The Holy Robe of Trier

Trier claims the seamless tunic that the Gospel of John says the soldiers did not divide but cast lots for, and the claim runs through Helena, mother of Constantine, who is said to have brought it from Jerusalem to the city where she had lived. That tradition is medieval. It is not recorded by anyone at the time it describes, and the earliest secure documentation of a robe at Trier is from 1196, when the archbishop translated relics into the new high altar of the cathedral.

After that it was largely out of sight until 1512, when it was rediscovered and shown in the presence of the emperor Maximilian, and the modern history of public showings begins there. They have been rare and irregular ever since, at intervals of decades, in 1810, 1844, 1891, 1933, 1959, 1996 and 2012, and each has drawn very large numbers of pilgrims.

The object itself is difficult to examine. Centuries of well-meant conservation have left it patched, backed and impregnated with later materials, so that what a visitor sees is a garment-shaped composite in which the original textile is largely inaccessible. Scientific examination has therefore been limited, the diocese does not present the relic as authenticated, and recent pilgrimages have been framed around veneration and pilgrimage rather than around any claim of proof.

The pilgrimage of 1844 brought hundreds of thousands of people to Trier over several weeks, and it produced a schism. Johannes Ronge, a suspended Silesian priest, published an open letter attacking the showing as superstition and the bishop who ordered it as its promoter. The letter circulated widely in a Germany already politically restless, and out of the response to it came the German Catholic movement, a breakaway that drew substantial support for some years before dispersing. A relic showing had become a political event because it offered a public occasion for arguments that had nowhere else to go.

The other difficulty is a rival. The basilica of Argenteuil near Paris venerates a tunic said to be the same garment, with its own tradition of arrival, its own showings and its own following. The two claims as traditionally made cannot both be true. The harmonisation sometimes offered, that one is the inner tunic and the other the outer cloak, is a later reconciliation rather than what either tradition originally said, and it satisfies few people on either side.

The atlas records both claims and endorses neither. What is not in question is that a garment has been kept, guarded, argued about and travelled to at Trier for eight hundred years, and that is a fact about religion whatever the cloth turns out to be.