Gone Medieval - Crown of Thorns

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

What if one of the most iconic symbols of suffering and triumph in Christian history isn't what you think it is? Matt Lewis is joined by Dr. Faith Tibble to uncover the history and significance of the Crown of Thorns, exploring its Medieval - not ancient - origins, how this symbol evolved from a relic to a powerful icon of suffering and triumph and how kings used it to legitimise their rule by comparing themselves to Christ. They reveals the fascinating ways faith, art, and politics intertwined to shape the story of the Crown of Thorns.Vatican sarcophagus: https://www.museivaticani.va/content/museivaticani/en/collezioni/musei/museo-pio-cristiano/sarcofagi-_a-colonne/sarcofago-con-scene-della-passione-di-cristo.html More:Charlemagnehttps://open.spotify.com/episode/4zrQc5pHsqCjOSyQZ7m2vPGone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders to find the stories big and small that tell us how we got here.

Find out who we really were. We've gone medieval. The air was heavy with dust and the sweat of the gathered men, the morning sun casting long shadows across the stone courtyard. Bound and beaten, Jesus stood before them. The governor, Pontius Pilate, had washed his hands of the matter, handing him over to the soldiers who now took their turn. To them, he was no king, no threat, just another condemned man. But this one called himself the son of God, and for that they would have their sport. They twisted together a crown of thorns, their rough hands weaving the cruel brambles into a mockery of majesty. With jeers and laughter, they forced it onto his brow.

the shark thorns biting into his skin. They draped a tattered purple robe around his shoulders, a hollow echo of royal splendor. Then, circling him like predators, they knelt in exaggerated reverence. Hail, king of the Jews, they sneered. Their voices thick with scorn. Blood trickled down his face,

mingling with the sweat. and the dust as the weight of their mockery pressed upon him. If you grew up aware of the stories in the New Testament, this scene is hugely familiar and may be burned into your mind. Christ, blooded and beaten, a twisted ring of sharp thorns pressed viciously onto his brow as he hangs on the cross. In medieval art, this moment is depicted again and again, these haunting images of his suffering. We see the crucial

cruel flagellation, the mocking soldiers and the heavy cross dragging behind him. But here's the twist. While the flogging and the crucifixion certainly happened, the crown of thorns, at least as we imagine it, might not have. The brutal spikes, the dripping blood. These are later inventions, shaped by medieval devotion, theology, and even political ambition. So what was the crown of thorns? and why did it matter so much to people during medieval times?

Despite its ancient origins, this seemingly timeless symbol is a product of the shifting of power, faith and art, evolving over centuries to become something far more than a mere relic. And speaking of relics, there is one. A revered, jeweled remnant now housed in Paris. But as history has shown us, relics are often not quite quite. what they seem. This episode is being released on Good Friday.

The day the Christian Church remembers the story of Jesus' passion, complete with the Crown of Thorns. I'm joined by Dr Faith Tibble, medieval art historian and author of The Crown of Thorns, humble gods and humiliated kings. Faithbook explores the first appearance of the crown in the 4th century, its explosion onto the political scene in the 11th century, and its final ingraining in medieval art and Christianity in the 13th.

It takes a lot longer than you might think to become the crown of thorns that we recognize today, but we're going to find out how it began and how it got to where it is now. Welcome to God Medieval Faith. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm looking forward to getting stuck into, I was going to say thorny subject, but that would be a bit of a cheap pun. No, that's good. I like it. I like it. So across this episode, we're going to get into all of this in a bit more detail, but I wonder just high level, can you give us an idea?

