holy land to France, Ansel's cross was reconceived as the relic that sowed the seeds of this new sacrality in Paris, at Notre Dame. In this new formulation, Ansel's relic did not merely bring Notre Dame into the orbit of a Christendom centred on Jerusalem. It relocated the Holy Land in Paris.

This was all part of a longer story in which Paris emerged as a new sacred centre. That story has multiple threads, including the important one in which the city became in these years the kingdom's capital.Footnote 81 As the king and kingdom established itself as christianissimus, the city styled itself as sanctissimus. It is the adjective used more than sixteen times in an oration of the fourteenth century, when a royal envoy to the papal curia could say that France was most sacred because Christ had adorned it with sacred relics, including the wood of the cross. ‘The most precious relics are now in France, by the choice of God's grace to make them safe there … And from this it is clear that this place is more holy, since it was chosen by our Saviour.’Footnote 82 And then, ‘Is it not thus equally the case that God, through the exhibition and presence of these holy relics of his, is seen to prefer the land of France to the city (of Rome)?’Footnote 83

APPENDIX I

The relationship between the sources for Ansel's cross relic

The following table offers the text from the two original letters currently held in the Archives Nationales (column 1), the original lections for the feast of the Reception of the Holy Cross (column 2), and the revised lections that survive in multiple volumes (column 3). The purpose is to demonstrate how the language of the original sources (in column 1) was adopted first for the early liturgical lections and then further adapted for the adjustments in the thirteenth century. Although two witnesses exist for column 2, the text is taken from BSG, Paris, ms 2618, which is the fuller version. BNF, ms Latin 15182 [P] and KBR, ms IV.472 [B] have been used for column 3, although many versions of the text in this form survive. Unless suggested by an obviously better reading, P has been favoured over B. I have not generally marked word order variants or spelling variants unless these affect meaning.

To permit appreciation and identification of the process of invention, innovation and transmission, meaningfully new elements in the first and second recensions are italicised.

Rubrics are in bold face.

A version of the revised lections was published by Lebeuf in 1739.Footnote * The letters (column 1) have been printed many times, recently reedited in Chartes originales antérieures à 1121 conservées en France. They also exist in English translation.Footnote †

Table 1. The relationship between the sources for Ansel's cross relic

Footnotes

Earlier versions of this argument were presented in Cécile Caby's seminar at the Sorbonne in 2022 and at the Medieval History Workshop at Harvard in 2023. I thank Sean Field and Christopher MacEvitt for reading drafts of this article. I am deeply indebted to Marc Smith for invaluable help with dating relevant manuscripts below. I further extend my thanks to this Journal's reviewer.

References

1 By ‘space’ I mean the abstracted, ambiguous, and ever permeable idea of a territorial expanse or area, often a spatial imaginary, in this case the expanse that constituted the notion of ‘Christendom’ in the medieval period. By ‘place’ I intend to evoke something more akin to a dot within that spatial imaginary understood in relationship to other ‘dots’ (places) on the map. In this case, the ‘place’ was understood, variably, as ‘the cathedral of Notre Dame’, as ‘Paris’ and as ‘the kingdom of France’. These ideas have been often theorised. See first Henri Lefebvre, The production of space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Oxford 1991. See also Yi-fu Tuan, Space and place: the perspective of experience, Minneapolis, Mn 1977, and Doreen Massey, For space, London 2005. These frameworks, as they are related to the medieval world, are discussed fruitfully in Boulton's introduction to Meg Boulton, Jane Hawkes and Heidi Stoner (eds), Place and space in the medieval world, New York–Oxford 2018, pp. xv–xxv.

2 Paulinus of Nola, Epistolae, ed. Wilhelm Hartel, Vienna–Prague–Leipzig 1894, ep. xxxi.6, p. 274; Robin Margaret Jensen, The cross: history, art, and controversy, Cambridge, Ma 2017, 49.

3 Cara Aspesi suggests that it was quickly after 1099: ‘The contribution of the cantors of the Holy Sepulchre to crusade history and Frankish identity’, in Margot Fassler and Katie Bugyis (eds), Music, liturgy, and the shaping of history (800–1500), Woodbridge 2017, 278–96.

4 Rubrics vary. Calendars often call it the feast ‘de susceptione sancte crucis in ecclesia parisiensis’ (as in BNF, ms Latin 1052, fo. 4v; see also BNF, ms Latin 1026, fo. 4v). Common also was the ‘festum in ecclesia beate marie parisiensis de susceptione sancte crucis’, as for instance in BNF, ms Latin 10482. It can also just be the feast ‘de cruce in ecclesia parisiensi’ (as in Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, Paris, ms 203, fo. 4v), or other variants. The rubric in the sanctorale often specifies Notre Dame specifically, as in ‘Sciendum est quod prima dominica augusti faciendum est duplex festum in ecclesia beate marie parisiensis de susceptione sanctis crucis’: BNF, ms Latin 1026, fo. 223v. At the Sainte-Chapelle, the rubric read ‘In festo sancte crucis quod celebratur prima die dominica augusti’: KBR, ms IV.472, fo. 128v.

5 Included in Breviarium Parisiense, illustrissimi & reverendissimi in Christo Patris D. D. Caroli-Gaspar-Guillelmi de Vintimille, ex comitibus Massiliæ du Luc, Parisiensis archiepiscopi … ac venerabilis ejusdem ecclesiæ capituli consensu editum: pars aestiva, Paris 1736, 458, and others.

6 Jannic Durand and others, Le Trésor de Notre-Dame de Paris: des origines à Viollet-le-Duc, Paris 2023, 56, 64–6 (cat. no. 16). The relic remained at Notre Dame until 1793. Parts of it were returned to Notre Dame in 1803. See Ambroise Guillois, Explication historique, dogmatique, morale, liturgique et canonique du catéchisme, Paris 1864, 167.

