Overview

The Crown of Thorns is one of the great relics of Christ's Passion, venerated as the thorny wreath forced onto Jesus' head by soldiers who mocked him as "King of the Jews." The relic now kept at Notre-Dame de Paris is not a mass of spikes but a circlet of rushes about twenty centimetres across, bound with gold thread; the thorns that were once attached have been broken off and dispersed as individual relics to churches across Christendom, so that many places claim a single thorn. Louis IX brought the Crown to Paris in the thirteenth century and made it the centrepiece of the royal chapel he built for it. Today the cathedral exposes it for veneration on the Fridays of Lent and on Good Friday, and it was among the first objects rescued when fire struck Notre-Dame in 2019.

Byzantine sources place a crown of thorns among the relics gathered in Constantinople by the eighth or ninth century, part of a wider imperial collection of Passion relics displayed in the Pharos chapel of the Great Palace; the Fourth Crusade's sack of Constantinople in 1204 disrupted this collection and set in motion the chain of pawning and debt that eventually put the crown in Venetian hands. Louis IX's 1239 procession bringing the relic into Paris on foot and in a plain tunic was recorded by chroniclers as a deliberate act of humility associating the Capetian monarchy with Christ's suffering, and the Sainte-Chapelle he built to house it, completed in 1248, remains one of the most celebrated examples of High Gothic architecture. The individual thorns dispersed as gifts over the centuries went to churches and rulers across Europe, so several dozen churches today claim to hold at least one.