Why does it take so long for the crown of thorns to appear in Christian imagery? We associate it so much with the mockery today in a particular way and it has a gospel presence, but it seems, from reading the book, it seems to take a very long time to become part of the settled story. It does. It's very unusual because obviously you see it once that we have. have in art in the mid-fourth century, right? And then it's in the context of the mockery. It's a very unusual crowning, and we'll probably get to that, but you don't see it again for 700 years. And by the time it reappears, it's much closer to what we would think of when we think of the crown of thorns and mockery. But the rest of passion iconography, so the imagery around sort of Jesus's

trial and mockery and death and crucifixion and all of that, that imagery has had a long time to develop and have a foundation in so much of it. So like the flagellation, like the betrayal, all of this has been depicted except the Crown of Thorns, which is strange because now we just associate it with passion iconography. It's everywhere. He's always wearing it. And I think part of the reason that it takes so long is, because it has such a strange connotation from the start. So from the start, the crown of thorns, it's not really associated with pain, which is kind of how we look at it now. It was much more closely associated with enduring humiliation and suffering and much more closely associated with triumph

and victory. And so it takes a while for artists to find a place to put it, in art instead of just following the gospel stories as they usually do. So I think that's part of the reason is that the artists weren't quite sure where to put it in art because of its deep, deep historical associations with triumph rather than pain. Yeah. And I think what comes across reading the book is this idea that in the beginning no one's quite sure what it should mean, what it means to different audiences over time, and so it can easily be sort of set aside as something that's a little bit too difficult to deal with at the moment, so we'll maybe come back to that later. But I wonder if we could just mention that first early appearance that you mentioned. If you could just describe

us kind of where we find that and what it means in that fourth century setting. Yeah, absolutely. So the first time that we see the Crown of Thorns, it's on a mid-fourth century sarcophagus that was found in the cemetery of Domitilla, which is a cemetery that was just on the outskirts of Rome. And it's now in the Vatican. You can go see it. It's very big. And what we find is sort of a series of events that lead up to the crucifixion depicted on this sarcophagus. So very early Christian, very Christian cult. But you're not actually going to depict the crucifixion because it does take them a little bit of time to depict it. But what we have is we have Jesus with a Roman soldier.

He's before Unmistakable Pontius Pilate who's thinking about whether or not to crucify him. We see Simon of Serene on the other side of the sarcophagus carrying Jesus' cross, for him. And then we find this last panel where you have an unmistakable Roman soldier. He's got his cloak. He's got his sandals. He's got a sword. But with his other hand, he's raising above a very youthful appearing Jesus. He's got curly hair. He's beardless. And he's raising over his head a leafy wreath, which isn't as all what we would expect, right? We would expect to see these sharp, cruel, vicious thorns piercing into the bloody brow of Jesus, right? But what we get instead is almost this sort of calm ceremony, this leafy wreath that he's being given. So the question, of course,

what are we looking at? Why is it that we suddenly have this leafy wreath instead of the cruel thorns that we come to expect? And very briefly, the answer has a lot to do with first century Judea and messiahs, right? Sort of this idea of the messianic leader in first century Judea, of which there were quite a few, right? Josephus, a contemporary historian in the first century talks a lot about them. Basically what they are, these kind of rabble-rousers. They're always military men, they're sort of general-like figures, their messiahs or prophet. They've come from God to deliver their people from oppression, to bring them out of death into life. are salvific figures, right? And part of what they do is they then have this big battle and that

they, the Romans obviously crush them and kill them. But that's the idea of the messianic leader. And the Romans saw messianic leader as a military figure who was there preaching that he would single-handedly save his people from death and destruction. So what the Roman soldiers are doing with Jesus is that they are, instead of mocking him as this failed king, they're actually mocking him as a failed general, because for them, that concept is much more prevalent. But basically, the highest elevation that you could possibly get is to be crowned as the greatest general with a reef. We have these military decorations in the Roman world, and one of the best ones is called Corona Gromenea or the Grass Crown. And it's given to a general who single-handedly,

saves his people and his army from certain death and destruction. He delivers them to salvation. And so they mock this messianic leader as trying to be this kind of general who preach that he would save his people from death and destruction and failed. So they weave for him this decorative, honorific wreath. They put it on his head and, you know, it's sort of hail, oh, great general, for your incredible deed and mocking him because he didn't. So what we see in this sarcophagus is that ceremony. But the early Christians have turned it on its head, right? They've taken that mockery and they've turned it around and said, no, this is an actual triumph for them. Because for the early Christians, Jesus did do that, right? Through his suffering, through his humiliation, through his death,

