The Reliquary of the Empire

From the ninth century to 1204 the Pharos chapel functioned as the spiritual treasury of the Byzantine state, holding what was arguably the greatest concentration of Christian relics ever gathered in one room. Successive emperors added to it: by the mid-tenth century it held a portion of the True Cross and the Holy Lance; the Mandylion arrived in 944, the arm of John the Baptist in 945, the sandals of Christ and the Keramion in the 960s, the letter of Christ to Abgar in 1032.

By the late twelfth century visitors listed the Crown of Thorns, a Holy Nail, Christ's clothes and purple mantle, the reed and sponge of the Passion and a piece of the tombstone. Ambassadors and pilgrims who were admitted described the chapel as a foretaste of heaven, and the emperors staged elaborate ceremonies around the relics that bound the sacred history of Christ to the legitimacy of their rule. Because the relics were kept together and displayed as a set, the chapel became, in the words of modern scholarship, a "New Jerusalem", an attempt to relocate the holy places of the Passion to the imperial capital.