[Stewart Gordon, ed. Robes and Honor : The Medieval World of Investiture (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 59-93.]

CHAPTER 4

THREADS OF AUTHORITY:

THE VIRGIN MARY'S VEIL INTHE MIDDLE AGES

Annemarie Weyl Carr

In 1031/32 the monastery of New Minster in Winchester, England, commemorated benefactions from the reigning king, Cnut, and his spouse, Queen Emma, by creating a Liber Vitae for the altar of its church.[1] The book's text—a list of benefactors and the order for prayers on behalf of their salvation[2]—is prefaced by three full-page illuminations. The first shows Cnut and Emma making their gift by placing a large cross on New Minster's altar (see figure 4.1); the following pair shows the afterlife, where the Devil garners the damned from his book of sins while the blessed— introduced to Peter by the Liber Vitae itself [3]—enjoy the rewards of their benefactions in Heaven. The theme of generosity rewarded is anticipated already in the opening scene, where—before the approving eyes of New Minster's monks at the lower margin—the royal donation is acknowledged with divine recompense. Christ himself in a mandorla hovers over the cross, flanked on his right by his Mother and on his left by Peter, the two patron saints of New Minster. Below St. Peter, an angel lowers a crested crown onto Cnut's head, and below Mary, a similar angel lowers a veil onto Emma's.

The miniature presents the first surviving image of an English queen, a distinction reinforced by the placement of Emma below Mary on Jesus's right hand, a place of honor in which one might have expected to find Cnut. Emma’s eminence reflects, in fact, her prominence in the political conditions of Cnut's reign; Pauline Stafford, her modern apologist, calls Emma the "apotheosis of English queenship." [4] No less striking in the miniature is Emma’s receipt of the veil. The visual alignment of their placement and clothing links Emma and Mary together with the veil: as Cnut [p.61] receives the crown of kingship from Christ through St. Peter, Emma receives a veil associated with the Virgin.

A ruler's receipt of a crown from Christ or Mary is an image well entrenched in Christian art and one that Cnut assuredly found useful in England.[5] The conferral of a veil, on the other hand, is singular. The veil seems inevitably to be a confirming sign of Mary's power and approval: a confirnation of Emma's queenship through her vestment in the veil of Mary. And so the New Minster Liber Vitae leads us to the issue at hand: the Virgin's veil and its role as an instrument of investiture.

The Virgin's veil is a largely modern figure of speech used to cover (among others) a range of legitimately medieval images and objects. The questions it poses are legion; important for us will be: What deserves to be called a veil of the Virgin? When, where, and how did such objects appear? How were they utilized or displayed? What does this say about the distinctive kind of power attributed to the Virgin Mary? How was this power imagined to be linked to that of earthly rulers? And to what extent was it used to distinguish women's from men's power?

The idea of the veil may initially have emerged from a relic cult. As Mary's tomb in Gethsemane had been left without bodily remains, she was served-when her relics began to appear-by secondary relics, especially clothing. These collected above all in Constantinople, where their advent is linked by legend with the great partisan of the Mother of God, the ernpress Pulcheria (450-53). Among these relics, one came to be known as the "maphorion" of Mary, that is, the cloth enveloping her head and shoulders. This seems to have been the initial veil.

This relic was housed in a circular church sheathed it) silver known as the Soros, or Reliquary, adjoining the basilica of the Virgin at Blachernai.[6] Blachernai occupied an exposed position at the northern end of the Constantinopolitan land walls. Its vulnerability is reflected in the annual feast of the deposition of its relic on July 2. This commemorated not the garment's arrival in Constantinople, but its restitution to Blachernai in 620 after removal for safekeeping during Avar raids during the preceding year. Blachernai's great moment came soon thereafter, in 626, when the Patriarch Sergios repulsed an Avar assault by taking holy objects (variously identified in historical reports) onto the walls there;[7] a similar defense ended the terrible Arab siege of Constantinople in 718. Mary's protection manifested in these events was-and continues to be-celebrated in the annual singing of Romanos the Melode's great Akathistos Hymn, modified by the addition of a prooirmon lauding Mary as the "invincible general."[8] Then again in 860 Mary was summoned to Constantinople's defense: the Patriarch Phones, bearing Blachernai's relic in his hands, routed marauding Russian invaders.[9]

[p.62]

Blachernai was a site of imperial as well as episcopal display and included, along with the basilica and the reliquary church, a metatorikion or imperial vesting apartment for the emperors when they visited the complex for official ceremonies. "[10] They did this on a number of feast days and anniversaries,[11] as well as on Fridays to bathe in Blachernai's sacred spring. On these latter occasions the ritual included a visit to the Soros, as we learn from Constantine VI I's Book of Ceremonies.[12] Constantine gives no indication whether these visits were in any way coordinated with another famous Friday event at Blachernai: an all-night vigil in honor of Mary held each week and attended by the populace at large.[13] Known as the "Presbeia," or Intercession, the vigil was accompanied by a procession across Constantinople to the church of the Virgin Chalkoprateia near Hagia Sophia, also equipped with a Soros housing Marian garments.[14] The vigil must have acquired a spectacular aspect, for it figures in a range of visions in ninth- and tenth-century saints' lives that refer to the Virgin Mary in a radiance of light.[15] Its showmanship seems to have culminated in the famous "usual miracle" described in 1075 by Michael Psellos and known to pilgrim literature throughout Europe in the later eleventh and twelfth centuries.[16] In the "usual miracle" a veiled icon of Mary was mysteriously exposed and became luminous when the veil rose at dusk on Fridays; it fell again on Saturday evening, The "usual miracle" is cited for the last time in about 1200 by the Russian pilgrim Anthony of Novgorod, and it seems, like the Soros, to have fallen victim to the Latin Interregnum (1204-61).[17] The basilica itself, still majestic in 1400, was destroyed in 1434 in a fire lit by youngsters chasing pigeons.

The Book of Ceremonies makes it clear that the Soros figured in imperial ceremonial, and the recurrent reference to the vigil shows that Blachernai was a major center of Marian veneration, known both within Byzantium and to pilgrims from abroad. The nature of the relic housed there is far less clear. [18] Three legends are recorded in Byzantium about its origin. One, best told in a sermon by a certain Theodore Synkellos, relates how two Constantinopolitan patricians named Galbios and Kandidos stole from a pious Jewish widow a casket containing one of the two garments that Mary had willed on her deathbed to needy friends. [19] Calling it simply έσθής --that is, "garment"--, Theodore asserts that Mary not only wore it, but "received and nursed the Christ Child in it." [20] sermon delivered at Blachernai and attributed to the eighth-century Andrew of Crete cites droplets of milk on the cloth, but calls it the ξώυη, or belt, of Mary. [21] A second narrative is preserved in the anonymous Euthymiac History; this tells how Juvenal, Patriarch of Jerusalem, responding to empress Pulcheria's demand for a relic of the Virgin Mary, sent a sealed casket containing the Virgin's two dresses (imatia) and burial shroud [p. 63] (entaphia), which Pulcheria installed with due reverence at Blachernai. [22] A third narrative, finally, given in the late tenth-century Menologion of Basil II (Vatican, or. 1613) and cited already in a sermon for 2 July by the Patriarch Euthymius (907-912), says the emperor Arcadius (395-424) received the belt that Mary had worn at the first Christmas; deposited in Blachernai, the garment was taken briefly from its reliquary in 906 in order to liberate from demons the empress Zoe, wife of the emperor Leo VI (886-912) . [23]

These narratives yield at least three definitions of the garmentas belt, shroud, and dress; they link it with three different moments in Mary's life-her new motherhood, her death, and her assumption; and they describe three different moments of deposition. They have been variously interpreted by modern scholars. Martin Jugie, who attributed both the Euthymiac History and the sermon associated with Theodore Synkellos to the second half of the ninth century, asserted firmly that no relic of Mary could be associated with Blachernai before the ninth century when the Patriarch Photios enshrined it in Byzantine history and sensibility by involving it in the Russian defeat of 860 .[24] A decade after Jugie, however, Antoine Wenger identified Theodore Synkellos as an eye-witness of the Avar siege of 626, thus creating a far earlier context for the association of a relic with Blachernai.[25] Lodged in Constantinople already before the tumultuous years of the Avar raids, he sees it thrust into mythic eminence by the events surrounding these raids. Van Esbroeck, finally, based on his study of an Arabic text related to the Euthymiac History, sees the Marian relics forged in the yet earlier crucible of the Chalcedonian controversies that wracked the later fifth and sixth centuries.[26] He reconstructs a veritable laundry-chute of Marian garments imported to bolster Chalcedonian Christology by recreating in Constantinople the sacred topography of Sion and Gethsemane, sites of Mary's dormition and assumption.

Wenger's and Van Esbroeck's textual attributions seem, indeed, to have located a Marian relic at Blachernai long before the Patriarch Photios mobilized it to defeat Russian marauders in 860. Yet Jugie retains his grandeur. For the relic seems to have became a veil only at a time near if not during the miracle of 860. It is only after Photios' use of it that the relic acquires its identity as the Virgin's veil or maphorion (also omophorion), a word that seems to have been applied to the relic for the first time by Photios himself.[27]

The volatile identity of the Blachernai relic throws into relief the complex persona of Mary herself in Constantinople. Each of the three eras singled out above was crucial to her configuration. Ephesus, Chalcedon, and their great sponsor, Pulcheria, elevated Mary to the majestic status of godbearer that permitted her to intervene in the fate of empires.[28] The [p. 64] metaphor of textile-weaving is so powerful in the Marian rhetoric of this era that the textile relics—whatever their identity—find a compelling context here.[29] Thus Nicholas Constas has brought out the rich nuances given to textile metaphors in the Marian sermons of Pulcheria's confessor. Patriarch Proclus, and the intimate bond he knit by their means between the virgin empress and the Mother of God. Speaking of Christ's flesh as a luxurious toga woven on the textile-loom of Mary's womb, Proclus promised also that Pulcheria could, by her pious chastity, make her own flesh a loom of Christ.[30] The empress inscribed her vow of chastity on an altar in the cathedral church of Hagia Sophia, presenting her own robe as its altar cloth; "like her exemplar the Virgin Mary who wove a robe of flesh that was draped around the divinity," Constas writes, "the virgin empress wove a robe of cloth that served as both a covering for the body of the altar and a shroud for the symbolic body of Christ."[31] An echo of this strong, somatic imagery may reverberate still in Cosmas Vestitors fourth sermon on the Dormition, known only in its Latin translation from Reichenau, which glosses the Euthymiac History by saying that Pulcheria placed the casket with Mary's garments on Blachernai's altar "veluti si dixerim, in sinibus Dei Genitricis Christum portatum"—as if, so to say, Christ upon [Mary's dress spread upon] the altar were borne on the lap of the Mother of God.[32]

If Mary attained imperial agency with Pulcheria, however, it was only later, in the fierce crucible of the later sixth and early seventh centuries, that the distinctive character other agency begins to emerge. [33] Her motherhood, reflected in the droplets of milk; her ascetic and virginal purity, reflected in her meagre bequest of two dresses; her mysterious ascent to the realm of the ruler of the angels, reflected in her empty shroud were all threads in the fabric of her being. But as Averil Cameron has argued, these themes—which were to be so important to the formation of the western medieval Mary—did not have the power to focus firmly the identity of the chameleonlike "eothes" interred in the Soros at Blachernai. [34] Instead, Mary assumed an eminence analogous to that being forged in the same centuries by the earthly Augustae: she became the guarantor of eternal victory. As Diliana Angelova has shown, the empresses acquired an imagery of authority rooted in their intercessory participation as partners in victory, an imagery that merged with—rather than diverged from—the imagery of the emperors, welding them together, male and female, as shared faces of one ideal. [35] So, too, with Mary. She became the embodiment of the imperial virtue of eternal victory, the sure intercessor whose protection safeguarded the integrity of the realm. The concreteness of Mary's bond with victory comes out powerfully in the panegyric composed by George of Pisidia to celebrate the triumph of 626, which opens with a metaphor likening Mary to a victory standard:

[p. 65]

If a painter wished to show the tropaion of this battle,

he would raise high the one who conceived without seed,

and paint her image.