For them, he did save humanity from death. So it's this fascinating turning on the head of the mockery into something victorious. And that's a lot of what the early Christians were trying to do, is to create victory out of humiliation and pain. It's almost like they say, you know, that the final joke is almost on you, Romans, because you mocked him in worship, but actually you were worshipping the actual Messiah. you know, the joke is on you kind of thing. Absolutely. And there's two parts of it that you sort of pick out in the book. So the original Greek Gospels describe a wreath of Acanthus being woven. And there's kind of how that relates to a crown of thorns and how that sort of becomes a crown of thorns. What does wreath of a canthus kind of mean in Greek?

Yeah, absolutely. So when you read the New Testament, the New Testament, they were originally written in Greek. Right. And so when we get to that part of the mockery and the crown of thorns, we find that the Roman soldiers are weaving or braiding a Stephanon X Akhanthon. So Stephanon in Greek is a reef. And the canthon is an acanthus plant. It's a very specific kind of plant. And this plant, the acanthus, grows all over the Mediterranean.

It's done so for thousands of years. It even grows here in Britain, where I am right now. Some of my neighbors have some. And it's this big, sort of very, it has huge leaves, right? That sort of grow, maybe end of spring, early summer. And then this big stalk that shoots out the middle with these little purple flowers that grow on the stock. And because it was so ubiquitous, and it was a very unusual plants. It's a weed. It's a relentless weed. So if you have an acanthus plant and you want to pull it up, good luck. Because if you leave, you of just a tiny, tiny bit of the root behind, it will grow up in full again the next season. So in the ancient world, it had deep connotations with liminality or sort of this barrier between life and death because it seems like you couldn't kill it, right? So it was a barrier between the living and the dead. And it had connotations of resurrection, a new life, rebirth, and salvation, because you could also use it medicinally. It was kind of like an aspirin.

It could get rid of migraines. Please don't go and chew on your acanthus plant in your yard. That's not quite how it works. But it had all the – and some of these words that I'm using, right, for the Christian audience, for the early Christian audience, these are all words that you would associate with Jesus, right? This sort of barrier between death. It's easy to see how they resonate with early Christians.

Yeah. When you're talking about resurrection, kind of victory over death and destruction, and the ability to heal and all of those kinds of things, they would be things that early Christians would associate with Jesus. Yes, and so it makes a lot of sense that they use that word, acanthus, when associating it with Jesus' mockery and crowning. Because this is his crowning right on earth that sort of reflects his heavenly crowning.

And you're using a plant that basically epitomizes everything he is. You know, he is resurrection, he is new life, he is rebirth, he is salvation. So again, it's going back to what you said is that this is a proper crowning with the decorative wreath that honored what Jesus was doing in a proper way with a plant that reflected exactly who he was to the Christians. Yeah. And for the Romans, I guess, the mockery part was that, as you said, they're staging this crowning that they would perform for a general who was being celebrated as a great Roman hero. and they're doing it in mockery, but sort of accidentally recognizing Jesus as this person who was single-handedly saved his entire people, I guess. You know, we're not talking about an army that a general would have saved, but he saved his entire people from destruction.

And so they're able to present what the Romans did and say, you know, you accidentally did the right thing. Exactly, exactly. And it is fascinating because the Christians were very irritating for the Romans. anyway, because they did this all the time, right? They took humiliation and they turned it into victory. They took death and they turned it into victory. And the Romans hated that kind of thing. And so they're always doing it. They're always finding these ways to say, yes, you think that you were deeply humiliating our Messiah, but actually you were doing the right thing. You were crowning

him as a victorious, triumphant general who did indeed, right, to the Christians, save his people from death and destruction, not just his people, but the entire world, right, from their perspective. And so it's a fascinating, just turning things on its head. And I guess it plays into that idea that the early Christian church was very good at morphing into whatever it needed to be to gain acceptance. So, you know, they take a lot of pagan holidays and turn them into Christian holidays. And here they're taking a pagan ceremony of mockery and turning it into something that they can celebrate that's recognizable to a contemporary audience. as Roman soldiers rightfully praising Jesus. Yeah, and I think that that's true about the early Christians.