7 BNF, ms Latin 93, fo. 261v. ‘De ligno sanctae crucis’ appears at the head of a list with seventy-eight entries, some of which list multiple relics. I thank Julia M. H. Smith for sharing with me her forthcoming work on this relic list: ‘Relics and the politics of empire: Hilduin of Saint-Denis and his crypt, 825–34’, EHR (forthcoming). Like most such lists, the Saint-Denis relic list begins with Dominical relics and then proceeds with Apostolic relics, Roman relics and then local relics. On relic lists and their logic see Philippe Cordez, ‘Gestion et médiation des collections de reliques au Moyen Age: le témoignage des authentiques et des inventaires’, in Jean-Luc Deuffic (ed.), Reliques et sainteté dans l'espace médiéval, Saint-Denis 2006, 33–63, esp. pp. 47-9. Other such lists for Paris churches are somewhat later in date, but probably reflect early collection practices or claims. See, for instance (for Saint-Magloire, dating to c. 1138), Jean-Luc Deuffic, ‘L'Exode des corps saints hors de Bretagne (viie–xiie): des reliques au culte liturgique’, in Reliques et sainteté dans l'espace médiéval, Saint-Denis 2005, 371. A thirteenth-century relic list for Saint Victor survives in BNF, ms Latin 14673, fo. 56r–v, which includes ‘de ligno crucis’ although not in first place.

8 The claim to this relic was made in the famous Descriptio qualiter, a text composed probably sometime between the mid-eleventh century and the second quarter of the twelfth century. Its Latin text has been published three times, representing three different manuscript recensions: Federica Monteleone, L'anonimo di Saint-Denis: una fortunata storia di reliquie, Bari 2012; Gerhard Rauschen and Hugo Loersch, Die Legende Karls des Großen im 11. und 12. Jahrhundert, Leipzig 1890; and Ferdinand Castets, ‘Iter Hierosolymitanum ou voyage de Charlemagne à Jérusalem et à Constantinople: texte Latin d'après le ms. de Montpellier’, Revue des langues romanes xxxvi (4th ser. iv) (1892), 468: ‘spineam coronam et unum de clavis Domini qui in carne eius infixus fuerat et de ligno crucis et alia quedam sancta sanctorum ad ecclesiam ter beatissimi Dyonisii martyris devote attulit’. The scholarship is reviewed in Jerzy Pysiak, The king and the crown of thorns: kingship and the cult of relics in Capetian France, trans. Sylwia Twardo, Berlin 2021, 21–36.

9 A cross relic is probably attested at Saint-Germain-des-Prés by Abbo of Saint-Germain's Bella parisiacae urbis (c. 900), in the account of Paris's resistance to the Viking siege of 885–7: Abbo of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Viking attacks on Paris: the Bella parisiacae urbis of Abbo of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, trans. Nirmal Dass, Paris 2007, ii. 308–9. It is not entirely certain whether this episode indicates a cross relic, or simply a ceremonial or liturgical cross, but it is generally thought to indicate the first. If Abbo was speaking of a relic, it may perhaps date to the foundation of the abbey by Childebert i in the sixth century, which was originally dedicated to ‘Saint Vincent and the Holy Cross’. An eighth-century hagiographical source refers to a golden cross and an eleventh-century source stated that Childebert had brought a golden cross encircled with previous gems: Didier Busson, Paris, Paris 1998, 349–50. This may be the golden cross that the Provost of Paris wanted to purloin around the year 1080, although the story does not make it clear whether this was a reliquary cross or not. For this episode see Michel Félibien and Guy Alexis Lobineau, Histoire de la ville de Paris, Paris 1725, i. 133.

10 Jean Lebeuf, Histoire de la ville et de tout le diocèse de Paris, Paris 1883–93, iii. 384–5; Anatole Frolow, La Relique de la vraie croix: recherches sur le développement d'une culte, Paris 1961, 34–5.

11 Jörg Oberste, The birth of the metropolis: urban spaces and social life in medieval Paris, Leiden 2021, 30–41.

12 ‘Necessarily’ because altars required relics, and relics were involved in the consecration of churches. On these questions see Nicole Hermann-Mascard, Les Reliques des saints: formation coutumiere d'un droit, Paris 1975, 162–8.

13 Léopold Delisle, ‘Notice sur un sacramentaire de l'église de Paris’, Mémoires de la Société imperiale des antiquaires de France ser. iii/3 (1857), 165–71; Durand and others, Le Trésor de Notre-Dame, 58 (with further bibliography).

14 Paul F. Bradshaw and Maxwell E. Johnson (eds), The origins of feasts, fasts, and seasons in early Christianity, London 2011, 70–1 (the chapter on the Triduum); Paul F. Bradshaw, Egeria, journey to the holy land, Turnhout 2021, 80–1.

15 Frolow, La Relique de la vraie croix, 56–64; Louis van Tongeren, ‘The cult of the cross in late antiquity and the Middle Ages: a concise survey of its origins and development’, Römisches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana xxxviii (2010), 59–75 at p. 65.

16 For the readings (lections) as practised in Paris, I have consulted BNF, ms Latin 15181, fos 286r–289v, which draws material from Lamentations ii.13–18 (lections 1–3); Augustine's Enarrationes in Psalmos, LXI–LXX (lections 4–6) and Hebrews iv.11–v.1 (lections 7–9). On the veneration of a relic of the True Cross see Tongeren, ‘The cult of the cross’, 59–75 at p. 66. Since the fourth century in Jerusalem, and the seventh century in Rome, the Good Friday liturgy involved the veneration of a relic of the True Cross, a practice that was adopted in northern Europe: Louis van Tongeren, ‘Imagining the cross on Good Friday: rubric, ritual and relic in early medieval Roman, Gallican and Hispanic liturgical traditions’, in Juliet Mullins, Jenifer Ní Ghrádaigh and Richard Hawtree (eds), Envisioning Christ on the cross:Ireland and the early medieval West, Dublin 2013, 34–51.