She alone can triumph forever over nature,

first in her conception and second in battle.[36]

Finally, in the ninth century, the city found a fitting fabric in which to clothe this concept of Mary. This occurred with the identification of the relic as the cloth veiling Mary’s head and shoulders. It refers to the heavy mantle that cloaks the head and shoulders of the Byzantine figure of Mary, falling in deep swags over her chest and cascading over her arms to deeply fringed hems at knee-level, known as the maphorion. Photius himself calls it her peribole or stole, but it is clear from his language that it is a protective mantle, and accounts of the miracle of 860 from the tenth century on call it her maphorion. In Photios' words, it is mobilized by compassion, deployed in intercession, and enfolds the city like a sheltering cloak pulled around the shoulders:

When, moreover, as the whole city was carrying with me her raiment for the repulse of the besiegers and the protection of the besieged, we offered freely our prayers and performed the litany, thereupon with ineffable compassion she spoke out in motherly intercession: God was moved, His anger was averted, and the Lord took pity of His inheritance. Truly is this most-holy garment the raiment of God's Mother! It embraced the walls, and the foes inexplicably showed their backs; the city put it around itself, and the camp of the enemy was broken up as at a signal; the city bedecked itself with it, and the enemy were deprived of the hopes which bore them on. For immediately as the Virgin's garment went around the walls, the barbarians gave up the siege and broke camp.[37]

Photios ends his sermon with a prayer to Mary: "We put thee forward as our arms, our rampart, our shield, our general: do thou fight for thy people." [38] It is her sure intercession that the maphorion signals. Notably, the visual aspect so central to our conception of the veil—as something that hides—is absent from Photius's language. No less absent is the strong, somatic association with Mary's delivery and death seen in the Pulcherian rhetoric.

The maphorion linked effectively the relic of Mary's garment and the potent myth other protection in times of war. To the modern imagination these elements coalesce readily in an image of Mary's veil. In Byzantium, by contrast, the iconography of the relic remains elusive. To our knowledge—though the point is much debated—there was no Byzantine icon conceived specifically to represent the protective power of the relic at [p. 66] Blachernai.[39] The icon of the orante Virgin spreading her maphorion in the gesture of prayer is often associated with Blachernai, but we have little understanding as yet of when and how dogmatically this association was made in Byzantium: many icons of the orante Virgin must have lived out their serviceable lives without ever evoking the relic of the veil, while the name "Blachernitissa" appears on images of Mary that are not in the orante pose, as well.[40] By the same token, though Mary is depicted conferring garments like the episcopal pallium upon St. Nicholas, she was never shown conferring her maphorion. Mary does confer regalia on rulers. We see this in images from precisely the centuries in which the maphorion served as a major repository of the distinctive persona of Mary as the protector of Constantinople and its rulers in times of war. In these images Mary places a crown upon the head of the ruler and so confirms the divine origin of the ruler's authority. The emperors, as Henry Maguire has shown, wore the garb of angels, expressing their place in the hierarchy of the cosmic court of God.[41] Mary at her assumption had risen to the side of the ruler of the angels,[42] and it is this role that she assumes here. She is the peerless intercessor between Christ and the angelic host of his court. This was the role in which Photios, too, had cast the Mary of the maphorion. In the images of crowning, this Mary exercises the right of investiture. In contrast to the investiture depicted in the Liber Vitae of New Minster with which this article opened, the investiture she enacts is represented by a crown, and it is gender-indifferent: be it the emperor Leo VI on his ivory knop,[43] be it the warrior-emperor John I Tzimiskes (969-976) crowned by Mary on his gold coins,[44] be it the eleventh-century empress Theodora (1055-1056), crowned in exactly the same way on her coins,[45] the investiture received is one only, conferred on the unpartible head of empire. Conferred upon emperor alone, empress alone, emperor and empress together, or emperor and son(s), the investiture is one, and expressed in the same garment: not a veil, but a crown.

The Virgin of the maphorion co-existed at Blachernai with many other faces of Mary. These lived largely in icons, and Blachernai became a very busy locus of Marian invocation.[46] The maphorion's role in the ongoing rituals of imperial and civic devotion in Constantinople is not easy to discern, for its active interventions in the City's life are few. They are concentrated in the tenth and early twelfth centuries—assuredly not accidentally in the reigns of warrior rulers. The best-known use of the maphorion was by Romanos I (920—944), who wrapped it around his body as an impregnable armor when he departed Constantinople on November 9, 926, to engage his arch-enemy, the Bulgarian Tsar Symeon, in peace negotiations.[47] It can not have been long thereafter that the Life of St. Andrew the Fool in Christ was composed in Constantinople; a story of [p. 67] apocalyptic foreboding, the Life is directed to heavenly, not earthly, threats, but it buffers these with a brilliant vision of holy protection set in the Soros at Blachernai, when Andrew beholds the Virgin herself, moving on the path the emperors used, to the sanctuary where she kneels in prayer, lifting her veil till it floats like a luminous cloud over the assembled crowd.[48] The Life tells us that the maphorion had a deep root in the imagination of contemporaries, and this impression is reinforced by the fact that it was among the palatine relics of which small fragments were sent to war with the emperors in spectacular reliquaries—including the Limburg Reliquary of 963.[49]

The maphorion next emerges in 1093, when the splenetic metropolitan, John Oxites—upbraiding the emperor Alexios I Komnenos (1081-1118) for lack of piety—invoked the miracle of the maphorion as exemplary of the invincibility that that proper piety conferred.[50] The use of this example may well have been a special dig at Alexios, for we know that Alexios did employ the maphorion; he is the last emperor whom we know to have done so. Alexios' relation to the Marian cult at Blachernai has been a matter of some conjecture: he made his home in the Blachernai palace, and the Alexiad reports his hurried return to Constantinople from the outset of his campaign against the Normans in March, 1107,[51] after Blachernai's "usual miracle" had failed to occur on the Friday of his departure. This passage is often understood to indicate his customary engagement in the ritual. In fact, however, we have no evidence that Alexios (or any other emperor) ever participated in the "usual miracle." A different story in the Alexiad may throw clearer light on his relation to the shrine.[52] This reports that when Alexios went onto the battlefield against the Cumans in 1089 he carried a sword in one hand and in the other the maphorion of the Mother of God as a battle standard. The emperor must have gone to Blachernai to get the veil/standard, and with it the Virgin's blessing, before going to war. Under these circumstances the failure of the "usual miracle" on the eve of battle might well have aroused a popular anxiety deep enough to compel his return.

Alexios' use of the maphorion as a battle standard is otherwise unknown in Byzantium, though it recalls George of Pisidia's metaphor of Mary as tropaion centuries earlier.[53] It was not a success: Alexios was so badly beaten by the Cumans that he was forced to stuff the veil into the crux of a tree and flee the field.[54] The maphorion was surely not lost to history at this point. But it does not figure again in military history. As a myth it was still strong. This is proved by the decision of the Andrej Bogoljubskij (+1174), prince of Suzdal, to adopt as a major cult in his realm the cult of the Pokrov, the protection and intercession of Mary.[55] The liturgy of the Pokrov-feast was based upon that of the 2 July feast at Blachernai;[56] Bogoljubskij also [p. 68] dedicated the famous church on the Neri River commemorating his victory over the Bulgarians in 1164 to the Pokrov. Thus he bound victory, protection and intercession together in the language of the Blachernai shrine, surely adopting for his own regime the protection under Mary's maphorion that Byzantium claimed.[57] Notably, however, we have no evidence that Bogoljubskij acquired from Constantinople an actual fragment of the maphorion, or of any other Blachernai relic. Rather, it is with icons that his veneration of Mary is associated, and eventually the feast of Pokrov acquired its own icon, depicting the vision at the Soros of Andrej's saintly namesake, Andrew the Fool in Christ.[58]

The linkage of Bogoljubskij's cult with an icon is suggestive. For in Constantinople, too, the maphorion was being preempted by an icon: the icon of the Mother of God Hodegetria was taking over the veil's traditional role as the sign of the City's Marian protection.[59] A relic continued to grace Blachernai: Russian pilgrims venerated Mary’s robe, belt, and cap (literally, scullcap) there;[60] the fourteenth-century historian Nikephoros Kallistos inventoried quite a complex cluster of textile relics associated with Mary's motherhood and death there;[61] and the Roman church of Santa Maria Maggiore eventually, in 1453, received a belt of Mary reputed to have come from Blachernai.[62] But these were no longer the maphorion—in all his careful inventory Nikephoros Kallistos never so much as uses the word.[63] Alexios I's own daughter, Anna Komnene, writing in the second quarter of the twelfth century, is among the last to use it.[64] The relics Nikephoros cites spoke of a different identity of Mary, and served a different purpose. Singled out in the ninth century from the dress, the shroud, and the milk-stained belt, the maphorion had played its role, and—after passing its identity on to the icon of the Hodegetria— had succumbed once again to the relics bound to the more corporeal life of Mary.[65]

A further indication of a shift in the imagery of the Virgin's veil in the decades of Alexios Is crucial reign occurs in painting. It is seen in the iconographic elaboration—not so much of the maphorion—but of the clustered folds depicted around Mary's head in certain icons. Perhaps the earliest instance of this occurs in the famous icon of the Virgin with Prophets preserved at Mount Sinai: here Christ draws the eye specifically to the headdress of his mother by clutching it.[66] The gesture has been variously interpreted: as a reference to the imperial celebration of the feast of the Presentation at Blachernai;[67] as a reference to the veil of flesh that Mary gave to her son's divinity;[68] as the veil of his divinity that he is said to cast over her in the fourth oikos of the Akathistos hymn.[69] This variability shows that the iconography is arcane: bound to some specific, presumably literate key. But it does not seem to open upon the militant [p. 69] messages of Blachernai's maphorion. In time this image of Jesus clutching Mary's veil became widespread, and a striking number of the icons that display it became charismatically charged and served as the focus of devotional cults.[70] Only fitfully, for short periods, did any of them assume a role in military events, though, and none shared the charge of the maphorion. The same can surely be said of a variant of the so-called Pelagonitissa, again a widely-disseminated thaumaturgic type, that also showed a twisting child clutching his mother's veil.[71]

The maphorion's role as the protective mantle of eternal victory might seem to be linked more justly with another instance of a conspicuously painted veil that appeared in the century after Alexios. This is the heavy red and gold veil worn over Mary's maphorion in a pair of icons from the Crusader period, one of about 1200 in Paphos on Cyprus, and another of about 1280 at St. Catherine's monastery. Mount Sinai.[72] These icons show the Mother of God cradling a recumbent Child, and both are paired with an icon of a military saint. The pairing is striking: for all her martial presence in Byzantium, Mary is rarely linked with military saints in Byzantine art. The same iconography of Mary cradling a recumbent Christ recurs in a fourteenth-century icon in Athens that is inscribed with the name r\ akatamachetos—the invincible—, echoing the militant Prooimion to the Akathistos Hymn.[73] If protective, however, the icon in Athens lacks the heavy red veil and so challenges this garment's association with the maphorion and its myth. The veil itself, moreover, appears in a range of other contexts that speak not to war, but to more specifically womanly conditions, veiling the virginal Mary of the Annunciation, the child Mary at her Presentation in the Temple, and the aged Anna with the infant Mary in her arms.[74] The garment is significant in illustrating attention to the veil of Mary from the twelfth century on. But it is a new attention, that finds its roots in contexts different from those of the maphorion.