And a lot of people ask me, because when I talk about sort of messianic leaders in the first century, they say, okay, well, why did Christianity make it? If there were all these other messianic leaders out there, all these other messiahs and prophets, why didn't they do what Jesus did? And part of the reason, part of the reason is luck. But the other part of the reason is a lot, what you're saying is that they catered especially Paul, catered to a pagan community. So the rise of Christianity came about because they started associating sort of the local gods with local martyrs and saints. So, okay, you think this God is

helping as overseeing and helping builders or carpenters. No, no, no, it's actually a saint. It's a saint who you pray to that's overseeing this. So what they did is they created sort of these local understandings, and they made them Christian. And they did this. What was very clever is that they preached to the poor, the army, the downtrodden, and then they say, your life might be terrible now, but don't worry, you'll have everlasting life if you believe in this God. And it's so easy for the pagan world to just believe in another God. That's fine. And then eventually you say, okay, well, actually, it's the only one. Well, he's doing a lot for me now, so I guess I'll just believe it's the only one. So it was very, it was very,

fascinating how they were able to do that continually sort of saying, actually you're worshipping the proper God. I know you think you're worshipping a different God, but it's actually a saint. And it's fascinating how they did that. And that's part of the reason that Christianity won out was their ability to take common people, you know, sort of this peasant class or the military class, and create for them a world that they could easily attain. Yeah, yeah, and imagery like this that is recognisable to them. They don't have to do any work to interpret it because it already means something to them. You mentioned then that the image of the crown of thorns sort of disappears for several centuries after that initial appearance on the sarcophagus.

We do get stories of Charlemagne in the 9th century. Charlemagne receiving kind of a gift of some of the thorns off the crown of thorns. So where are we putting that? If we're thinking it's disappeared, the story's disappeared, how do we reconcile that with Charlemagne becoming involved? Yeah, I mean, we don't, there's very little evidence that he actually did have any pieces of the crown of thorns. There's no actual evidence that he received them, even even just little thorns or even that, you know, he made a pilgrimage in any way. So it's pociful, but it's significant not for the art. This idea of the crown of thorns doesn't help the art yet. But what it does do is it continues the same almost ideal. of victory in association with the crown of thorns, right? Charlemagne in this apocryphal story triumphantly brings it back to the new Jerusalem, which is Paris, which is France. And he brings it back to France as this almost new holy land. And this is where the kings really start to

associate themselves even closer with Christ, this idea of what's known as Christomimesis or the imitation, the mimicry of Christ, because they are Christ's anointed, right? This is around the time that we're starting to anoint kings like David, the King of the Old Testament were anointed, and that they were God's chosen. And so you have the kings in Europe starting to do this, where they're anointed as Christ's representative on earth. And part of that is being Christ-like, is associating yourself with things that Jesus went through on. earth to what you go through on earth. And part of that, of course, is attaining the sort of highest throne through enduring hardships, enduring humiliation, enduring suffering, and coming out the other

side victorious. And we see the neat parallel between deep humiliation of the potential ruler and Jesus' deep humiliation during his trial and his mockery to attain. To a deep humiliation, the throne in heaven and the king's enduring of humiliation and possibly mockery to attaining the highest throne on earth. And so you start to see these neat parallels between the kings, and eventually the crown of thorns makes this superb parallel, but not quite in Charlemagne's time. We have to wait another century or so to get to that. So when we do see the crown begin to emerge more fully into art. What is it when it first begins to appear more regularly? So when we first see it again, it's so funny because it almost has zero artistic precedence

when we see the mockery and the crown come up again. Almost zero. We've seen maybe a couple of times in the Carolingian period or the descendants of Charlemagne, we'll see some instances of the crown of thorns, but it's still kind of wreathy with these little thorns sort of stuck into the top. it's quite funny, but there's no mockery, right? It's just sort of him wearing a thorn being processed by pilot or by whomever. And that's it. But all of a sudden, almost out of nowhere in the 11th century, sort of first quarter of the 11th century, we suddenly see the mockery and the crown of thorns together in one place with almost no precedence. And it looks like nothing we've ever seen, and almost nothing we'll see since or after that. So what you have, and we have a couple

