History and Provenance

The chalice can be documented with confidence from the later Middle Ages within the crown of Aragon. It appears in inventories associated with the royal monastery of San Juan de la Pena in the Pyrenees, was held by the Aragonese kings, and in 1437 King Alfonso V transferred it to the cathedral of Valencia, where the canons have preserved it ever since. Pious tradition extends the story much further back, claiming that Saint Peter carried the cup to Rome, that the popes used it, and that it was sent to Spain by the deacon Saint Lawrence for safety during the persecution of the mid-third century, reaching Aragon in the early Middle Ages. In modern times the cathedral has promoted the relic through Jubilee years of the Holy Chalice, and two papal Masses celebrated with it have raised its profile as a focus of Grail devotion.

Pope John Paul II venerated the chalice and celebrated Mass using it during his 1982 pastoral visit to Valencia, one of the relic's most prominent modern endorsements by a sitting pope, though the Catholic Church has never formally declared the cup to be authentically the vessel used at the Last Supper. It is one of several distinct objects independently venerated across Europe as the Holy Grail; Genoa Cathedral's Sacro Catino, a hexagonal glass dish long believed in the medieval period to be carved from a single emerald before later examination showed it to be Byzantine or Islamic glasswork of the ninth or tenth century, taken as war booty at Caesarea in 1101, is another such independent claimant, with its own separate and unconnected history.