This heavily embroidered, red veil was, moreover, joined by other veil images: the veil embroidered in its hem with the words of Psalm 45,[75] or the veil grasped in one hand by a snuggling Christ depicted as the Lamb of the Passion.[76] These images appear in Palaiologan art and reflect the richly nuanced, highly semiotic visual language that Chrysanthe Baltoyanni has identified in Palaiologan icons.[77] Rooted in homilies and Scripture, this is an idiom deeply steeped in the intensity of the anticipated Passion. It is physically associative and corporeal, pointing in the direction of birth, death, obedience, and virginity intimated by Mary's dress, shroud, and belt. It is plausibly regal, as illustrated by the images of sainted princesses like Helena, Catherine, and Barbara, who wear similar veils, or by the beautiful Poganovo icon in which the donor, Helena Palaiologina, mourns the death of her father and son through the image of a mourning [p. 70] Mary who clutches her heavily fringed veil about her.[78] But it is an imagery adapted to rulers as women: as mothers and queens. It does not merge with, but differentiates itself from, the imagery of male rulers. It is in this sense an imagery unlike that of the warrior goddess of the maphorion.

The protective role of Mary's maphorion did not vanish: the folklore of Athos, Cyprus, and the city of Siena all draw upon legends of the Virgin's protecting an endangered site by veiling it in fog;[79] in the nineteenth century the feast of the Pokrov was introduced as the feast of the Skepe or veil into the Greek Orthodox Church;[80] and still in the Second World War, war posters showed the Mother of God with her mantle thrown over Greek soldiers.[81] But these stories—linked more with the mantle than the veil as such—led an existence alongside another and more intimate imagery that spoke to the veil of the flesh.[82]

Linking the two changes operating here—from relic to icon and maphorion to veil—may be a yet deeper shift signalled by the spectacular events of the "usual miracle." In the "usual miracle" we encounter for the first time a veil that is not a protective cover but a concealment: a cloth that functions to hide from view. The drama of concealment and revelation became a familiar aspect of icon culture in late eleventh and twelfth-century Byzantium. Like modern ones, the great charismatic icons of Byzantium were "brought out" only on certain occasions, for ceremonial appearances in vigils and processions. Some of these great images were veiled by embroidered covers: Alexios I himself, for instance, recovered from serious illness after being covered with the veil from the icon of Christ in the Chaike Gate.[83] Valerie Nunn has collected eleven epigrams from the late eleventh and twelfth centuries that were composed for embroidered covers given in thanks or supplication to icons.[84] Many of the donors belonged to the imperial family, and half of the covers are destined for "the Hodegetria"—either the great palladion itself, or precious private replicas venerated under her name. Such covers were a form of display, for they were rich and precious. But they were also a form of concealment, mystifying and making desirable the icon beneath. They played, thus, upon a fundamental dialectic of vision, both creating a display and withdrawing its object into the realm of desire. Like the very objects they covered, they belonged to a realm of spectacle. As the great sacred objects of Byzantium became drawn ever more into the play of spectacle, these instruments of vision—the icon and the veil—come into their own.

It has been noted that Andrej Bogoljubskij's devotion to the Pokrov became associated above all with icons, and not with a relic. This was not the case with rulers linked at earlier moments with Byzantium's rituals of imperial presence. Focal in this context is Charlemagne, a figure scarcely less [p. 71] mythic than the maphorion itself, and fundamental to the legends of Mary's relics in western Europe.[85] If the Virgin's garments had originated within what was, in around 400, still Byzantine territory, and so belonged to Byzantium's own heritage, such items were available to western Europe only from outside: from the "east." Charlemagne acquired sacred objects from Jerusalem and cultivated an enthusiasm for Holy Land relics in his courtier-abbots. But Charlemagne also had the example of the imperial capital of the east, Constantinople. Constantinopolitan habits of relic acquisition and display assuredly affected his own. He takes us into another— if interestingly interlocked—story of Mary's veil.

"Veil" is the identification given repeatedly to the relic of the Virgin's vesture housed in the great Marian shrine in Aachen and traced back by both legend and learned association—medieval as well as modern—to Charles the Great and his Palace Chapel.[86] This definition met a formidable challenge when the shrine was opened and yielded not a veil, at all, but a fully intact dress.[87] The dress is of western medieval origin, and reflects the fashions of the early thirteenth century. It must have been made for the ceremonies surrounding the dedication of Aachen's Court Style Gothic apse, consecrated to Mary in 1238 and furnished with trappings of a sanctity capable of withstanding the glare of Louis IX's Passion relics at the Sainte-Chapelle.[88]

But the story is not quite so simple as this. The Aachen couture tells us that the appropriate form for a Marian garment in 1238 was as a dress. It does not tell us that the tradition requiring a Marian garment at Aachen had originated in the thirteenth century, or that that tradition had been served throughout its life by the same conception of the garment. The tradition assuredly antedated 1238, and there is every reason to expect that it was as volatile as the one that spawned it in Constantinople. As Heinrich Schiffers notes, it is probable that a relic or relics of Marian garments were among the sacred items assembled at Aachen in Carolingian times: Angilbert of Centula, who claimed to have a sample of every relic in Aachen, had among others a relic of a Marian "vestimentum,"[89] and according to a monastic inventory of 1003 Charlemagne's grandson, Lothair I, had given another to the monastery of Prum.[90] The earliest inventory of the Aachen relics is no earlier than the late twelfth century and so not long before the apse of 1238.[91] It, however, speaks of a "velum" of Mary. With this, an interesting pattern emerges, as a "vestimentum" gives way to a "velum" that reverts in the thirteenth century to a dress, a dress now stained with droplets of milk from the Nativity.[92] The articles of clothing, and perhaps more notably their sequence, recall the shifting habit of Blachernai.

A curiously convergent picture is offered by the most famous off-spring of Charlemagne's legendary Marian relic.[93] This, of course, is the "chemise" [p. 72] of Christmas night preserved at Chartres, supposed to have come to Chartres as a gift of Charles the Bald. The relic is first attested by Dudo of St.-Quentin between 994 and 1015 in his account of Chartres's miraculous triumph over Rollo the Norman, an account repeated in several eleventh-century Norman texts and eventually implanted in early twelfth-century compilations of Marian miracles at Chartres itself, and in England.[94] As Dudo tells it, the story has clear reverberations of the accounts of the defenses of Constantinople at Blachernai: threatened by Norse invasion, Chartres's bishop, Walter, summons the Duke of Burgundy and the Count of Poitou to defend his city and, as combat is engaged, marches himself toward the enemy holding up the cross and the tunic of Mary; Rollo flees—in other accounts he is blinded—and the city is saved. The story of Blachernai had reached the West already by 800 with the translation of the Akathistos Hymn by a Venetian bishop named Christophoros, who was in France in 807-13;[95] Paul the Deacon recounted it,[96] so one gathers that it was known in the West, and the legend of Chartres seems to have appropriated it. Progressively, as Chartres' story was told, the role of the relic became more central until, as Gabriela Signori notes,[97] William of Malmesbury omits the warlords entirely and focuses on the relic, reporting that:

. . . the townspeople, relying neither on arms nor fortifications, piously implored the assistance of the blessed Virgin Mary. The shift, too, of the Virgin, which Charles the Bald (literally, "unus ex Karolis") had brought with other relics from Constantinople, they displayed to the winds on the ramparts, thronged by the garrison, after the fashion of a banner ("in modum vexilli").[98]

The account of the miracle preserved at Chartres itself, composed perhaps a century after William of Malmesbury's and transmitted by Vincent Sablon in 1671, uses much the same image, saying that the bishop "raised [the tunic] like a banner."[99] That the relic had, indeed, been singled out for exceptional veneration at Chartres is attested by its installation in a rich reliquary by the goldsmith Tendon in the very years around 1000 when Dudo was writing.[100] It remained there until 1717.

William of Malmesbury's account of the siege of Chartres is interesting in many ways: it links the relic with the Carolingians and before them with Constantinople, offering in the guise of history a clear picture of its legend's genealogy, running back from the emperor of the West to the imperial city of Constantinople; it focuses the city's salvation upon the relic alone; it identifies the relic clearly as Mary's tunic. But it also adds an interesting detail. Rather than stating that Bishop Walter was carrying the tunic in his hands ("in manibus ferens") as Dudo had, he says that it was set up as a battle standard. All western authors are agreed that the garment [p. 73] invoked during the siege of Chartres was a tunic. But the reference to its being carried as a battle standard has a parallel only in Anna Komnene's description of Alexios I carrying the maphorion. The convergence of William of Malmesbury's and Anna Komnene's conceptions—both set down in the first half of the twelfth century—is striking. It suggests that the relic at Chartres not only drew upon a deep and ancient linkage with Constantinople, but that it continued to be conceived in parallel with what—in Constantinople—had become the maphorion. This suggestion receives support from an unexpected piece of evidence. When Tendon's reliquary was opened at Chartres in 1717, what lay within was a white silk veil, wrapped in a long, tirazlike [sic?: tiaralike?] swath of Byzantine silk of tenth- or early eleventh-century manufacture.[101] The latter textile is now displayed behind the altar at Chartres; it tells us that the relic deposed in Tendon's shrine was conceived in around 1000 as being linked to Constantinople. The fabric that it enfolded tells us something else: the "tunic" of the Virgin was a veil. As Aachen's "vestimentum" had emerged in 1238 from what had earlier been a "velum," so the "tunicam" of Chartres emerged from its eleventh-century reliquary as a veil.

The relics at Aachen and Chartres represent no more than a tiny fraction of the Marian garments that were gathering in châsses throughout Europe in the course of the early medieval centuries;[102] the value of these two, very eminent examples lies in the glimpse they afford into the volatile history of the relics' role as they lived in the imaginations of successive centuries of Christians. Both examples were bound in this rich imaginative life with the city of Constantinople, and one feels in their shifting shape and stories how strongly the history of the Marian relics in Constantinople paralleled that in western Europe. During the centuries of the maphorion's ascendancy in Byzantium, the Chartres and Aachen relics, too, assumed aspects of veils.

We argued earlier that the maphorion had been a way of linking the relics resident at Blachernai in Constantinople with a conception of Mary as the "invincible general," the peerless intercessor whose protection guaranteed eternal victory and safeguarded the integrity of the City. More than in any imagery of her own imperial status, this role as the embodiment of eternal victory bound Mary to the emperors as the guarantor of their rule. It was a guarantee that embraced not just the emperor but the head of empire, be that head male or female, single or—through marriage or co-rulership—conjoint.

In western Europe, too, the centuries of the maphorion saw a heightening of Mary's royalty, though by interestingly different means. She was associated with royal persons; but she was also—as she was not in Byzantium—imaged as royal. It was, thus, in exactly the years that Dudo [p. 74] wrote about the siege of Chartres that Bishop Aethelwold's magnificent Benedictional was illuminated at Winchester with an image of Mary receiving a crown and scepter at her Dormition, a motif repeated with focal clarity in the slightly later Sacramentary of Robert of Jumièges;[103] in the early years of the new millennium, Mary was depicted with crown and scepter in the Bury Psalter and the Arenburg and Pembroke Gospels; and in the famous "Winchester Quinity," possibly drawn by the artist of the New Minster Liber Vitae, she is conspicuously crowned.[104] In bearing the scepter, she bears regalia belonging to the king, but not—as Pauline Stafford has shown—accorded to queens.[105] She is in this sense beyond gendered definitions of regal authority, a status perhaps confirmed by the fact that in several of these images she also carries a book and so "has voice." Ottoman Germany, too, in the same years at the turn of the millennium, saw a cluster of imperial representations of Mary, dressed in jeweled garments recalling those of Byzantium.[106]

The figure of Mary is also associated in varied ways with images of rulers. This is most visible Germany under Otto III (991-1002) and his Salian successors. Henry II (1002-1024) and Conrad II (1024-1039). A range of iconographic conventions rooted in Byzantium link these emperors with Mary in a pattern that was itself very probably rooted in Byzantine political rhetoric. Thus, the miniature of Mary crowning Otto III in the Sacramentary of Warmund of Ivrea is readily paralleled with the just slightly earlier formula found on Byzantine coins of John I Tzimiskes (969-976), with Mary crowning him.[107] The use of August 15, the day of Mary's Dormition, as a time for imperial ceremonies,[108] may also be rooted in Byzantium.[109] It was at her Dormition, as Aethelwold's Benedictional had shown, that Mary ascended to queenship of Heaven, and so the emperors celebrated their own power on that day, paralleling it with Mary's assumption to be, in the words of Brunon de Querfurt (ca. 1002), "bona angelorum imperatrix augusta."[110] A magnificent Byzantine ivory of the Dormition was inset in the cover of the Gospel Book of Otto III (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibl., clm. 4453); Otto's successor. Henry II, celebrated August 15 with pomp; and Conrad II scheduled both of his coronations—in Germany in 1024 and in Rome in 1033—on Marian feasts, and had himself depicted with his family before an image of Mary in the apse of Aquileia cathedral in a composition reminiscent of the image of Leo I at Blachernai.[111]

Paralleling these public and Byzantine-inflected images associating the emperors with Mary, however, a second iconographic current of Marian regal imagery appeared. This one is more strictly western, though it assumes especially clear visual form in a depiction of Otto Ill's Byzantine mother, Theophano. This current is focused on women. It is seen clearly in [p. 75] the well-known ivory in the Castel Sforzesco, Milan, showing Otto II and Theophano kneeling beneath an enthroned Christ, who is flanked by intercessors.[112] Otto's protector, the soldier-saint Maurice, stands over Otto to Christ's right. At Christ's left, Mary looms above the kneeling Theophano, who holds her infant son Otto III before body as if he were virtually being born. As St. Maurice guards the emperor in war, Mary guards Theophano, bending her grace to the empress specifically in the female terms of her fertility.