17 On the origins of the feast of the Inventio crucis in Frankish areas see Frolow, La Relique de la vraie croix, 164. More recently, with a review of the debate, see Stephan Borgehammar, ‘Heraclius learns humility: two early Latin accounts composed for the celebration of exaltatio crucis’, in Millennium: Jahrbuch zu Kultur und Geschichte des ersten Jahrtausends n. Chr./Yearbook on the culture and history of the first millennium C.E., Berlin 2009, 152 n. 24. On the origins of the feast of the Exaltatio crucis, first in Rome and then from Rome to the Frankish lands see Louis van Tongeren, Exaltation of the cross: toward the origins of the feast of the cross and the meaning of the cross in early medieval liturgy, Leuven 2000. This has an extremely helpful summary of conclusions at pp. 275–84.

18 Craig M. Wright, Music and ceremony at Notre Dame of Paris, 500–1550, Cambridge 1989, 67. Use of both feasts is widely documented in Francia. Tracing the liturgy specifically for Paris before 1200 has long been stymied by a surprising absence of liturgical sources, the conundrum of which was addressed in David Hughes, ‘Parisian calendars of the later Middle Ages’, in Bryan Gillingham and Paul Merkley (eds), Chant and its peripheries: essays in honor of Terence Bailey, Ottawa 1998, 277–309. Hughes proposed that earlier volumes may have been ‘driven out’ by a liturgical reform or reorganisation of the liturgy around 1200. Our earliest calendars for the Paris secular church (and not its storied monasteries) include both the 3 May (Inventio crucis) and the 14 September (Exaltatio crucis) feasts, for which see Norman Smith, ‘The Parisian sanctorale, ca. 1225’, in Thomas Drescher (ed.), Capella antiqua München, Tutzing 1988, 251, 55, 59, 60. On occasion, earlier recensions or usages survive in later copies in non-elite volumes or working volumes, such as with the examples discussed below with BSG, ms 2618 and Charleville BM, ms 86.

19 BNF, ms Latin 2294, fos 84v, 32r (the foliation is not sequential). The sacramentary includes a further series of standard ‘benedictiones sanctae crucis’ at fos 83v–84v. On this manuscript see Delisle, ‘Notice sur un sacramentaire’, 165–71.

20 Our evidence for the text used in the office in the Paris Church starts only in the thirteenth century. See, for instance, Bibliothèque de l'Université, Paris (= Sorbonne), ms 1220 (breviary), fos 367r–369v, drawing from BHL 4169 (Inventio), and fos 484r–479v, drawing from BHL 4178 (Exaltatio), and Bibliothèque Mazarine, Paris, ms 397, fos 92v–93v (a thirteenth-century Paris lectionary). The two texts circulated widely before 1100, as can be traced through the Légendiers Latin site at <https://legendiers-latins.irht.cnrs.fr/>. Evidence that BHL 4169 (Inventio crucis) was known in the Paris area in the eleventh century can be found in Bibliothèque Mazarine, ms 1711, fos 387v–398v, a hagiographical collection belonging to Saint-Denis. For BHL 4178 (Exaltatio crucis) see BNF, ms Latin 16820, fos 18v–21v, 160v–164r (a twelfth–century legendary from Saint-Denis), and BNF, ms Latin 11754, fos 72v–75v (early thirteenth-century legendary from Saint-Germain-des-Prés).

21 On liturgical historia see Ritva Jonsson, Historia: études sur la genèse des offices versifiés, Stockholm 1968. See also now David Hiley (ed.), ‘Historiae’: liturgical chant for offices of the saints in the Middle Ages, Venice 2021.

22 BHL 4169. The full text can be found easily in Boninus Mombritius, Sanctuarium, seu vitae sanctorum, Paris 1910, i. 376–9. The Sanctuarium was originally published in Milan in 1477, and represents the basic medieval textual tradition. For translation from one tenth-century (Spanish) exemplar see E. Gordon Whatley, ‘Constantine the Great, the Empress Helena, and the relics of the holy cross’, in Thomas Head (ed.), Medieval hagiography: an anthology, New York 2000, 77–95, starting at p. 86, from which I take the translations that follow.

23 Whatley, ‘Constantine the Great’, 79. According to Légendiers latins <https://legendiers-latins.irht.cnrs.fr/8865> the earliest attestation of BHL 4169 dates to 701-800, and is Cod. Guelf. 404.3 Novi (13). The standard history of the development and transmission of this narrative to the West is found in Stephan Borgehammar, How the holy cross was found: from event to medieval legend with an appendix of texts, Stockholm 1991. See importantly also Jan Willem Drijvers, Helena Augusta: the mother of Constantine the Great and the legend of her finding of the True Cross, Leiden 1992, 179–80. Also useful is Barbara Baert, A heritage of holy wood: the legend of the True Cross in text and image, Leiden 2004.

24 The text is drawn from BHL 4178. Borgehammar (‘Heraclius learns humility’, 145–202), reedited and translated at pp. 180–91. On the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross more generally, see Tongeren, Exaltation of the Cross. The full text can also be found in Mombritius, Sanctuarium, i. 379–81.

25 Anatole Frolow, ‘La Vraie Croix et les expéditions d'Héraclius en Perse’, Revue des Études Byzantines xi (1953), 88–105; Sara Mashayekh, ‘Khosrow in Jerusalem: Sasanians, Romans, and the removal of the True Cross’, e-Sasanika xviii (2017), 1–11.

