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HISTORY

A bronze medallion , recovered from the bottom of the Seine, is the first ever testimony of pilgrimages to the Shroud in Europe. Dating back to the mid-1300s , the object bears a depiction of the Shroud with its double image , the herringbone fabric and the coats of arms of the Charny family. It had evidently belonged to a pilgrim who had gone to venerate the Shroud and who intended to take the medallion home in memory of the special encounter.

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The first historically certain news about the Shroud now preserved in Turin dates back to the 14th century , when the French knight Geoffroy de Charny had a church built in the small town of Lirey – near Troyes – to guard and display the Shroud to the faithful.

Before that time the traces are more vague. Texts dating back to the 5th-6th century state that in the city of Edessa (now Urfa , in Turkey ) there was preserved a portrait of Jesus (indicated by the Greek word Mandylion which means “towel”) belonging to the category of miraculous “acheropite” ( “not made by human hand” ), imprinted on a cloth. Some scholars associate this cloth with the Shroud preserved today in Turin , which at that time would have been displayed to the public folded so as to show only the face .

In the 10th century, the Mandylion was transferred to Constantinople , at the time the capital of the Byzantine Empire . In his diary, preserved in the Royal Library of Copenhagen, Robert de Clari , a French knight who took part in the Fourth Crusade , reports having seen the Shroud in a church in Constantinople, where it was exposed every Friday and where “its entire body could be seen clearly”.

With the sack of Constantinople and the theft of countless precious objects, it is hypothesized that the Shroud , like many other finds, had been brought by the Latins to Greece , where the Charny family was present.

In the first half of the 15th century , due to the worsening of the Hundred Years' War , the last descendant of Geoffroy, Marguerite de Charny, withdrew the Shroud from the church of Lirey and took it with her on her wanderings through Europe. Until she found a welcome at the court of the Dukes of Savoy , to which both her father and her second husband, Humbert de La Roche , had been linked. It was there that, in 1453 , the transfer of the Shroud to the Savoy took place.

The Shroud remained the property of the Savoy family until 1983 , when, upon the death of the last king of Italy, Umberto II , it was bequeathed to the Holy See.

Insights

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