Characteristically, we assign the elaboration of a Marian rhetoric of queenship to the later eleventh and twelfth centuries, based in Gregory VII's famous letters to Mathilda of Tuscany and Adelaide of Hungary. But Dominique Iogna-Prat has traced it back already to the Carolingian coronation ordines.[113] She identifies as an echo of the ordo for Louis the Pious's wife Irmingart the words attributed by Ermold le Noir to Pope Stephen IV during Louis's anointing, with their resonance of the Annunciation:

"Hail, woman loved of God. May life and health be accorded to you for long years."[114] Mary's bond to the theme of fertility is stronger in the surviving ordines of Charles the Bald's wives, Ermentrude and Richildis— crowned only after they were pregnant—who are admonished to imitate Mary's chastity by consecrating their ready fertility to the realm.[115] Where Mary figures in male ordines as a protection and rampart, she figures for queens in terms of grace and fecundity.[116] logna-Prat thus singles out a phenomenon seen more fully in the Ottoman use of Mary: two iconographies of Mary evolve around the royal couple, one for males and one for females. The ivory of Otto II and Theophano illustrates this clearly, and this differentiation continues even in the Ottoman era that produced many images of the ruling couple equally disposed on either side of Christ: the Codex Aureus of Speyer shows Mary receiving the manuscript from the emperor Henry III (1028-56) while laying her hand on the head of his wife, Agnes.[117]

The ivory in Milan is the image most consistently associated by scholars with the frontispiece in the Liber Vitae with which we began. In both, Christ in a mandorla sits flanked by a royal couple for whom saintly protectors intercede, a male saint for the male ruler and the Virgin Mary for his consort. In the Liber Vitae, however, as noted, Mary and the queen are at Christ's right, and the queen receives a veil. The veil is paralleled with the crown conferred on the king by Christ, and it echoes the crown's dual theme of confirmation and investiture. At the same time, it is closely associated with Mary and her grace. Like her placement at Christ's right, the veil gives signal distinction to the queen, Emma. But what is signalled by the veil? To Renate Kroos, it signals the stola secunda worn by the blessed at the Last Judgment.[118] The Last Judgment follows this frontispiece in the [p. 76] manuscript; nonetheless, the visual parallel of crown and veil is too overt to believe that they do not have a shared dimension of worldly meaning. To Dominique logna-Prat, this shared dimension lies in their reference to coronation, the veil signalling the chaste marital fertility invoked by Carolingian ordines and imaged in Mary's protection of Theophano with her tiny son in the Milan ivory.[119] But Pauline Stafford points out that the coronation ordines of English queens are striking precisely for their omission of fertility as a theme.[120] The rite used in Emma's coronation in 1017 in particular emphasizes other duties, calling upon her to "be a peace-weaver, to bring tranquillity in her days, to be an English queen, and to be a consort in royal power."[121] It is likely that the veil, too, spoke the language of English ordines.

Emma was crowned at much the time that Dudo wrote about the defense of Chartres by the Virgin's relic; the Liber Vitae was written before Dudo's death but not before his account of Chartres' protection had reached England. At Wincester, where the Liber Vitae was made, it reached a community distinguished for its veneration of Mary, where Marian relics rested, and where the imagery of Mary's royalty flourished. Winchester's Marian relics are recorded in the Liber Vitae itself: several relics of Mary's garments (yestimenta) and one other sepulcher.[122] A century after the Liber Vitae, the "Byzantine diptych" in the Winchester Psalter would display the sepulchre relic as the sarcophagus in a potent image of Mary's assumption to be the "reine de ciel."[123] But the Winchester manuscripts of the Liber Vitae's own era show that the royalty that Mary reached through her sarcophagus was already particularly Winchester's own.

The royal Mary of Winchester oversees Emma as her fellow patron of New Minster, St. Peter, oversees Cnut. We have seen above that in the art of the medieval West the Virgin's relation to queens was not the same as that to kings; a particular relationship is formulated in the veil that links Emma and Mary. We have seen, too, that the terminology of coronation in England does not readily furnish the relationship of chaste fertility that had linked Mary and the queen in the Carolingian coronation ordines. Emma had been crowned with an admonition to be a consort not in the royal bed but "in royal power."[124] Mary, too, had assumed a heroic dimension in Emma's day: this was the era of the victor-Virgin of Blachernai and Chartres, who had given Blachernai's relic its distinctive definition as a maphorion. The imaginative form of the "garment" housed in western relic collections, too, was volatile. Interred in Tendon's reliquary at Chartres in the form of a veil, Mary's signature garment may well have assumed that form in Winchester, too, when called upon to image the special grace of a queen who was as "gerant" as she was "germinant."

[p. 77]

The image in the Liber Vitae is unique in the history of medieval art. It is central to our quest because it is the unique instance in which a garment of Mary constitutes an instrument of investiture. It arises from a very particular conjunction of circumstances: a particular phase in the persona of Mary, a particular phase in the imaginative history of her relics, a particular place in the geography of Europe with its distinctive patterns of Christian rulership and worship, and a particular woman's queenship. The moment that produced the Liber Vitae was fleeting. Especially for the Virgins relics, the European West was even less hospitable to the concept of a garment abstracted from the somatic story of birth and Passion than Byzantium was, and the great majority of the textile relics in the West got swept into the embrace of the Nativity or the Passion. Fashion, too, was important, for Romanesque images of the Virgin rarely wear a maphorion; they wear a mantle and a headcloth. Where Mary's protection survives as a theme, it is bound largely to Mary's mantle. The veil slowly assumed a different life, as it did also in Byzantium.

This story can be observed most compactly in the city of Siena, where the Virgin's veil became the locus for at least four different significations during the two-generation span between about 1260 and 1320. A first occurs with Coppo di Marcovaldo's majestic Madonna del bordone, painted in 1261 in the wake of Ghibelline Siena's dramatic victory over the Florentines at the battle of Montaperti the year before.[125] In a composition notable for its Byzantine character, echoing the pose of the Hodegetria, Coppo nonetheless retains the Romanesque clothing of the Virgin, her dress cloaked not by a maphorion but by a heavy stole and white veil. In this huge and somber panel whose iconography deliberately conjures the Hodegetria's role as guardian of cities and emperors, the conspicuous white wimple offers itself as the logical nesting point for metaphors of Mary’s clothing. Sienese legend assigns the victory at Montaperti to the protection of the Virgin, who veiled the battlefield in white mist and so bewildered the enemy.[126] This metaphor of protection—a topos in Byzantine legends, too[127]—seems to find its visualization in the white wimple that the Madonna del bordone bequeathed in turn upon the whole generation of Virgins dominated by the models of Coppo and Guido da Siena.

That the metaphor of Mary’s protection was, in fact, linked with her clothing in Siena as in Constantinople is demonstrated by a second significant image. This is Duccio's well-known Madonna of the Franciscans of around 1280-85.[128] Surely produced for private devotion, this tiny panel uses a composition known hitherto only in the Crusader Levant,[129] with Mary throwing open the long fringe of her maphorion to cloak kneeling devotees, in this case three Franciscan friars huddled in the Byzantine devotional posture of proskynesis. Reflecting a fusion of Byzantium's legend [p. 78] of the maphorion and the western understanding of Mary’s robe as a cloak, this short-lived but eloquent iconographic formula exposes with momentary, dramatic clarity the rich processes of mutual accommodation as the visual imaginations of two cultures converged on common myths.

If the protective mantle/maphorion was a factor in the Sienese iconography of Mary's veil, as the Madonna del bordone and Madonna of the Franciscans attest, this metaphor was being joined by a different image of Mary's clothing, now rooted not in the robe but in the white, wimplelike veil itself. This third face of Siena's veil-imagery was developed once again by Duccio, who pioneered it in his early Stoclet Madonna, developed it in his Perugia Madonna, and brought it to its exquisite fulfilment in the triptych in the National Gallery in London.[130] In this case, Mary is shown wearing something very like the maphorion. But it is not this garment that is mobilized iconographically. It is, rather, her fine, white veil, worn under the maphorion, that is brought into play, as her infant child pulls at it. In his seemingly innocent play, he draws it across his own, scantly clad body. With this, Duccio activates a new and extraordinarily provocative realm of imagery, as the delicate clothing of Mary’s head and heart both cloak her child's divinity and shroud his mortality. Powerless to protect, this fabric can only veil the inexpressible mysteries of maternity and mortality.

As the veil had triumphed over the maphorion in Byzantine iconography, so in Siena it was the veil, not the mantle, that was bequeathed by Duccio's generation on the art of its successors. This is illustrated by a fourth Sienese image, whose pan-European dissemination must stand in the limited scope of this article for the broader processes of European image-making. A product of the circle of the Lorenzetti, this image is preserved for us in the great miracle-worker, the Madonna of Cambrai.[131] Copied countless times in the northern Europe, the panel itself seems to have originated in Siena in the 1330s, and shows the Virgin cuddling a twisting child who clutches with one hand at the rich hem of her maphorion as it laps onto her breast. Less explicit than Duccio's veil, the veil of the Virgin of Cambrai stands as a quiet, portentious sign of the vast body of associative significations embraced by the bond of matter—of material stuff—that binds mother and child. Hans Belting has traced the image itself to Byzantium. But in this Sienese form it exercised vast, evocative power over western European art.

Richard Trexler sums up his study on clothing and unclothing holy images with the conclusion that to clothe an image is to feminize it.[132] Veiling, with its visual dialectic of transformation and mystification, occlusion and desire, evokes the same patterns of response that Trexler singled out in his investigation of clothing. Our overview of the story of Mary's veil has shown that this highly visual, speculative and specular response to the veil [p.79] is not the only one possible. Most notably, this is not the way the mythology of the maphorion functioned. Yet it is a response that appeals to the modern imagination. The deeply somatic mystery of Mary—mother of god, daughter of her child, spouse of her son—demands a veil before its suggestive immensity. What is beneath the clothing of Mary? The early medieval answer—that it is we ourselves—cannot satisfy the yearning curiosity to lift the veil that covers Mary's head and heart and see into that deep vessel where the physical facts of god's life were weighed. So it is that the relics of Mary's garments—varied as they may have been in both name and mythic interpretations during the Middle Ages—have become in our modern vocabulary her "veil." In the vast economy of textile exchange, it should perhaps surprise us that Mary's robes, so potent as the armor of just rulers, were but rarely drafted into the role of investiture. It cannot surprise us, however, so long as we veil our own imagination with the potent and feminizing "veil of the Virgin."

