History and Provenance

The correspondence between Abgar and Jesus is reported by the church historian Eusebius in the early fourth century, though he mentions only letters, not an image. A physical cloth image at Edessa is first described near the end of the sixth century by Evagrius Scholasticus, who says it delivered the city from a Persian siege in 544. The relic remained at Edessa until 944, when the emperor Romanos I Lekapenos secured it by negotiation and had it carried to Constantinople in a great celebration, placing it in the Pharos Chapel of the imperial palace among the most precious relics of the empire. There it stayed until the Fourth Crusade, when Latin armies took and looted the city in 1204 and the Mandylion disappeared from the record. A cloth later kept in the Sainte-Chapelle at Paris and lost in the Revolution may or may not have been the same object.

The Mandylion was ceremonially translated from Edessa to Constantinople in 944 CE, a major event in Byzantine court and religious life, and it disappears from the historical record after the Fourth Crusade's sack of Constantinople in 1204, its fate thereafter unknown. The British author Ian Wilson has proposed that the Mandylion and the Shroud of Turin are one and the same object, folded in a way that displayed only the face, which would account for its disappearance from Byzantine records shortly before the Shroud's own documented appearance in France in the 1350s; this identification is not accepted as scholarly consensus among Byzantine art historians, and it leaves an unexplained gap of roughly a century and a half between the 1204 sack and the Shroud's first securely documented Western appearance.