of examples from pretty much the same sort of 20-year period, which in the medieval world is hard to do, right? You don't get a lot of that. Yeah. And as an art historian, that must make you stop and think, hang on, what's going on here? Absolutely. This is suddenly exploded from nowhere. What's going on? Exactly. Right. So, you know, you're studying and you go, okay, well, here's another century where the crown of thorns doesn't go. Here's another century where it doesn't show up. And then all of a sudden, within a 20-year period, you have the crown and mockery showing up multiple times. So something's going on, right? And it's like nothing you've ever seen. So you have Jesus, and there's an example, and it's across sort of artistic media, right? So you have an altar piece

and a manuscript with these examples. So in these images, you have Jesus seated centrally and frontally, which is, again, it's very unusual. He's usually off to the side or he's looking at you sort of from the side. But he's in the middle of the image. He's on a throne, on a cushioned throne. and he has two mockers on either side of him, two or three mockers on either side of him. One of them puts a read in his hand. So part of that Bible story is putting a read in his hand as part of his sort of kingship leadership. One of them puts a read in his hand. In his other hand, Jesus is holding a book, right?

Or the New Testament, really, the Gospels. And then the other attendant is reaching up and putting a crown of thorns on his head. They are both expectorating all over him. They're spitting all over him. And they have their hands raised, their palms up towards him, which is in the medieval world, this is a gesture of acclamation or sort of proclamation of the leadership, right? And they're spitting all over him. And then you have some instances where he's being slapped, but it's usually this gesture of acclamation. And you see it several times. And it's so strange. And the crown of thorn. is also strange because all of a sudden that reef is gone. What you have is an actual crown,

right? What we would think of a bejeweled crown with these little sort of stick-like, tree-like thorns sticking all up and down it. So there's still not a lot of blood and gore, but the mockery is there, a crown is there, and these crown of thorns are there. But you look around and you say, where is this coming from? Because there is no, our artistic parallel yet within passion iconography that would possibly create this. But there is one image that is so strikingly similar. It's almost, once you see it, it's so obvious, right? And it's the image of the coronation of the king, which is everywhere all over the medieval art, especially sort of this era of the Otonians and the Salians, so we're talking

sort of 10th, 11th century, right, and a bit into the 12th. And this is kind of what will become the Holy Roman Empire, that kind of Germanic area where they're ruling, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So you're thinking, so the Carolingians are sort of very vaguely France, and then the Otonians are sort of the last of the Carolingians, which is very much Germany, bits of Italy. And so they're the sort of Germanic kings and the Holy Roman Emperor, absolutely.

And they have coronation imagery all over the place, especially in manuscripts, because it was very important to see the king crowned, right? This was sort of reflecting that anointment by the Pope and therefore by God and by bishop. So it's really legitimizing his kingship, because I'm sure your listeners will know sort of medieval kingship is a bit bonkers. And so to be able to prove that you're king, this is very important. This imagery was incredibly important and just exploded during the Ote's. and Salian and Pyrids. And what you find in these images, they're all the same. Sometimes you have examples of manuscripts where they just sort of cross out the name of the last king and put the new one because while they were creating the manuscript for Otto,

he died and now it belongs to Henry. So that happens a lot. But what you have is the king seated, fully frontly, staring out of the audience, very regal, on a cushioned throne, being given a scepter in one hand by a attendant, being crowned by a bishop and a bishop and another, holding an orb in one hand, and everyone around him, he's in the middle, he's flanked pretty evenly, everyone has their palm raised towards him in acclamation. And you see this image, and then you look at the mock cream crowning of Christ, and you go, oh, that's where it's coming from. It's such a clear parallel. Yeah, I get it. I get it now. Yeah, it's such a clear parallel. And then you're very excited because you found this parallel.