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[1] Elizabeth Temple, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts 900-1066, Manuscript Books from the British Isles 2 (London: Harvey Miller, 1976), no. 78. The manuscript is London, British Library, Stowe 944, folio 6r.

[2] Jan Gerchow, "Prayers for King Cnut: The Liturgical Commemoration of a Conqueror," in England in the Eleventh Century, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 2 (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1992), 230-37.

[3] On the books' identification see Gershow, "Prayers," 231.

[4] Pauline Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 175-79, esp. 178.

[5] For late ninth- and tenth-century examples preceding Cnut's portrait see the Byzantine emperors Leo VI (886-912) crowned by the Virgin (Kathleen Corrigan, "The Ivory Scepter of Leo VI: A Statement of Post-Iconoclastic Imperial Ideology," Art Bulletin 60 [1978]: 407-16, and Helen C. Evans and William D. Wixom, eds.. The Glory of Byzantium. Art and Culture of the Middle Byzantine Era, A.D. 843-1261, exhibition catalogue, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 11 March 1997-6 July 1997 [New York, 1997], 201-2, no. 138), Constantine VII (913-959) crowned by Christ (Evans and Wixom, eds., The Glory, 203-4, no. 140), and Romanos and Eudokia crowned by Christ (Ibid., 500; see most recently Anthony Cutler, "A Byzantine Triptych in Medieval Germany and Its Modern Recovery," Gesta 37 [1998]: 9-10 for the date of this plaque and thus of its imperial pair). In the West see Otto II (967-983) and Theophano (972-991) crowned by Christ in their ivory plaque in the Musée de Cluny in Paris (Evans and Wixom, eds., The Glory, 499-501, no. 337), Otto III (991-1002) crowned by Mary in Ivrea, Biblioteca capitolare, MS LXXXVI, fol. 16v (Robert Deshman, "Otto III and the Warmund Sacramentary. A Study in Political Theology," Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 34 [1971]: fig. 1), and Henry II (1002-1024) crowned by Christ in Munich, Staatsbibliothek, cod. lat. 4456, folio 11r (Percy Ernst Schramm, Die deutschen Kaiser und Konige in Bilder ihrer Zeit 751-1190, 2nd ed., ed. Florentine Miitherich [Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1983], no. 124).

[6] On the Blachernai complex see Raymond Janin, La Geographic ecclesiastique de l'empire byzantin, I: Le Siege de Constantinople et le patriachat oecumenique, 3: Les Eglises et les monasteres (Paris: Centre national des recherches scientifique, 1969), 161-70.

[7] On the siege of 626 see most recently J. Howard-Johnston, "The Siege of Constantinople in 626," in Constantinople and Its Hinterland, ed. Cyril Mango and Gilbert Dagron (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995), 131-42, and Cyril Mango's commentary in The Chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor, trans. and with commentary by Cyril Mango and Roger Scott (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 477.

[8] On the Akathistos and its relation to the events of 626, see Egon Wellesz, "The 'Akathistos' : A Study in Byzantine Hymnography," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 9-10 (1956): 143-76; Paul Speck, Zufalliges zum Bellum avaricum des Georgios Pisides, Miscellanea Byzantina Monacensia 24 (Munich: Institut für Byzantinistik, neugriechische Philologie und byzantinische Kunstgeschichte der Universitat, 1980), 58-59; and Nancy Patterson Sevcenko, "Icons in the Liturgy," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 45 (1991): 49 n30.

[9] A good summary of this event's complex historiography is given in Cyril Mango, The Homilies of Photios, Patriarch of Constantinople. English Translation, Introduction and Commentary, Dumbarton Oaks Studies 3 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), 74-82.

[10] 10. See Alexander P. Kazhdan, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, 3 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 2: 1353, s.v "Metatorion."

[11] They visited Blachernai on Good Friday; on the Virgin's feasts of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple (Feb. 2), the Dormition (Aug. 15), and her Synax (Dec. 26); on July 2 and on the anniversary of the dedication of the church on August 31; on the eve of the Feast of Orthodoxy (first Sunday in Lent); on the anniversaries of the victory over the Arabs in 718 (June 20), the victory over the Avars in 626 (Aug. 7), and the earthquake of 740 (Oct 26).

[12] Constantini Porphyrogeniti, "De Cerimoniis Aulae Byzantinae, "in Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Graeca [henceforth PC], ed.. J.-P. Migne, 161 vols. in 166 (Paris: Gamier Fratres, 1857-1887), 112: col. 1021A: ElQ'o'uTOX; 6eepxovTca 5ia tod npoc, avamKi\v 5ei;io'u (xepom; tod priiiaioi; Kai to-u oKe'uo(()'»AaKio'u, Kai eiaep^ovTai eic, tov vapOT)Ka Tr\c, cc/iac oopov . . . [Then the emperors leave the bema to the east through the right side of the bema and the skevophylakion, and they enter the narthex of the Soros . . .]. It is not easy to see the point at which the emperors actually acknowledge the Virgin's garment. With Venance Grumel,"Sur L’Episkepsis des Blachernes," Echos d'Orient 33 (1930): 334, I suspect that this occurred at the "Episkepsis" cited at col. 1021 B: Eira EKpaUo-uci to to'utcov aayla, Kai ^.a[ipavei 6 TcpcoTOi; paai^etic iiapa tod TcpantOCTiTOU to a7t6 TacovoTiTEprav puiiSlov, Kai (|)iA.OKa^ei nip-ic, Tr|c ayiac TpaJie^Tic, Kai e^ep/ovTai to'u peuaTOc, Kai anepxovTai wco 5e!;iac, eic ttiv ETtiaKeviv, Kai anTOUoiv KaKeiae Kripo-uc Kai TtpOCTK'uvo'ucn.v [Then, the emperors get out of their sagia, and the senior emperor takes the riphidion made of peacock feathers from the praepositos, and he goes around the altar, and they go out of the bema, and go out on the right into the Episkepsis, and light candles there and venerate]. This seems to refer not to an icon, as usually maintained, but rather—as Reiskius proposed in his translation given in Ibid., col. 1022 B—to the site of the relic: . . . et abeunt a dextra parte ad episkepsin [seu visitationem atque adorationem sacrarum B.Virginis reliquiarum], et ibi quoque accendunt cereos et [reliquias] adorant. See, however, Lennart Ryden, "The Vision of the Virgin at Blachernae and the Feast of the Pokrov," Analecta Bollandiana 94 (1976): 70, who cites a similar use of the word in reference to an icon at the Myrelaion church.

[13] On the vigil and procession see most recently Sevcenko, "Icons in the Liturgy," 50-54. Constantine's predecessor by a century, the Iconoclast emperor Theophilos (829-842), is reported by both Michael Glykas and Kedrenos to have gone each week to venerate at Blachernai, but while his visit is likely to have been made on Fridays, we don't know if it bore any relation to the vigil. See Michael Glykas, "Annales, IV," in PG, 158: col. 537 B: outoc; Ka©'eKaorr|v epSouaSa 5ia Tf\c, ayopac, e(|)i7i7t0(; ei<; tov ev B^a^epvaic vaov cnciip^eTO' ei yap Kai Tijrqv rail; ayiaic, eiKooiv odk eve|iev, to) Scorripi Kai awri tr\ Oeo|ir|TOpi tiiotiv eTT]pei, (be e^eyev [He went each week on horseback through the agora to the church of Blachernai; if he did not have honor for the holy icons, he nonetheless did have faith in the Savior and the Mother of God].

[14] For the Chalkoprateia church, see Janin, La Geographie, 241—53.

[15] See in particular the vision of St. Andrew the Fool in Christ, quoted in translation by Ryden, "The Vision," 66, and the visionary dream of St. Irene of Chysobalanton, in Jan Olaf Rosenqvist, The Life of St. Irene Abbess of Chrysohalanton (Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1986), 58-59.

[16] Psellos's text, composed in 1075, is given in translation and the western European descriptions of the miracle are cited in Venance Grumel, "Le 'Miracle habituel' de Notre-Dame des Blachernes," Echos d'Orient 24 (1931): 129-46.

[17] Ibid., 141.

[18] Note Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopouloss extremely complicated narrative of Constantinople's Marian relics, analyzed by Michel Van Esbroeck, "Le Culte de laVierge de Jerusalem a Constantinople aux 6e—7e siecles," Revue des etudes byzantines 46 (1988): 185-86, quoting from Nicephori Callisti Xanthopouli, "Historia Ecclesiastica," in PC, 146: col. 1061 A-B and 147: cols. 41 D, 44 B-45 B. Nikephoros has Pulcheria place at Blachernai with her own hands two caskets received from Jerusalem, one with the shroud (rd evT6(|)ia OTtapyava) and one with what must be the two nbes (. . . ueTd tcov iepcov EKeivrav du,(|)ia)v . . .), and then adds that "the venerable garment was placed there not long afterward under Leo ('H yap Ti.u.ia ea0r|c eiti ^eovTOc od TtoUco •uoTEpov eKOlu.ii,eTO.)"The genuine confusion over the matter is amusingly reflected in the illuminations for 15 August in three Metaphrastian Menologia of the eleventh century (Moscow, Historical Museum, gr. 382, Athos, Dionysiou 50, and Paris, Bibliotheque nationale, gr. 1528), which conflate elements of Blachernai and Chalkoprateia, and of the ceremonies of July 2 and August 15: Sirarpie Der Nersessian, "The Illustrations of the Metaphrastian Menologium," in Late Classical and Mediaeval Studies in Honor of Albert Mathias Friend, Jr., ed. George Forsyth and Kurt Weitzmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), 230—31. Pilgrim accounts are no more consistent.The early twelfth-century English Pilgrim, for instance, reports that "Ad sanctam Mariam Blachernes . . . est posita ar-gentea archa, et iacet intus cinctura sanctae Dei genitricis," while William of Tyre says nothing about the Soros. See Krijne N. Ciggaar, "Une description de Constantinople traduite par un pelerin anglais," Revue des etudes byzan-tines 34 (1976): 260; E.M. Langille, "La Constantinople de GuiUaume de Tyre," Byzantion 63 (1993): 195.

[19] "Narratio in DepositionemVestis S. Mariae = Eii; icoiTdQeoiv ttjc Ti(nc(c eoOfiTOC Trie ieouTiTOpol; ev B^a^epvaic," in Francois Combefis, Historia haeresis monotheletarum sanctaeque in earn sextae synodi actorum vindiciae . . . (Paris.-Antonii Bertier, 1648), 751-88.

[20] Ibid., 782 A: r\v ov |i6vov (ruTqv 7te7ciore'uicc(u£v rm())iea0ai tt|v tod OeoD \6yov u.T|Tepa ' dU' ev t) Kai awov TtavTCoc en vr|7iio'u ovth tov Oeov Xoyov, e6s.£,aw te, Kai eya^ovj^oev.

[21] Andrew of Crete, "EyK:6u.iov eic Tr|v KdTciQeoiv Tfjc n|iiac ^(nvric Tr|c •ultepayial; oeaitoivrii; rmoov OeoTOKou," in Combefis, Historia, 789-804. Accordingly, the sermon by Patriarch Germanos (730-33) honoring a church of the Virgin and its milk-stained relic of the ^(nvT| is often assigned to Blachernai: S. Gerrmni Patriarchae Constantinopolitanae, "Oratio I in Encaenia venerandae aedis sanctissimae Dominae nostrae Dei Genitricis, inque sanctas fascias Domini nostri Jesu Christi," in PG, 98 (1865) : 371-84. This or another i,d)VTl was venerated along with the saddling clothes of Christ from the early tenth century onward at the Chalkopraeia church; another !,Wf} was brought to Chalkoprateia in 942. See Nancy Patterson Sevcenko, "The Limburg Staurothek and Its Relics," in iYMIAMA lyrrjv tivrilir] Trie; QdOKOtpivac, Mnovpa (Athens: Benaki Museum, 1994), 291.

