The tunic's legendary history traces it to Saint Helena's recovery of relics in the Holy Land and its passage through Constantinople, whence, tradition says, the empress Irene sent it to Charlemagne, who in 800 gave it to the convent of Argenteuil governed by his daughter Theodrada. The relic disappears and resurfaces through the medieval centuries and suffered its gravest danger in the French Revolution, when the parish priest cut it up and concealed the pieces to keep it from the anti-clerical authorities; the fragments were gathered again afterward and the reassembled tunic returned to veneration. Solemn expositions were held in modern times in 1934, 1984 and, for the Jubilee of Mercy, in 2016, when tens of thousands came in a few days; the next is planned for 2034. Around these events the cloth, its bloodstains and its pollen have been studied by specialists.
The tunic has survived a documented history of concealment and near-loss: hidden during the French Revolution to protect it from anti-clerical destruction, it suffered damage when hastily cut into pieces by those hiding it, and it has undergone several later restorations that further complicate any attempt at independent material dating, since a sample taken today would necessarily include fibres, thread and repair work from multiple different periods rather than a single, clean fragment of any one age. It remains today at the Basilica of Saint-Denys, Argenteuil, under the custody of the Diocese of Pontoise, displayed to the public only at infrequent, specially announced expositions rather than on continuous view, a pattern of restricted access shared with several other major cloth relics recorded in this atlas.