26 Some scholars associate the feast of the encaenia in Jerusalem (to which Egeria was witness) with the feast of the Exaltatio crucis in Byzantium, since the Armenian lectionary includes a cross feast on 14 September. Others see the origin of the feast of the Exaltatio crucis in Byzantium in the seventh century. See Holger Klein, ‘Niketas und das Wahre Kreuz: kritische Anmerkungen zur Uberlieferung des Chronicon Paschale ad annum 614’, Byzantinische Zeitschrift xciv (2001), 580–7, and ‘Constantine, Helena, and the cult of the true cross in Constantinople’, in Jannic Durand and Bernard Flusin (eds), Byzance et les reliques du Christ, Paris 2004, 31–59; and Tongeren, ‘The cult of the cross’, 62.

27 Borgehammar, ‘Heraclius learns humility’, 148.

28 ‘Regina voti compos effecta salutare lignum seccari per medium fecit: ut dimidiam Crucem Constantinopolim deferret ad filium: et aliam Hierosolymis thecis argenteis conditam reseruaret’: Mombritius, Sanctuarium, i. 379. I take translations from Borgehammar, ‘Heraclius learns humility’, 180–1.

29 ‘Multorum itaque temporum labente curriculo … ligni salutaris partem, quam religiosa regina ibi in testimonium uirtutis reliquerat’: Mombritius, Sanctuarium, i. 379–80; Borgehammar, ‘Heraclius learns humility’, 180–3.

30 The two letters are Archives Nationales, Paris, K//21/A, n° 1/6 and n° 1/7. Cuno of Praeneste's confirmation of the new feast is K//21/A, n° 1/8. These have been newly edited by the Telma project (Chartes originales antérieures à 1121 conservées en France, for which the landing page is <http://telma.irht.cnrs.fr/outils/originaux/> [accessed 29 November 2023]), bearing the respective reference numbers of 2162, 2167 and 2164. The letters have been printed many times before this: PL cxcii.729–32; Gérard DuBois, Historia ecclesiae parisiensis, Paris 1690, ii. 16–18; Gallia Christiana in provincias ecclesiasticas distributa: qua series et historia archiepiscoporum, episcoporum, et abbatum Franciae vicinarumque ditionum ab origine ecclesiarum ad nostra tempora deducitur, & probatur ex authenticis instrumentis ad calcem appositis, Paris 1715, vii, instrumentum 44; and (along with Cuno of Praeneste's privilege) in Miriam Rita Tessera, ‘La croce del legato: Conone di Preneste, il papato e i riflessi della missione in Oriente’, in Maira Pia Alberzoni and Pascal Montaubin (eds), Legati, delegati e l'impresa d'Oltremare (secoli XII–XIII): atti del Convegno internazionale di studi Milano, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, 9–11 marzo 2011, Leiden 2014, 139–60. The two letters are translated in Malcolm Barber and Keith Bate, Letters from the East: crusaders, pilgrims and settlers in the 12th–13th centuries, Farnham–Burlington, Vt 2010, 39–42. The accepted redating of Ansel's two letters to 1120 and 1121 is in Geneviève Bautier, ‘L'Envoi de la relique de vraie croix à Notre-Dame de Paris en 1120’, Bibliothèque de l'Ecole des Chartes cxxix (1971), 387–8, with sources listed at p. 88 n. 1. Images of all three documents are reproduced in Durand and others, Le Trésor de Notre-Dame, 59–61, catalogue numbers 11–13. Cuno of Praeneste's confirmation does not bear a date, but for its probable date and place of issue see Tessera, ‘La croce del legato’, 159–60.

31 Aspesi, ‘The contribution of the cantors’, 278–96 at p. 80.

32 Heribert Meurer, ‘Zu den Staurotheken der Kreuzfahrer’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte xlviii (1985), 65–76 at p. 66.

33 Nikolas Jaspert, ‘The True Cross of Jerusalem in the Latin West: Mediterranean connections and institutional agency’, in Bianca Kühnel, Galit Noga-Banai, and Hanna Vorholt (eds), Visual constructs of Jerusalem, Turnhout 2014, 207–22 at p. 218.

34 As in n. 58 below.

35 This is reported by the liturgy discussed below (earlier version, lection 2). On Ansel's emotional ties to Notre Dame of Paris, and his effort to establish confraternal association between it and the Holy Sepulchre, see Micol Long, ‘Memory and materiality in the letters and gifts sent by Ansellus “de Turre” from Jerusalem to Paris, ca 1120’, Reti Medievali Rivista xxiv (2023), 77–96.

36 Jean Lebeuf argued for a town called Fontenay-sur-Louvre (today Fontenay-en-Parisis). The true identity of this town as ‘Fontenay sur Louvres and Parisis’ and not ‘Fontenay sous Bagenux’ is the primary concern for Lebeuf in a chapter entitled ‘Dissertation sur le Fontenay du diocèse de Paris, où plus probablement arriva l'an 1109 la Ste Croix envoyée de Ierusalem’. See Jean Lebeuf, Dissertations sur l'histoire ecclesiastique et civile de Paris, suivies de plusieurs eclaircissemens sur l'histoire de France, Paris 1739, pp. i–xxviii.

37 Margot Fassler, ‘Who was Adam of St Victor? The evidence of the sequence manuscripts’, Journal of the American Musicological Society xxxvii (1984), 233–69, and Gothic song: Victorine sequences and Augustinian reform in twelfth-century Paris, Cambridge 1993, 64–72.