[22] The Euthymiac History is preserved as an interpolation into John of Damascus's second sermon on the Dormition and in the eighth-century Sinai ms gr. 491: see Antoine Wenger, A.A., L'Assomption de la T.S. Vierge dans la tradition byzantine du VI^e au X^e siecle. Etudes et documents, Archives de l'orient chretien 5 (Paris: Institut français d'études byzantines, 1955), 136-40. As seen in S. Joannis Damasceni, "Homilia II in Dormitionem B.V. Mariae," in PC, 96: cols. 721—54, this speaks indeed of the Virgin's burial shroud (col. 749 B: Km to (lev ocou.a auTric to 7iavu[iVT|Tov ou8au.c0(;evpeiv ii8'uvT]aav, u.6va 8e ccuiric th evTCt(()ia Kei(ieva eiipovTec [And her all-glorious body could not be found at all; only the empty winding cloths could be found]), but it is the dresses that are cited in the reliquary sent by Patriarch Juvenal (col. 752 A: Kai Tawa oi. paai^eti; aKOUoavTec, r|Tr|aav auTOv tov ApxieTtioKOTtov 'lo-ueva^lov Tr|v ayiav eKeivriv aopov [leTCt tcov ev aiJTfj Tr|(; avSo^o-u Kai Tiavayiac teoTOKOu Maptac ijiaTKov pepo-uU(o|ievTiv ao(j)a^.ttx; auTolc aitooTa^fivai.. . . [And hearing these things the emperors asked the Patriarch Juvenal to send them that holy casket carefully sealed up with the dresses of the glorious and all-holy Theotokos Mary inside . . .).

[23] Martin Jugie, La Mart et L’assomption de la sainte Vierge. Etude historico-doctri-nale, Studi e testi 114 (Citta del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1944), 695-96, where the text is quoted. The sermon of Euthymios is given in the Patrologia orientalia 17: 484—85, 511.

[24] Ibid., 688-707.

[25] Wenger, L'Assomption, 111-39.

[26] Van Esbroeck, "Le Culte," 181-90. The Arabic text, cited on page 187, is not fully identified.

[27] In his Fourth Homily on the Russian siege in Mango, Homilies (as in note 9 above), 95-110, Photios does not use "maphorion" but his term iiepl.po^,T| means something "thrown around," like a stole: see note 37 below. The word maphorion appears in the tenth-century chronicle known under the name of its scribe, Leo Grammatikos (Immanuelis Bekkari, ed., Leonis Grammatici Chronographia, Corpus Scriptorum Histo-riae Byzantinae 26 [Bonn:Weber, 1842], 241,11. 4-12) and its various plagiarisms describing the event of 860; in the chronicle of Theophanes Continuatus describing Romanos I's departure to parley with Tsar Symeon of Bulgaria in 926 (Immanuelis Bekkeri, ed., Theophanes Continuatus, loannes Cameniata, Symeon Magister, Georgius Monachus, Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae 43 [Bonn:Weber, 1838], 406,1. 19-407,1. 7); in a reference to the event of 860 in one of the diatribes of John Oxites against Alexios I Komnenos composed around 1093 (Paul Gautier, "Diatribes de Jean 1'Oxite centre Alexis ler Comnene," Revue des etudes byzan-tines 28 [1970]: 38-39, U. 17-27); and in a description of Alexios I Komnenos's battle against the Cumans in 1089 in the Alexiad of Anna Komnene (Bernard Leib, ed.,Anne Comnene Alexiade, 3 vols. [Paris: Societe d'edition 'Les belles lettres', 1933], 2: 98).

[28] On Pulcheria see recently Vasiliki Limberis, Divine Heiress. The Virgin Mary and the Creation of the Christian Constantinople (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), and Nicholas P. Constas, "Weaving the Body of God: Proclus of Constantinople, the Theotokos, and the Loom of the Flesh," Journal of Early Christian Studies 3,2 (1995): 169-94.

[29] See in particular Constas, "Weaving," 176-94.

[30] Ibid., 183, 173.

[31] Ibid., 189.

[32] Antoine Wenger, A.A., "Les Homelies inedites de Cosmas Vestitor sur la Dormition," Revue des etudes byzantines 11 (1953): 295.

[33] See in particular Averil Cameron,"TheTheotokos in Sixth-Century Constantinople," Jonrnal of Theological Studies NS 29 (1978): 79-108; Idem,"Images of Authority: Elites and Icons in Late Sixth-Century Byzantium," Past and Present 84 (1979): 3-35; and Idem, "The Virgin's Robe: An Episode in the History of Early Seventh-Century Constantinople," Byzantion 49 (1979): 42-56. These are reprinted in Averil Cameron, Continuity and Change in Sixth-Century Byzantium (Aldershot: Variorum, 1981), articles XIII, XVI, and XVII.

[34] Cameron, "The Theotokos," 103-4 and passim.

[35] Diliana Nikolova Angelova, "The Ivories of Ariadne and the Construction of the Image of the Empress and the Virgin Mary in Late Antiquity," M.A. thesis, Southern Methodist University, 1998.

[36] Agostino Pertusi, Ciorgio di Pisidia. Poemi, I: Panegyrici epici, Studia patris-tica et byzantina 7 (Ettal: Buch-Kunstverlag, 1959), 176: t(bv lyW/pa^w/ tii; ei Oe^ei to 'dy, "a^ric, •cponotw 5eii;ai, tt)v TeKODoav doTtopMi; |l6VT|V 7IpOTC(!;Ol KOl Ypa(|)0l TTTV elKOVCt' aei yap ol8e tt)v (|)'uctiv vikqv u.ovt], toko) to Tipcorov Kai Ha^T) to Sevcepov:

[37] Cyril Mango, The Homilies (as in note 9 above), 102-3; S. Aristarches, Tov ev afioic, rcatpoc; quov <I>aniov. . . 16yoi Kai oiiiUdi oysotjkovtci Tpe'll;, vols. (Constantinople, 1990), 2: 41-42: 'He, koi ttiv 7teplpo^.Tl eii; avaaToXTi (lev tcov TtoXiopKowrcov, (ji'u^.aKfiv 5e tmv 7io^.iopKou(xev(av aw e"oi iiaoa r\ 716^.11; eni(|)ep6nevoi rac eKouaicd; eKovaiai,6(ieQa, tt)v ^.iTaveiav eitoio'u"e0a, e(j>' oil; apard) (|)i^.av0pco7ug, |iT)TpiKr|c 7tappncn.aoa|ievT|c ev'te'u^ecx;, Kal to Qeiov e7texAi©r|, Kai 6 0'u|i6(; diteoTpa(|)T|, Kai, 'Hker\oe Kupioi; ttiv KX,T|povouiav avTOD. "ovtox; (iTiTpoc oeod Tiepipo^ ti itavoeitTOi; a'UTT| oto^-ii! a'UTr| itepieKUKOu Ta teoct, Kal ra tcov ico^e|ii(av appTiTQ) ^.oycp e5eiKVUTO vcora ' ti noKiq Ta'UTT|v TiepiepaUeTO, Kal to '/_apaKm[ia tcov ito^euicov ax; £k (mvOriu.aTOi; 5ie^.ueTO ' a-UTri Ta'u'rr]v eotom^eto, xal •u\c, sXni&oi, a-UTOv, ey t\(, sikoxouvto, £y'u|ivo'uto to Tto^euiov. "Ana Yap to Tel^oi; ti TrapOeviKTi oto^t) Tts.piE'kr^uQs., kqi Trie TtoA.iopKtac, oi pappapol a7teiTC6vTe(; dveaKeuaaavTO, Kal ir\c, 7ipoa8oKfl)|J,evr|<; aA.6oe(oc eX-uTpcoOrmev, Kai tt)<; a5oKTiTou aa)TT|pi.a<; Tii;i(»|ie0a.

[38] Cyril Mango, The Homilies, 110; Aristarches, Tov ev Ctfioii;, 2: 56: 'husk; Tf)v itp6i; oe TiioTiv Kal tov TioOov dSioTaKTdx; (|)t)^a^o|iev, aver) ttiv otiv no^iv, clx; ol5a<;, 6x, po-uX^i, itepiocooov OTtXa ae Kal tei^o(; Kai Otipeoi); Kai oTpaTT]y6v auTov 7ipopaX^.6|ie©a, a-UTri to-u 'kaov oov DTcepjiaOTaov.

[39] The locus dassicus for the imagery of the Virgin of Blachernai is the fundamental study of Christa Belting-Ihm, "Sub Mains Tutula." Untersuchungen zw Vorgeschichte der Schutzmantel Madonna (Heidelberg: Karl Winter-Uni-versitatsverlag, 1976). With extensive bibliography see also John Cotsonis, "The Virgin with the 'Tongues of Fire' on Byzantine Lead Seals," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 48 (1994): 221-27 discussing an image perhaps associated with the icon of the "usual miracle," and Annemarie Weyl Carr, "Court Culture and Cult Icons in Middle Byzantine Constantinople," in Byzantine Court Culture from 829 to 1204, ed. Henry Maguire (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1997), 92.

[40] Ibid., 92, note 78; see also the twelfth-century icon on Mount Sinai depicting miracle-working icons in Constantinople, that shows the Blacher-nitissa (at far left) as holding a standing child who seems to run along the lower frame of the image: Anthony Cutler and Jean-Michel Spieser, Byzance medievale, 700-1204 (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), pl. 310.

[41] Henry Maguire, "The Heavenly Court," in Byzantine Court Culture from 829 to 1204, ed. Henry Maguire (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1997), 95-99 and passim.

[42] Mary's status above the angels is expressed with particular intensity by the late tenth-century John Geometres in a passage translated by Antoine Wenger, A.A., "Foi et piete mariales a Byzance," in Maria. Etudes sur la sainte Vierge, ed. Hubert du Manoir, S.J. (Paris: Beauchesne, 1958), 5: 942: "... elle est plus elevee que les thrones, plus redoutable que les cherubins; remplie d'une sagesse plus grande que les seraphins; ou mieux, elle est reveree des thrones, elle est redoutable aux cherubins, incomprehensible aux seraphins; elle est la commune reine de 1'universe, detenant un regne indestructible, au deuxieme rang apres la royale Trinite, et remplie a satiete du toute la Trinite . . .

[43] Corrigan, "The Ivory Scepter" (as in note 5 above). On the objects function see Anthony Cutler, The Hand of the Master. Craftsmanship, Ivory and Society in Byzantium (9th-llth Centuries) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 200-1.

[44] Philip Grierson, Catalogue of the Byzantine Coins in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection and in the Whittemore Collection, 3: Leo III to Nicephorus III, 717-1081, 2: Basil I to Nicephorus III (867-10S1) (Washington, DC.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1973), 589, pl. XLII, 19.1-19.4.

[45] Ibid., 749, pl. LXII, la.l-l.d.

[46] See Sevcenko, "Icons in the Liturgy" (as in note 8 above), 51 n. 41; the Life of St.Thomais of Lesbos in Alice-Mary Talbot, ed., Holy Women of Byzantium. Ten Saints' Lives in English Translation (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1996), 297-322, esp. 309; and Rosenqvist, The Life of St. Irene (as in note 15 above), 58-59.

[47] Described inTheophanes Continuatus, as cited in note 27 above (... TO aylov ow Kipmnov 5iavoi^avTe<; ev co to oetitov tti(; ayioii; oeotokou TE©T|aa'upiOTO tt)HO(j)6piov . . .), and repeated in John Skylitzes: loannes Thurn, ed., loannis Scylitzae Synopsis Historiarum, Corpus Fontium Histo-riae Byzantinae 5 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1973), 219, 11. 31-35; translated in Hans Thurn, trans., Byzanz wieder ein Weltreich, Byzantinische Geschichtschreiber 15 (Graz:Verlag Styria, 1983), 257: 6 6e paoi^eDi; ev to) vaco yevouevol; t(bv BKa.'/e.pvwv a|ia to) itaTpiap^n, kcu ev Tfi ayta oopco eloe^lov Kal ticeTnpiac; coocti; 6710601)1; to) tea), to tt)(i0(()6piov Tf\i., OeoTOKou ^ctpov ei^ei -cov vaov, 6n\oic, da(|)a^eai (()pa^a^evo<; (Der Kaiser begab sich mit Patriarchen Nikolaos in die Blachernenkirche, trat in die Kapelle des heiligen Reliquienschreins ein und sang Bittgesange an Gott. Mit dem Omophorion der Gottesmutter verliess er sicher gewaffnet die Kirche).

