1204 and the Dispersal to the West

The Fourth Crusade's capture and sack of Constantinople in 1204 ended the chapel's role as guardian of the relics. In the chaos and the Latin occupation that followed, the treasures were dispersed. The Passion relics passed into the hands of the Latin emperors of Constantinople, who, desperate for money, pledged them to Venetian financiers; in 1239 King Louis IX of France redeemed the Crown of Thorns and, over the following years, a large group of associated relics, paying vast sums and building the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris expressly to enshrine them.

In this way the heart of the Pharos collection travelled from Constantinople to Paris, where the surviving Crown of Thorns is now kept at Notre-Dame. The chapel itself, part of the Great Palace, fell into ruin along with the rest of that complex over the later Byzantine and Ottoman centuries, and today nothing of it remains standing; its location within the palace precinct near the Sea of Marmara is known only approximately. The Pharos chapel therefore survives only in texts and in the relics that once passed through it.