And then you go, but why? Why? Why does it look like this? What is the point of all of a sudden having the mockery and crowning of Jesus come into such popularity? And the reason is, is because of what we were talking about earlier. It's this idea of Christomimesis, this idea that the king needed to imitate Christ. And it's really what it is, is it's this age-old motif of zero to hero, right? So you think about any story where someone becomes king or is a very famous leader, you know, even Odysseus,

you know, he wanders around the Mediterranean for 10 years. He nearly used, he loses all of his men, nearly loses his kingdom, but he gets it back in the end, right? Zero to hero. Or you think even of Julius Caesar captured by pirates. you know, has a rough time. But he manages, he manages to get to the highest office. It's the same idea that these kings needed, in order to legitimize their kingship, they needed to have suffered. They needed to have been humiliated. I mean, abject humiliation in order to gain the throne. It's very zero to hero. And you find this a lot in the chronicles or letters that people like, say Conrad, first of the Salions, Conrad the second, he was ejected from the court of Henry

the second. And this was deeply humiliating for him. It would have been. It would have been devastating to be ejected from the court, to no longer have the ear of the king, to no longer be by his side. And yet, even though this was devastating and really humiliating, you know, chroniclers say it's humiliating, but it would have been at the time, very deeply devastating. He pulls it back, He comes from rock bottom and he becomes king. And that's the idea of going from absolutely nothing, totally rock bottom, brink of death, to being victorious, just like Jesus did. And it was quite striking in the book that you talk about for the Etonian kings and then the sailing kings. It is a core part of their origin stories that they've all undergone some form of trial of a problem in their life that they've had to overcome.

and that's pitched as making them worthy to then be king because we can see the parallels to Christ's life. So it's almost a way for them to smooth over their beginnings. That's not embarrassing. That's not a bad part of my life. That's the bit that makes me king now because I'm like Christ. Yeah, exactly. And you can think about that with leaders all over the place. You know, people are really, even in modern day, you know, we think of people who have come from nothing to achieve something great like the highest office in the land is in prime.

to us. You know, I think that, you know, even Trump's favorite image of himself as his mugshot when he was arrested. That's his favorite image. That should be deeply humiliating. But he made it into something like a victory. And so we see that all the time. I can't, you know, I came from nothing. I had nothing. And look what I've achieved. And so this idea just permeates through leadership. But for the medieval kingship, it was particularly important. because it made you look like Christ. It strikes me that at this point we see them, we said earlier, you know, they were, in the early years of Christianity,

they were fitting themselves into existing structures and they were adopting pagan holidays and making them Christian. Whereas here, they're taking the gospel's version of the mockery and they're changing it to present it in a way that fits now with structures of medieval kingship and things like that. So Christianity is now becoming change. to fit societal structures as they are, rather than Christianity changing itself to become more acceptable.

Yeah, and I think that you're absolutely right, because it's, I mean, as anyone who studies this period knows, that medieval kingship is very complicated. And the attempt to use the Gospels, to use Christianity, to use Jesus's victory triumph, to make your kingship more legitimate, it's sort of, it's a shift in how people were viewing the Gospels from a political, right, context. And, you know, theologically, these same ideas of victory over death, of triumph. They started in the early Christians, and it's just throughout, throughout, throughout that you have this idea. But it's only with the Otonians and the Sallions that they're using this idea so specifically.

And if it weren't for them, I don't know what would have happened to the Crown of Thorn's imagery, because they're the ones who brought it out. To use political, of course, but they're the ones who used this in order to bring the Crown of Thorns and the mockery to the fore in art. And it's interesting because this image doesn't last, right, the image of the enthroned mockery, it doesn't last to have a while where it disappears again, but many of the same elements remain. So now that they've used the Crown of Thorns for this reason, the crown of thorns stays. It stays in the imagery of the mockery. But this particular enthroned mockery disappears probably until the 13th century when it comes up again with King Louis,

