A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [167]
The stained-glass windows of the Sainte-Chapelle leave us in no doubt that Paris and the kingdom of France are to be permanently transformed by the arrival of the Crown of Thorns. Louis, who became St Louis when canonized in 1297, is shown paired with Solomon; the Sainte-Chapelle is his temple and Paris has become Jerusalem. When the crown arrived, it was described as being on deposit with the king of France until the Day of Judgement, when Christ would return to collect it and the kingdom of France would become the kingdom of Heaven. When this chapel was completed and dedicated in 1248, the archbishop proclaimed: ‘Just as the Lord Jesus Christ chose the Holy Land for the display of the mysteries of his redemption, so he has specially chosen our France for the more devoted veneration of the triumph of his Passion.’ The Crown of Thorns has played a long and fascinating part in the international politics of piety – it allowed St Louis to claim for France a unique status among the kingdoms of Europe, and every French ruler since St Louis has wanted to follow his example.
The historian Sister Benedicta Ward sees this as something more than a religious quest:
To have a relic particularly connected with the passion of Christ was the best thing you could have. But there were also relics of the saints, particularly the martyrs. I think they provoked a lot of envy, especially the French collections. The rivalry in England was intense: ‘We want to have a better relic than they have because we are a better nation than they are.’ They are subject to all kinds of external influences. Like everything else it can be part of commerce. Politics, commerce, exchange – this is certainly all round the relics.
In the complex economy of political influence, a thorn from the crown became the ultimate French royal gift. In the late fourteenth century one came into the possession of a powerful French prince, Jean, duc de Berry, and we can be absolutely confident that the reliquary in the British Museum belonged to him. It has his coat of arms enamelled on to it, and it also sums up many of his preoccupations: he commissioned some of the greatest religious art of the period and he was a passionate collector of relics. He had what were claimed to be the marriage ring of the Virgin, a cup used at the wedding at Cana, a fragment of the Burning Bush and a complete body of one of the holy innocents, the children murdered by Herod. He was also an enthusiastic builder of castles, and so, appropriately, the base of our reliquary is a castle made out of solid gold. This Holy Thorn Reliquary is certainly one of the supreme achievements of medieval European metalwork, but sadly there is no way of knowing if it was the greatest artefact in Jean de Berry’s collection. The bulk of his goldsmiths’ work was broken up and melted down within months of his death, when the English occupied Paris after the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. The survival of this reliquary means that he must have given it away before he died.
We are not sure who he gave it to, but by 1544 it was in the treasury of the Habsburg emperors in Vienna, and from there its secularization begins – the gold, enamel and jewels becoming far more valuable and interesting than the humble thorn that they house. In the 1860s it was sent for restoration to a dishonest antique dealer, who, instead of carrying out the repairs, created a forgery which he sent back in its place