[48] The vision at Blachernai is given in English translation in Ryden,"The Vision" (as in note 12 above), 66, and extensively analyzed on 66-73.

[49] Sevcenko, "The Limburg Staurothek" (as in note 21 above), 291.

[50] Gautier, "Diatribes" (as in note 27 above), 38-39,11. 17-27: ... TO ©ElOV ttii; QeoLiTiTOpOl; pfiKO<; (uo«()6piov owTiQef; tovto KCtA^lv) . . . (the sacred scrap of God's Mother, commonly called the maphorion).

[51] Leib, ed., Anne Comnene (as in note 27 above), 3: 87,11. 15-23; in E. R.A. Sewter, trans., The Alexiad of Anna Comnena (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), 395.

[52] Leib, ed., Anne Comnene, 2: 98,11. 23-29; translated in Sewter, The Alexiad, 225: 6 aevTOi pdoT.^e'uc; 7tpo|3ep^.r|TO ttii; oiKeini; 5-uva|ie<B(; Kal ^i(|)T|<j)6poi; eioTT|Kei, Tr| erepq 8e tcov ^eipttiv Tf|<; tod aoyou |iT|Tp6<; to (b|i6(|)opov OTi[ic(iav wce^mv 'la'TOtTO (The emperor, however, still stood with sword in hand beyond his own front line. In the other hand he grasped like a standard the Cape of the Mother of the Word).

[53] In 971 John I Tzimiskes went with the standard of the Cross to Blachernai before departing for war, but we do not know what he did there and have no intimation that he adopted the relic as a battle standard. See Michael McCormick, Eternal Victor. Triumphal Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium, and the Early Medieval West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 249, citing Leo Diakonos. It is hard to guess how characteristic of Byzantine habit Alexios's use of the maphorion was.We know about the use of icons in the army and about battle standards, often painted with holy images, but not about textile relics in this role. On the use of banners and icons in the Byzantine army, see George T. Dennis, "Religious Services in the Byzantine Army," in EYAOFHMA. Studies in Honor of Robert Toft, S.J., Studio Anselmiana 110, ed. E. Carr, S. Parenti, A.A. Thiermeyer, E. Volkovska (Rome, 1993), 109-13;John F. Haldon, Constantine Porphyrogenitus. Three Military Treatises on Imperial Military Expeditions (Vienna, 1990), 270-71.

[54] Leib, Anne Comnene, 2:110; Sewter, The Alexiad, 227.

[55] Alice Christ, "Calendar and Liturgy in the Icon of the Pokrov," Byzanti-norussica 1 (1995): 126-37; Ryden, "The Vision" (as in note 12 above), 74-82; Belting-Ihm, "Sub Matris Tutula" (as in note 39 above), 58-61.

[56] Belting-Ihm, "Sub Matris Tutula," 59.

[57] Certainly it is a veil-like garment that figures centrally in the icon eventually formulated for the Pokrov feast, illustrating the vision of Andrew the Fool in Christ, with Mary's veil spread like an arc over crowds in her Soros. See Ryden, 74-82. See the fifteenth-century icon of the "Suzdal" version of the Pokrov with Mary holding the veil in Engelina Smirnova, Moscow Icons 14th-l 7th Century (Oxford: Phaidon, 1989), pl. 416; KurtWeitzmann, Gaiane Alibegasvili, Aneli Volskaja, Manolis Chatzidakis, Gordana Babic, Mihail Alpatov, Teodora Voinescu, The Icon (New York: Knopf, 1982), 297-98 gives an example of the "Novgorod" version of the Pokrov in which angels hold the veil.

[58] Ibid., 275 for the famous fifteenth-century icon of the battle of the Novgorodians with the Suzdalians (Novgorod, Museum of Architecture and Ancient Monuments) that shows the image being carried in war. The icon itself is now damaged on the front: see Engelina Smirnova, "Some Contributions to the Iconography of the Blachernitissa (The Study of Two Russian Icons of the 12th-13th Centuries)," Bvl,avcivri MdKeSovia, forthcoming. It is closely copied in the thirteenth-century icon of Our Lady of the Sign in the Korin Collection: Konrad Onasch and Annemarie Schnieper, Icons. The Fascination and the Reality, trans. Daniel G. Conklin (New York: Riverside Book Company, Inc., 1995), pl. p. 158. I am very much indebted to Dr. Smirnova for her generosity in showing me a typescript of her article—and in so many other contexts.

[59] Carr, "Court Culture" (as in note 39 above), 94-99.The Hodegetria's symbolic role as the guardian of the city is summed up well in the exasperated comment of Eustathios, Bishop ofThessaloniki, that the Constantinopoli-tans shrug off their military weakness by saying that "the Hodegetria, the protectress of our city, will be enough, without anyone else, to secure our welfare": J.R. Melville Jones, trans., Eustathios ofThessalonike: The Capture of Thessalonike, Byzantina Australiensia 8 (Canberra: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, 1988), 42-43,11. 11-12.

[60] George P. Majeska, Russian Travelers to Constantinople in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, Dumbarton Oaks Studies 19 (Washington, DC.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1984), 44, where Stephen of Novgorod speaks of the robe (riza), belt (poias) and cap (skufiia) of Mary at Blachernai (Lacherniu).

[61] See note 18 above.

[62] Janin, La Geographie (as in note 6 above), 170.

[63] This is true not only of the Historia Ecclesiastica cited above, but of the sermon for the Feast of the Akathistos formerly attributed to George of Pi-sidia and now attributed to Nikephoros: Georgii Pisidii, "In Hymnum Acathistum," PG 92: cols. 1348-52, esp. 1350 D where the acheiropoietas icon of Christ and the eolr|<; are cited, and 1352 D where the True Cross and the icon of the Hodegetria are named.

[64] See note 27 above.

[65] 65. Belting-Ihm, "Sub Mains Tutula" (as in note 39 above), 45, notes that a relic of the veil is recorded in San Marco in Venice after 1204; if this was, indeed, from Blachernai, it is notable both that Venice succeeded in acquiring it—as she had not managed to do with the Hodegetria—and that it drifted into indifference thereafter.

[66] Evans andWixom, eds., The Glory (as in note 5 above), 372-73, no. 244, and with earlier bibliography, Annemarie Weyl Carr,"The Presentation of an Icon on Sinai," Ae/iriov Trji; xpiOTiccviKrjc; dpyciio^oyiKrji; eTdlpeicii; ser. 4, 17 (1993-94): 239-48.

[67] Ibid., 242.

[68] Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence. A History of the Image Before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 291.

[69] Efthalia C. Constantinides, The Wall Paintings of the Panagia Olympiotissa at Elasson in Northern Thessaly, 2 vols. (Athens: Canadian Archaeological Institute at Athens, 1992), 1:142-44, and 169 where she links this imagery with the church at Blachernai.

[70] On its future as the Mother of God of Kykkos Monastery in Cyprus, see Olga Gratziou, "MeTC(nop(|)(i)o'eic, (iiac Qauy.(novpyr\i, eiicovac. £T||ieia)CTei<; cttk; ovi/inec, itapaUayei; Trie navayiac tod kukko-u," Ae^Tiov Trji; %pia"riciviKrj<; apxaio^o'yiKrjc; eraipeica;, ser. 4, 17 (1933-94): 317-29 with English summary on 330; George A. Soteriou, "H K-UKKidmoaa," Necc Earia (Christmas issue 1939): 3-6. On its future in Italy see Paola Santa Maria Mannino, "Vergine 'Kykkotissa' in due icone Laziali del Duecento," in Roma Anno 1300, Atti del Congresso inter-nazionale di storia dell'arte medievale, Roma, 19-24 Maggio, 1980 (Rome: L'Erma di Bretschneider, 1983), 487-92.

[71] This type is postulated by Belting, Likeness and Presence, 438, on the basis of its appropriation in Italy for the type later famous as the Madonna of Cambrai. It is significant because it draws even more closely together the Pelagonitissa type with the type seen in the Sinai icon of the Virgin and Prophets, eventually famous as the Kykkotissa.

[72] Evans andWixom, eds.. The Glory (as in note 5 above), 127-28, no. 75 and A. Papageorghiou, Icons of Cyprus (Nicosia: Holy Archbishopric of Cyprus, 1992), pis. 15 a and b; Doula Mouriki, "Icons from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century," in Sinai. Treasures of the Monastery of Saint Catherine, ed. Konstantinos A. Manafes (Athens: Ekdotike Athenon, 1990), 118-19, pl. 65.

[73] KdTa^oyoc;: 'EnQecn] yia w eicaw xpovia ct?$ XpiaTiaviKrji; 'Apxaio^OYiKrji; ETaipeion;, exhibition catalogue, Byzantine and Christian Museum, Athens, 6 October 1984-30 June 1985 (Athens, 1985), 22-23, no. 9 (entry by Manolis Chatzidakis).

[74] Annemarie Weyl Carr, "Byzantines and Italians on Cyprus: Images from Art," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 49 (1995): 335-36.

[75] Gordana Babic, "Le Maphorion de laVierge et la Psaume 44 (45) sur les images du XIVe siecle," in E'u<))p6owov C((|)iepco|ia otov Mav6^.T| XaT^T|5aKT(, ed. Myrtile Acheimastou-Potamianou, 2 vols. (Athens, 1991), 1: 57-64.

[76] Weitzmann et al.. The Icon (as in note 57 above), 180 (Virgin and Child, Monastery of Decani, altar screen of the Katholikon, ca. 1350).

[77] Chrysanthe Baltogianne, ElKOveg. MrJrrip Qeov ppeif)OKpawv(Ta 0'trjv evoapKOxn] Kai to JiaQcx, (Athens: ADAM, 1994), 107 and passim.

[78] Gordana Babic,"Sur 1'Icone de Poganovo et laVasilissa Helene," in Thessa-lonique et les pays balkaniques et les courants spirituels au XIVe siecle. Receuil des rapports du IVe colloque serbo-grec (Belgrade 1985), Academic Serbe des sciences et des arts. Institute des etudes balkaniques, Editions speciales 31 (Belgrade: GRO Kultura, 1987), 57-65.

[79] For Paphos and Siena, see Carr, "Byzantines and Italians," 356; for Athos, see R.M. Dawkins, The Monks of Mount Athos (London: George Alien and Unwin, Ltd., 1936), 281-83.

[80] John Wortley, "Hagia Skepe and Pokrov Bogoroditsi," Analecta Bollandiana 89 (1971): 149.

[81] Richard A. Clogg, A Concise History of Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 122, fig. 39, showing George Gounaropoulos's "nikt), KemEpw, H navccyia |ia^i tod."

[82] The theme deserves exploration on the level of folk devotion: see the fascinating nineteenth-century Finnish icon with Mary's upper body rising from a "skirt" of walls and bearing a Child who grasps her white veil: Mikhail Kraslin, "Ikonograficheskii arkhetip i narodnoe pochitanie chu-dotbori'ch obrazov = The Iconographic Archetype and Folk Worship of Miracle-Working Icons," in Chudotvoriia Ikona v Vizantii i drevnei Rusi, ed. A.M. Lidov (Moscow: Martis, 1996), fig. 1.

[83] B. G. Niebuhr, ed., loannes Zonaras, 3 vols., Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae 46 (Bonn:Weber, 1897), 3: 751, translated inJoannes Zonaras, Militdrs und Hoflinge Ringen um das Kaisertum. Byzantinische Geschichte von 969 bis 1118, trans. E.Trapp (Graz:Verlag Styria, 1986), 173.