the 9th, the French king Louis, and it comes up again for him. So Louis the 9th is kind of the king who brings the physical relic of the crown of thorns to Europe. So then what effect does that arrival of the actual relic? have on the art around the crown of thorns, because you've now got what people are saying is the real crown of thorns to look at. So how do you artistically interpret something that is in front of you? So this is what's interesting. I think a lot of people who, you know, will read the book or listening to this, they go, okay, well, what about the relic? Right. Because we all know if anyone has been to Notre Dame, you know, it's there, right? You have the

relic there. It's been there since the 13th century. So what about the relic? Surely people have been using the example of the real crown of thorns in their art. You know, we have an example from the fourth century, so why haven't they been using the crown? And the answer is, well, they didn't, right? It has been around for a long time. We know that it was revered in Jerusalem since the fifth century, right? So we have a lot of pilgrims, their travel logs, I like to call them, of when they go, they go to Jerusalem and they go into certain churches and they say, oh, I saw a piece of the true cross today and yesterday I saw a lance and and today I saw the crown of thorn so we know it was there. We hear about it again in the 8th century and then again in the 9th and sometime in the 11th,

probably the crusaders took it out of Jerusalem and it ends up in Constantinople. And we don't really know how or when it got there, but it is there. And it's being kept there and then Baldwin the second in Constantinople running out of money to try to get the Bulgarians off of his borders. And he strikes a deal with the Venetians who say, we'll give you the money. You have to give us a whole bunch of passion objects like the Crown of Thorns. And we're going to keep these as collateral for our loan. And he says, okay.

And then King Louis comes along and says, ooh, I'd like those, please. I would like the Crown of Thorns. I would like a bunch of other passion objects. I'll pay off you alone in exchange for these objects. And he gets them. And he brings, especially the crown of thorns. This was very important to him. The crown of thorns was suddenly very important to him. And he brings it back to France. And he walks barefoot without his kingly regalia. He carries it through Paris in front of everyone, sort of, you know, feet getting bloody. He doesn't have his, you know, jewels on or anything, very humble, right? Almost humiliating that the king is doing this, right? And he builds

a chapel just for the crown of thorns. It's called the Saint-Chapelle. And you can go there and see it today. It's a gorgeous church. And it's actually architecturally very, very important for the medieval world. But he builds this almost gigantic reliquy to the crown of thorns and puts it in there. It's not open to the public. It's just his personal chapel for him and his friends and guests and court. But he brings it there and it has a place of honor underneath one of the main stained glass windows on which we find the crowning of thorns and mockery as an enthroned mockery. And all around the whole program of the Saint-Chapelle, you see panel after panel after panel of enthronements of kingship, because it's that same idea that he's using to bring back the

idea of the crown of thorns as actually triumphant as a parallel to the king, to the coronation of the king. And again, that same idea as Paris is the new Jerusalem. This is now the place of salvation. And I can prove that because objects from the passion are here. We've translated them to Paris to create the new holy land. And so that parallel comes back and with it the imagery of the crown of thorns. And then we start to see more and more this imagery of Jesus seated, of him being crowned, of him being beaten, sometimes with a stick, sometimes being slapped in the face. And this idea of humiliation becomes more and more raw, becomes more and more violent. But it's revived by Louis. It's revived by him and that association with coronation.

Do we have a sense of what Louis is trying to achieve by doing that? I mean, as you say, he walks into Paris, you know, barefoot, willing to be humiliated. Obviously, there's a message going on there. But why is he so desperate? Why does he pay so much money to have the crown of thorns and build this shrine for the crown of thorns and make it so central? Is he reviving that Otonian and Salian image that we saw before of being like Christ? Is he just picking up on something that has been dormant for a couple of centuries, or is he trying to do something new?