38 Zurab Avalishvili, ‘The cross from overseas’, Georgica: A Journal of Georgian and Caucasian Studies i (1936), 3–11. On the possibilities for the identity of the Georgian queen see Miriam Rita Tessera, ‘Le donne e la traslazione delle reliquie di Oltremare in Occidente nel secolo xii’, Reti Medievali Rivista xxi (2020), 105–45 at p. 113.

39 Jean Richard, ‘Quelsque Textes sur les premiers temps de l'église latine de Jérusalem’, in Recueil de travaux offert à M. Clovis Brunel, Paris 1955, 420–30 at pp. 23–6; Johannes Pahlitzsch, ‘Georgians and Greeks in Jerusalem (1099–1310)’, in Krijnie N. Ciggaar, Adelbert Davids and Herman G. B. Teule (eds), East and West in the Crusader states: context, contacts, confrontations: acta of the congress held at Hemen Castle in September 2000, Leuven 2003, 35–51 at pp. 35–7.

40 Nonas Augusti (=4 August). ‘Obit Ansellus precentor ierosolimitanus, qui dedit nobis pretiosissimam partem dominici crucis, cuius anniversarium debet fieri prima dominica augusti, quam in honore eiusdem crucis tunc ad nos transmississe sollempniter celebramus’: BNF, ms Latin 5185CC, fo. 254v. The manuscript dates to the end of the thirteenth century. See Charlotte Denoël, ‘Le Fonds des manuscrits latins de Notre-Dame de Paris à la Bibliothèque nationale de France’, Scriptorium lviii (2004), 131–73 at p. 135. The text is printed in Benjamin Guérard (ed.), Cartulaire de l'église Notre-Dame de Paris, Paris 1850, iv.126.

41 Wright, Music and ceremony, 275–6. The use of Laudes crucis can be traced in all extant Paris missals containing the feast. See, for example, BNF, ms Latin BM 1112, fo. 184v; BNF, ms Latin 9441, fo. 163v; BNF, ms Latin 8885, fo. 439v; BSG, ms 97, fo. 222v. For the text of Lauda crucis see Guido Maria Dreves and Clemens Blume (eds), Analecta hymnica medii aevi, Leipzig 1886–1925, repr. New York 1961, liv.189–90. The sequence makes no mention or nod to the reception or the relic itself, but its themes are resonant with the Exaltation feast, which, in any event, served as the base formulary for the feast: Fassler, Gothic song, 64–72. The attribution to Adam of Saint Victor is not universally accepted. Nicholas Weisbein argued in 1947 that Laudes crucis Attolamus was written by the Latin poet Hughes Primat: ‘Le «Laudes crucis attollamus» de Maître Hugues d'Orléans dit le Primat’, Revue du moyen âge Latin iii (1947), 5–26.

42 Tessera, ‘La croce del legato’, 139–60.

43 ‘Legitur in evangelio multa quidem et alia signa fecisse Jhesum in conspectu discipulorum suorum, que non sunt scripta in libro hoc, et vos multa legistis, sed non omnia. Multa enim habent Greci quȩ non habent Latini’: appendix I, Ansel's letters: from <http://telma.irht.cnrs.fr/outils/originaux/charte2167/>, lines 2–3.

44 See n. 24 above.

45 ‘quatenus si una eis pars ad comburendum auferretur, tali modo aliae partes reservarentur’: appendix I, Ansel's letter: from <http://telma.irht.cnrs.fr/outils/originaux/charte2167/>, line 8.

46 Barber and Bate, Letters from the East, 41–2.

47 For the relationship between Christian communities in Jerusalem after the conquest of Jerusalem see Christopher MacEvitt, The crusades and the Christian world of the East: rough tolerance, Philadelphia, Pa 2008.

48 On this point see further Julia M. H. Smith, ‘Eleventh-century relic collections and the Holy Land’, in Renana Bartal, Neta B. Bodner and Bianca Kühnel (eds), Natural materials of the Holy Land and the visual translation of place, 500–1500, London 2017, 19–35, and Anne Lester, ‘The tasks of the translators: relics and communications between Constantinople and northern France in the aftermath of 1204’, in Laura Morreale and Nicholas Paul (eds), The French of Outremer: communities and communications in the crusading Mediterranean, New York 2018, 179–200.

49 Frolow, La Relique de la vraie croix, 68–72. See also Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusaders: 1095–1131, Cambridge 1997, 144–5, 81–2; Nicholas Paul, To follow in their footsteps: the crusades and family memory in the high Middle Ages, Ithaca, NY 2012, 90–133; and Benjamin Z. Kedar, Inventive Jerusalem, Ithaca, NY 2025, 84–92.

50 Much literature engages this point, for example Giles Constable, ‘Jerusalem and the sign of the cross (with particular reference to the cross of pilgrimage and crusading in the twelfth century)’, in Lee I. Levine (ed.), Jerusalem: its sanctity and centrality to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, New York 1999, 371–81, and ‘The cross of the crusaders’, in Crusaders and crusading the twelfth century, Farnham 2008, 45–91.

51 Jaspert, ‘The True Cross of Jerusalem’, 207–22.

52 Holger A. Klein, Byzanz, der Westen und das ‘wahre’ Kreuz: die Geschichte einer Reliquie und ihrer künstlerischen Fassung in Byzanz und im Abendland, Wiesbaden 2004, 193 (for Ansel) and ‘Eastern objects and western desires: relics and reliquaries between Byzantium and the West’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers lviii (2004), 283–314. This is of course before the Islamic conquest of the seventh century. Between the fourth century and the period of Islamicate control of the region, as amply attested in late antique sources, a robust circulation of fragments of the True Cross emanated from Jerusalem itself. See n. 15 above.

53 ‘cum ceteris christi comilitonibus ad liberationem ierusalem perrexit; qui capta urbe et a sordibus ydolatrie, per dei misericordiam liberate’: appendix I, recension 1 (lection i)/recension 2 (lection ii).

