From the late fourth century Christian writers report that Helena, on pilgrimage to Jerusalem around 325, discovered the Cross and that its wood was divided among Jerusalem, Constantinople and Rome. The Roman share was enshrined at the Sessorian basilica she founded. Over the centuries the True Cross fragments were multiplied by division into countless churches, a practice that the medieval mind explained through the wood's miraculous increase. The Titulus at Santa Croce is said to have been walled into the basilica for safekeeping and rediscovered during restoration in 1492, after which it was documented and venerated. The relics were regrouped in a modern reliquary chapel built in the twentieth century. In 2002 the Titulus panel was subjected to radiocarbon analysis, the first rigorous scientific test of any object in the collection.
True Cross fragments are, notably, one of the most widely dispersed relic types in medieval and early modern Christendom, venerated at churches across Europe in a quantity that became proverbial: the sixteenth-century reformer John Calvin, in his polemical Treatise on Relics, remarked that if every fragment claimed as True Cross wood were gathered together the total would exceed what a large ship could carry, a jibe modern relic scholars have generally found borne out by the sheer number of documented medieval claimants across the continent. The Santa Croce fragments are among the relics with the longest continuously claimed Roman custodial history of the type, associated with Helena's foundation of the church itself, but, like the Titulus panel kept alongside them, they cannot themselves be independently authenticated as first-century material through any surviving scientific test.