[84] Valerie Nunn, "The Encheirion as Adjunct to the Icon in the Middle Byzantine Period," Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 5 (1986): 73-102.

[85] On the relics collected at Aachen see Heinrich Schiffers, Karls des Grossen ReUquienschatz und die Anfange der Aachenfahrt (Aachen: J.Volk, 1951).

[86] "Schleier" is the favored noun of Stephan Beissel, S. J., Ceschichte der Verehrung Marias in Deutschland wdhrend des Mittelalters (Freiburg im Breis-gau: Herdersche Verlagshandlung, 1909), of Walter Potzl, "Marianischen Brauchtum an Wallfahrtsorten," in Handbuch der Marienkunde, ed.Wolfgang Beinert and Heinrich Petri (Regensburg: F. Pustet, 1982), 883-926, and of Schiffers himself.

[87] Schiffers, Karls des Grossen," pl. III.

[88] As argued with piercing scorn by Professor Dr. H, Disselnkotter, Aachens grosse Heilingtumer und geschichtliche Beglaubung (Bonn: Universitats-buch-druckerei undVerlag, 1909), 57 and passim.

[89] SchifFers, Karls Des Crossen, 57. Beldng-Ihm, "Sub Matris Tutula" (as in note 39 above), 45, endorses SchifFers' conclusions.

[90] SchifFers, Karls des Grossen, 13.

[91] Ibid., 32.

[92] Ibid., 55, quotes the inventory of 1238, which lists "Das Hemd der seligen Jungfrau, rnit dem sie bekleidet gewesen, als sie Christus gebar."

[93] Documents on the history ofthe relic at Chartres are compiled and translated in Robert Branner, Chartres Cathedral, Norton Critical Studies in Art History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), 107-14.

[94] This genealogy is spelled out with particular clarity by J.C.Jennings, "The Origins of the 'Elements Series' of the Miracles of the Virgin," Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies 6 (1968): 87-90. I am indebted to Rachel Fulton for showing me this helpful article.

[95] Belting-Ihm, "Sub Matris Tutula," 41.

[96] Jennings, "The Origins," 90.

[97] Gabriela Signori, Maria zwischen Kathedrale, Kloster und Welt (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1995), 179.

[98] J.A. Giles, D. C. L., William of Malmesbury's Chronicle of the Kings of England (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1847), 125. The Latin, cited by Signori, Maria, 180 n35, reads: Namque cives, nec armis nec muris confisi, Beate Marie auxillium implorant camisiamque gloriosissime Virginis quam, a Constan-tinopoli sibi allatum, unus ex Karolis ibi posuerat, super propugnacula in modum vexilli ventis exponunt.

[99] Branner, Chartres Cathedral, 112.The account Forms part of a history of the relic that draws in its earlier portions on the story of the patricians Kandi-dos and Galbios, recounted by Theodore Synkellos.

[100] Andre Chédeville, Histoire de Chartres et du pays chartrain (Toulouse: Editions Privat, 1983), 61.

[101] Ibid., 61. Chedeville calls the Fabric eighth- or ninth-century; this is too early For its tiraz-like design, and it seems more nearly contemporary with the relic's installation in Tendon's reliquary.

[102] For inventories of these relics, see Beissel, Geschichte (as in note 86 above), 293-94, and Charles Rohault de Fleury, La sainte Vierge; études archéologiques et iconographiques, 2 vols. (Paris: Poussielgne, 1878), 1: 290-93. Beissel, 293-94, points out that many textile relics of Mary were portions of Fabrics used to dress either altars or images of Mary. The close bond of such textiles to Mary herself is seen already clearly in the robe placed by Pulcheria upon the altar in Hagia Sophia, which was interpreted by Cosmas Vestitor's translator as the dress on Mary's lap upon which Christ sat when he was present upon the altar (see note 32 above).

[103] Robert Deshman, The Benedictional of St.Aethelwold, Studies in Manuscript Illumination 9 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Mary Clay-ton, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 162-65, pis.VI and VII.The manuscripts in question are London, British Library, Additional 49598, Folio 102v, and Rouen, Bibliotheque municipale, 369, Folio 54v.

[104] Clayton, The Cult, 166-71; StafFord, Queen Emma (as in note 4 above), 172-74.The manuscripts are: Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Reg. Lat. 12, Folio 62r; New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M 869, Folio llr (Clayton, pl. X); Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 301, Folio 2v (Ibid., pl. XII); and London, British Library, Cotton, Titus D. xxvii. Folio 75v (Ibid., pl. VIII).

[105] Stafford, Queen Emma, 179.

[106] See recently Patrick Corbet, "Les Imperatrices ottoniennes et le modele mariale.Autour de 1'ivoire du Chateau SForza de Milan," in Marie. Le Culte de la Vierge dans la societe medievale, ed. Dominique Iogna-Prat, Eric Palazzo, Daniel Russo (Paris: Beauchesne, 1996), 127, 129, citing in particular an image ofMary in clothing reminiscent of Byzantium in the Petershausen Sacramentary (see Anton Van Euw, Vor dem Jahre 1000. Ahendlandische Buchkunst zur Zeit der Kaiserin Theophanu, Ausstellungskatalog, Koln, 1991, 122, no. 32), the Ivrea Sacramentary studied by Deshman, "Otto III" (as in note 5 above), the Seeon Lectionary in which Henry II is shown presenting the manuscript to an imperially clad Virgin, and the Rich Gospels of St. Bernward of Hildesheim (Rainer Kahsnitz, Das kostbare Evangeliar des heiligen Bernwards [Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1993], 27-30).

[107] Deshman, "Otto III," fig. 1; Grierson, Catalogue (as in note 44 above).

[108] Henry Mayr-Harting, Ottoman Book Illumination, 2 vols. (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 1991), 1: 140-54. The miniatures he cites are all reproduced in Rainer Kashnitz, "Koimesis-dormitio-assumptio. Byzantinisches und Antikes in den Miniaturen der Liuthargruppe," in Florilegium Carl Nor-denfalk, ed. P. Bjurstrom, N.-G. Hokby, F. Mutherich (Stockholm: National Museum, 1987), 91-122.

[109] Van Esbroeck,"Le Culte" (as in note 18 above), 184, on the celebration of imperial acclamations at Blachernai on 15 August.

[110] Quoted by Corbet, "Les Imperatrices," 131. Compare this with the language of the late tenth-century Byzantine John Geometres (note 42 above).

[111] Mary-Harting, Ottoman Book Illumination, 1: 140-41; Corbet, "Les Imperatrices," 128-31.

[112] Corbet,"Les Imperatrices," 118 and passim.

[113] Dominique Iogna-Prat, "La Vierge et les ordines de couronnement des reines au IXe siecle," in Marie. Le Culte de la Vierge dans la societe medievale, ed. Dominique Iogna-Prat, Eric Palazzo, Daniel Russo (Paris: Beauchesne, 1996), 100-7; Idem, "Le Culte de la Vierge sous le regne de Charles le Chauve," Les Cahiers de Saint-Michel de Cuxa 23 (1992): 97-116.

[114] Iogna-Prat, "Le Culte," 115: Ave Femina amata Deo! Sit tibi vita, salus lon-gos distenta per annos; conjugis observes semper amata thorum.

[115] Iogna-Prat, "La Vierge," 106-7.

[116] Iogna-Prat, "Le Culte," 115.

[117] Escorial, Cod.Vitrinas 17, Fol. 3r: Schramm, Die deutschen Kaiser (a in note 5 above), pl. 157. Compare this with the ivory of Otto II and Theophano, cited in note 5 above, or with the Frontispiece on Folio 2r of the Speyer manuscript itself showing the Conrad II and Gisela symmetrically at the feet of Christ: Schramm, Die deutschen Kaiser, pl. 143.

[118] Renate Kroos, Der Schrein des hi. Servatius in Maastricht und die vier zuge-horigen Reliquiare in Brussel (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1985), 176.

[119] Iogna-Prat,"La Vierge," 103-7.

[120] Stafford, Queen Emma (as in note 4 above), 167-68.

[121] Ibid., 177-78.

[122] Clayton, The Cult (as in note 103 above), 138;Walter de Gray Birch, F.S.A., ed., Liber Vitae: Register and Martyrology of New Minster and Hyde Abbey, Winchester (London: Simpkin and Company, Ltd., 1892), 147 ("De uestimento sancte marie"), 148 ("De Sepulcro sancte marie"); 150 ("De uestimento Sancte marie matris domini"), 151 ("De uestimento Sancte marie"). A half century later, Exeter recorded relics (in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Auct.D.2.16) of Mary's headdress and hair. This suggests a veil, but the word itself is different: not "cuffia" but "heafo3clade."

[123] Holger A. Klein, "The so-called Byzantine Diptych in the Winchester Psalter, British Library, MS Cotton Nero C. IV," Gesta 37 (1998): 26-43, and Kristine Edmondson Haney, The Winchester Psalter: An Iconographic Study (Leicester: University of Leicester Press, 1986), 44-46, 125, and passim, discuss the sarcophagus without specific reference to the relic at Winchester, as I did, too, in Evans and Wixom, eds. The Glory (as in note 5 above), 474-85, no. 312. Relics of Mary's sepulchre were, admittedly, legion in western Europe.

[124] Stafford, Queen Emma, 178.

[125] Rebecca Corrie, "The Political Meaning of Coppo di Marcovaldo's Madonna and Child in Siena," Gesta 29 (1990): 61-75, and Idem, "Coppo di Marcovaldo's Madonna del bordone and the Meaning of the Bare-Legged Christ Child in Siena and the East," Gesta 35 (1996): 43-65.

[126] Corrie, "The Political Meaning," 65.

[127] See note 79 above.

[128] John White, Duccio. Tuscan Art and the Medieval Workshop (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979), 46-48, fig. 18.

[129] See Sirarpie Der Nersessian, "Deux examples armeniennes de laVierge de Misericorde," Revue des etudes armeniennes NS 7 (1970): 187-202; Belting-Ihm, "Sub Matris Tutula" (as in note 39 above), 68-69.Three examples survive from the Crusader Levant, all from the later thirteenth century: the huge panel of the Virgin protecting Carmelite monks in the Byzantine Museum of the Holy Archiepiscopate of Cyprus in Nicosia (Papa-georghiou. Icons [as in note 72 above], 46—49, pl. 31); the mural painting with a Prankish family in the southern conch of the narthex at Asinou (Ewald Hein, Andrija Jakovljevic, Brigitte Kleidt, Zypern—byzantinische Kirchen und Klostern. Mosaiken und Freshen [Ratingen: Melina-Verlag, 1996], fig. 26); and in a Cilician Armenian miniature, now in theMer-topolitan Museum of Art in New York, showing Marshal Oshin and his sons protected by Mary (Sirarpie Der Nersessian, Miniature Painting from the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia from the Twelfth to the Fourteenth Century, Dumbarton Oaks Studies 31, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1993), 1: 158-59; 2: fig. 646; a similar composition used with a standing Virgin appears in the Cilician Prince Vasak Gospels in Jerusalem (Ibid., 1: 158-59,2:fig.647).

[130] White, Duccio, 63, fig. 30 (Brussels, Feron-Stoclet Collection); 63, fig. 31 (Perugia, Galleria nazionale dell'Umbria); 52, fig. 22 (London, National Gallery). On the latter see also David Bomford, Jill Dunkerton, Gillian Gordon, Ashok Roy, Art in the Making. Italian Painting Before 1400, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery, London, 29, November 1989-28 February 1990 (London, 1989), 90-97, no. 4.

[131] Belting, Likeness and Presence (as in note 68 above), 438-40, color plate X.

[132] Richard C. Trexler, "Habiller et deshabiller les images: Esquisse d'une analyse," in L'image et la production du sacre: Actes du colloque de Strasbourg (20-21 janvier 1988) organise par le Centre d'histoire des religions de l'Universite de Strasbourg II, group "Theorie et pratique de L’image culturelle," ed. F.DunandJ.-M. Spieser, and J.Wirth (Paris: Klincksieck, 1991), 195-231.