54 ‘Quesistis qua ratione, qua necessitate portio ista de dominica cruce assumpta fuerit’ (line 1): appendix I, Ansel's second letter.

55 Guibert of Nogent, Monodies, and, On the relics of saints: the autobiography and a manifesto of a French monk from the time of the crusades, trans. Joseph McAlhany and Jay Rubenstein, New York 2011, pp. vii, xxxix. Rubenstein and McAlhany date the treatise to 1119 or c. 1120.

56 François Dolbeau, ‘Une Version inédite du miracle des ardents (BHL 3345)’, Journal des savants (1983), 151–67 at p. 164.

57 Gustave Fagniez, ‘Inventaires du trésor de Notre-Dame de Paris’, Revue Archéologique n.s. xxvii, xxviii (1874), 399; Frolow, La Relique de la vraie croix, 311 (no. 298). The adoration of the cross (in a cross relic) was a standard feature of the Good Friday liturgy in the Frankish/Gallican rite. This of course naturally depended on the availability of such a relic. On this practice see Tongeren, ‘Imagining the cross’, 42–4.

58 On the group of reliquary crosses made in Jerusalem in the second quarter of the twelfth century, probably in the workshop of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, see Meurer, ‘Zu den Staurotheken der Kreuzfahrer’, and ‘Kreuzreliquiare aus Jerusalem’, Jahrbuch der Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen in Baden-Württemberg xiii (1976), 65–76, 7–17; Bianca Kühnel, Crusader art of the twelfth century: a geographical, an historical, or an art historical notion?, Berlin 1994, 125–53; Jaroslav Folda, The art of the crusaders in the Holy Land, 1098–1187, Cambridge 1995, 83 (for this relic), 97–100, 293–4 (for cross reliquaries from the workshops in Jerusalem); Antonio Cadei, ‘Gli ordini di terrasanta e il culto per la vera croce e il sepolcro di cristo in Europa nel xii secolo’, Arte medievale ii (2002), 51–70. The fine example of a double-armed reliquary cross, now held at the Louvre (Musée du Louvre, Départment des Objets d'Art, no. OA 3665), was probably initially sent to an Italian location, where it was further encased in a western-style frame, bearing both Greek and Latin inscriptions. On this cross see Meurer, ‘Zu den Staurotheken der Kreuzfahrer’, 70, and Folda, The art of the crusaders, 293. The comparison has recently been made in Durand and others, Le Trésor de Notre-Dame, 56.

59 Fagniez, ‘Inventaires du trésor’, 252, 399; ‘sanctuarium sancte crucis’ (dating to 1213): Guérard, Cartulaire, i. 93. Sanctuarium is a capacious enough term that it could refer to either relic, reliquary, oratory or church, so here could either refer to the container or the place in the church where it was stored.

60 Fagniez, ‘Inventaires du trésor’, 252, 399.

61 Anne Lombard-Jourdan, ‘Les Foires de l'abbaye de Saint-Denis: revue des données et révision des opinions admises’, Bibliothèque de l'École des Chartes cxlv (1987), 286–8, 306–7; Antoine Jean Victor Leroux de Lincy and Lazare Maurice Tisserand, Paris et ses historiens aux 14e et 15e siècles: documents et écrits originaux recueillis et commentés, Paris 1867, 262–3. For the altar's placement see Wright, Music and ceremony, 99.

62 See note 41 above for the mass. The earliest surviving Paris breviaries that include the feast simply direct the reader to the liturgy for the Exaltation of the Cross. Several early thirteenth-century volumes testify to this layer of the practice. Bibliothèque de l'Université (= Sorbonne), ms 1220, fo. 427v, includes instructions (‘Sciendum est quod semper in prima dominica augusti faciendum est dupplex in ecclesiae Parisiensi de susceptione sancte crucis, sicut infra in festo Exaltationis scriptum est’) and no proper texts. The same is true of Houghton Library, Harvard, ms Riant 9, fo. 117v (‘Sciendum est quod in prima dominica augusti faciendum est festum duplex in ecclesia parisiensi de susceptione sancte crucis; fallit tamen quandoque sicut notatum est in kalendario In susceptione sancte crucis quere totum preter legendam in exaltatione sancte crucis’). Earlier volumes title the feast simply the ‘de susceptione sancte crucis [or †]’ as in BNF, ms Latin 1112, fo. 184v, a missal dating to c. 1225. Note that the feast is not found in BNF, ms Latin 748, which, according to Rebecca Baltzer, is the oldest surviving breviary for Notre Dame of Paris, dating probably from the first decade of the thirteenth century: ‘The sources and the sanctorale: dating by the decade in thirteenth-century Paris’, in Benjamin Brand and David J. Rothenberg (eds), Music and culture in the Middle Ages and beyond: liturgy, sources, symbolism, Cambridge 2016, 111–44 at pp. 131, 133.

63 Gustav Kühnel, ‘Heracles and the crusaders: tracing the path of a royal motif’, in Daniel Weiss and Lisa Mahoney (eds), France and the Holy Land: Frankish culture at the end of the crusades, Baltimore, Md 2004, 63–76; Guilherme Queiroz de Souza, ‘Heraclius, emperor of Byzantium’, Revista Digital de Iconografía Medieval vii (2015), 27–38; Bartlomiej Dzwigala, ‘Constantine, Helena and Heraclius in the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem’, this Journal lxxii (2021), 18–35; Anastasia Sirotenko, ‘Erinnern an Herakleios: zur Darstellung des Kaisers Herakleios in mittelalterlichen Quellen’, unpubl. PhD diss. Munich 2020; M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, ‘Louis ix, Heraclius, and the True Cross at the Sainte Chapelle’, in M. C. Gaposchkin and Jay Rubenstein (eds), Political ritual and practice in Capetian France: essays in honour of Elizabeth A. R. Brown, Turnhout 2021, 265–99. When, in the seventeenth century, the liturgy was rewritten for the third time, the lections reframed the story within the story of the crusades in general, beginning with Urban ii's call in 1095. See the Breviarium Parisiense (1736), 460–1.

64 As indicated in our earliest evidence, dating from the early thirteenth century. See, for example, BNF, ms Latin 1112, fo. 184v.

65 See n. 18 above on the lack of sources for the period before 1200. I am grateful for Marc Smith's opinion on the question of the dates of these volumes. It is he who suggests a date of ‘no earlier than the third quarter of the thirteenth century’ (personal communication, 12 May 2023). Victor Leroquais had dated BSG, ms 2618 to the second half of the thirteenth century: Les Bréviaires manuscrits de bibliothèques publiques de France, Paris 1934, iii. 457. Rebecca Baltzer gave the date as the 1260s, but also states that the manuscript represents the state of the liturgy in the 1220s: ‘Another look at a composite office and its history: the feast of susceptio reliquiarum in medieval Paris’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association cxiii (1988), 1–27 at p. 5 and ‘The sources and the sanctorale’, 111–41 at p. 31. One indication that it reproduced an outdated liturgy is that it does not include materials for the Feast of the Crown of Thorns. Leroquais made a very rare error in his catalogue: Bréviaires, iii. 457–8. In his entry for this manuscript at fo. 311, he correctly listed the rubric as ‘De susceptione sancte crucis’ (not corone), but he identified it as a feast for 11 August (which would be the day on which the Crown of Thorns was celebrated in Paris), and a few lines later wrote ‘la fête la plus récente est celle de la réception de la sainte couronne d'épines (1239)’. But this is incorrect. The feast at 311r–312r is for the Reception of the Cross, and it is followed by feasts for SS Sixtus (6 Aug., 312r), Donatus (7 Aug., 312v), Lawrence (10 Aug., 313r) and Hippolytus (13 Aug., 315r). The Crown of Thorns would have fallen between the last two. See Leroquais, Bréviaires, iii. 458. The error has been transmitted more recently: see Chiara Mercuri, Corona di Cristo corona di re: la monarchia francese e la corona di spine nel medioevo, Rome 2004, 220. Regarding Charleville, BM 86, Baltzer dates this volume to the ‘late 1230s’, and Leroquais to the first half of the thirteenth century: Baltzer, ‘The sources and the sanctorale’, 131, 33; Leroquais, Bréviaires, i. 279. Note that the Paris, BSG ms 2618 text is the longer of the two, and presumably the text in the Charleville manuscript was simply a cut-down from a copy of that longer version. My assumption is that it originally circulated more widely than these two manuscripts indicate.

66 ‘Ad removendam vero eorum hesitationem quibus gloriosam dictam crucem transmiserat per suas litteras inter cetera continentes scripsit eis’: appendix I, recension 1 (lection 5).

67 In 1725, when Felibien published his history of Paris, he could say that the relic was still in Notre Dame's possession, and also that they had the ‘authentic acts sent at the same time from Jerusalem by the canon Ansel’: Félibien and Lobineau, Histoire de la ville de Paris, i.144.

68 Specifically, to Paris. The new emperor, Baldwin i, sent to Philip Augustus relics from the imperial chapel, including two cross relics (or one that Philip divided in two). Philip distributed one of these to Notre Dame, which they received without much fanfare, and the other to Saint-Denis. We know about the one at Notre Dame only from a reference in the cathedral's thirteenth century obituary to ‘a cross from the Lord's glorious cross which was sent to [Philip] from the regions of Constantinople’. The reference to the Constantinopolitan origins distinguished this apparently minor relic from Ansel's prized Jerusalem relic: Guérard, Cartulaire, iv.110. For the broader phenomenon see Paul Edouard Didier Riant, Exuviae sacrae constantinopolitanae fasciculus documentorum minorum, ad exuvias sacras constantinopolitanas in occidentem saeculo XIII translatas, spectantium, & historiam quarti belli sacri imperijq(ue) gallo-graeci illustrantium, Geneva 1877, repr. Paris, 2004, and Frolow, La Relique de la vraie croix, 387–8, no. 461.

69 M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, ‘Louis ix and the triumphal cross of Constantine’, French Historical Studies xlvi (2023), 3–35.

70 Rubrics vary. See n. 4 above.

71 ‘Deus ineffabili gratia sua exalto prospiciens parisiensem dignatus sit visitare ecclesiam. Nam velud si aliquis de arbore aliqu<e>m ramum amputaret ut alias transplantaret; ita dominus noster ihesus christus, de gloriosa cruce illa in qua ipse veraciter et misericorditer pro nobis dignatus est pati mirabili ordinatione sua partem passus est auferri, & de oriente in occidentem transfretari ut exinde parisiensem ecclesiam ad honorem matris sue irradiaret; et ex eius fulgore totam galliam illustraret’: appendix I, recension 2 (lection 1).

72 For example, BNF, ms Latin 1052, fos 445r–446v. The lections are taken up in early printed breviaries, such as the Breviary of c. 1500 (BSG OEXV 743 Res).

73 Hermann-Mascard, Les Reliques des saints, 364–402; Patrick J. Geary, Furta sacra: thefts of relics in the central Middle Ages, Princeton 1978.

74 For example, with the story of a translation of Sainte Foy. The text is translated in Pamela Sheingorn, The book of Sainte Foy, Philadelphia, Pa 1995, 263–74. This text was composed between 1020 and 1060. See p. 26 of Sheingorn's introduction.

75 Alfred J. Andrea and Paul I. Rachlin, ‘Holy war, holy relics, holy theft: the Anonymous of Soissons's “De terra Iherosolimitana”: an analysis, edition, and translation’, Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques xviii (1992), 147–75 at pp. 151–2; David Perry, Sacred plunder: Venice and the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade, University Park, Pa 2015.

76 Anne Lester, ‘What remains: women, relics and remembrance in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade’, Journal of Medieval History xl (2014), 311–28; ‘Remembrance of things past: memory and material objects in the time of the crusades, 1095–1291’, in Megan Cassidy-Welch (ed.), Remembering crusades and crusading, London–New York 2016, 73–94; ‘Translation and appropriation: Greek relics in the Latin West in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade’, in Simon Ditchfield, Charlotte Methuen and Andrew Spicer (eds),  Translating Christianity (Studies in Church History liii, 2017), 88–117; and ‘The tasks of the translators’, 179–200. See also Perry, Sacred plunder. The classic study on the idea of the translatio imperii is Werner Goez, Translatio imperii: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Geschichtsdenken und der politischen Theorien im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit, Tübingen 1958.

77 M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, ‘Between historical narrative and liturgical celebrations: Gautier Cornut and the reception of the Crown of Thorns in France’, Revue Mabillon xxx (2019), 91–145 at pp. 125–6 (§§9–10).

78 David Townsend, ‘The “versus de corona spinea” of Henry of Avranches’, Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch xxxviii (1988), 154–70; Carin Ruff, ‘The “versus de corona spinea” of Henry of Avranches and the iconography of kingship in the reign of Louis ix’, Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch: internationale Zeitschrift für Mediävistik xxxviii (2003), 379–88.

79 The text has been printed three times: Emmanuel Miller, ‘Review of Exuviae sacrae Constantinopolitanae’, Journal des Savants (1878), 292–309, 389–403 at pp. 292–309 ; Natalis de Wailly, ‘Récit du treizième siècle sur les translations faites en 1239 et en 1241 des saintes reliques de la passion’, Bibliotheque de l'École des Chartes xxxix (1878), 401–15; and Girolamo Golubovich, Biblioteca bio-bibliotrafica della terra santa e dell'Oriente franciscano, ii, Firenze 1913, 306–11.

80 ‘Clericus cuidam Ansellus nomine natus parisii’: appendix I, recension 1 (lection 1)/recension 2 (lection 2).

81 Robert-Henri Bautier, ‘Quand et comment Paris devint capitale’, Bulletin de la Société de l'histoire de Paris et de l'Ile-de-France cv (1978), 17–46.

82 Franco Morenzoni, ‘Parler au pape au nom du roi: le discours d'Ancel Choquard au pape Urbain v (avril 1367)’, Studi medievali 3rd ser. xlviii (2007), 317–66.

83 ‘Nunquid etiam pariter hanc terram Francie pretulisse uidetur Dominus urbi per istarum sanctarum reliquiarum suarum exhibitionem et presentiam?': ibid. 353.

* Lebeuf, ‘Dissertation sur le Fontenay du diocèse de Paris, pp. v–ix. The two final paragraphs of Lebeuf's transcription, which speak of further letters between the Church of Paris and Ansel in Jerusalem, veer from what is found in most versions of this recension. I have noted these sentences in the notes.

† See n. 30 above.

‡ continentur] Oratio: Deus qui unigeniti filii tui domini nostri Ihesu Christi precioso sanguine humanum genus redimere dignatus es, concede propicius ut qui ad adorandam vivificam crucem adveniunt a peccatorum suorum nexibus liberentur. Add. P. N.B.: This is a standard prayer used for the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. See Eugene Moeller and Jean-Marie Clément (eds), Corpus Orationum, Turnhout 1992– , no. 2149.

§ posterorum P ] posterum memorie B

** de] om. B

†† capta B] cauta P

‡‡ eiusdem] om. eiusdem P

§§ gratulantes P] gratulati B

*** gratiarum P] grarum B

††† divino] om. B

‡‡‡ corrected G from cupiensbat

§§§ promissioni P] promissione B

**** memoratum P] memoriam B

†††† explevit B] implevit P]

‡‡‡‡ voti P] noti B

§§§§ se] iam add. B

***** cum] praedicto illo add. B

††††† dominico B

‡‡‡‡‡ From this point onwards, the text copied by LeBeuf in 1739 diverges, reading: ‘Susceptis tamen his litteris prefato Parisiensi episcopo velut alteri Thomae sanctae incredulitatis adhuc inerat scrupulus, upote dubitanti qua ratione vel quo eventu res tam pretiosa et tam diligenter custodita, in tot portiones posset disstribui. Itaque non fuit ei pigrum rescribere venerabili illi jam dicto Ansello et postulare ab eo ut de re tanta eum redderet certiorem. Quibus litteris episcopi visi, venerabilis vir ille Ansellus per alias litteras episcopo parisiensi sic respondit. Quaesistis qua ratione, qua necessitate portio ista de dominica cruce assumpta fuerit.’ Note that this text is a slightly embellished version of Recension 1, lectio 5, suggesting a separate variant or an intermediary version of the text, for which I know of no other existing evidence.

§§§§§ exulta] inquam add. B

****** quasi P] velud B

†††††† credentibus P] fredentibus B

‡‡‡‡‡‡ et P] atque B

§§§§§§ honorata P] honorificata B

******* fluxit B] flexit P

Figure 0

Figure 1. Fragments of the True Cross distributed from the Jerusalem relic of the True Cross, 629–36, according to Ansel's first letter. The cross in grey in Georgia finished up in Paris.Map courtesy of A. Christesen.

Figure 1

Table 1. The relationship between the sources for Ansel's cross relic