I think he's probably trying to pick up on this idea of being the new David, the new King David, being the new Jerusalem, the new Holy Land, the place where Christ now dwells, right? You know, it's a bit hard to get over to the Holy Land anyway at this point, so why not bring it closer to home? But I think it's these same sort of Carolingian, Otonian ideas of being the anointed, of being, you know, almost, almost, you know, being anointed by God, really, through the Pope, through the bishops. And as Christ's highest representative on earth. Yeah, yeah. I found the book particularly fascinating because I've read the Bible. I've several times read the New Testament. Sure. And I don't think I had, I think I'd probably read it with an image of the mockery in my head and not really questioned the words that I was reading because that image is so ubiquitous.

now that we associate it with the pain and the suffering and the blood and the thorns being, you know, cutting into Jesus's head and things like that. How do we move then from this idea that it is a glorious thing and that it is the crowning of a king? How do we end up with what is our more modern interpretation of it being this moment of violence and horror? Yes. It's very interesting how that happens because as, you know, as you, if you read the Gospels, they actually can be quite shocking. If you read them almost as a story, right, especially Matthew is a very excellent narrative. And you get to know these characters, right? You get to know them. And then at the end, you go, oh, no, they didn't kill him, did they? It's poignant. And it can be very

harsh a lot of the time. And, you know, we think of things, you know, movies like the Passion of the Christ, right, Mel Gibson. And, you know, from a historian's perspective, the violence in that movie is incredibly accurate, right? This is how the Romans were. And so we know that, but that wasn't translated into the early Christian art because it was embarrassing. They didn't have the idea that your God is killed in the most horrific way that the Romans could possibly think of that was reserved only for criminals and foreigners. It's embarrassing. So they didn't depict it. They didn't depict suffering. It was only victory. Turning all of that suffering on its head to create some something victorious. But that starts to go away when the suffering of Christ became more relevant.

So when even you can start to see these parallels, even with, say, the crusaders who were going off to the Holy Land, being killed in horrific ways, just like Christ. Right. And they were not anointed, but they were given permission to basically go and suffer in exchange for salvation. And so you start to see this idea of pain and suffering come about in the middle ages, later middle ages to where it was important to depict Jesus' suffering, that his abject suffering is so that we don't have to. And you do get that in the gospel stories, that Jesus suffered and died so that, you know, his believers don't have to. And the art starts to depict that in more and more gruesome ways. And you look at things, you know, like say Rembrandt. So he has the face of

Jesus for Rembrandt was hugely important. But he even has images of, you know, Christ on the cross where Jesus has this diftled scream of agony on his face. And we're meant to look at these images, right? His audience is meant to look at these images and say, Jesus did that so I don't have to, right? And that our suffering is nothing compared to what Jesus did because he did that. And so I think the point was more and more was that this suffering was sort of meant to remind us that we don't have to go through that. And that anything that we're experiencing, don't worry, Jesus experienced worse, and he did that for you. Right. And that's where you start to get the more the blood and the gore. And eventually, you know, people like the

movies and other literature, they want to be more accurate to what it would have been like. So it comes in even more to the fore. But I think that that idea of pain and blood and suffering started to come about really to remind their audience of the suffering that Jesus went through and the pain and the torment so that the audience doesn't have to. Yeah. So does then the display of the blood and the gruesome and humiliating experiences of Christ, Does that reflect more confidence in the church as it's established? If the early church is sort of ignoring that bit and trying to focus on the bit that, whoops, you accidentally did correctly praise the Messiah,

is it a reflection of a more confident church that they're willing to now explore the story of Jesus being physically humiliated, physically hurt, to be able to say, as you said, he went through that so you didn't have to, but they now feel able to be more open about that. as the Middle Ages have gone on? Absolutely. Yeah, I think once Christianity wins out, right? Once Christianity is sort of the religion of Europe, you have much more confidence to depict things like the crucifixion. And the crucifixion scene I mentioned earlier, this was not something that the early Christians depicted. And when it was depicted early on, it's Jesus

is very much alive, right? And it's sort of Byzantine examples too. Anytime he's on the crucifixion, he's usually very much alive, fully clothed. open, right? This is almost the resurrection on the crucifixion. And it's only once they move past the embarrassment and they really take the crucifixion and make it their own, that you start to see more suffering. Because as you say, they're the dominant religion. They've won out. They can now say, it's okay that our God was crucified. And now no one else can be. They sort of stopped the whole crucifixion thing because Jesus was crucified, even his disciples. They said, I'm not going to be crucified the same way Jesus was, turn me upside down, right? What happens is that embarrassment leaves,

and with that, then the depictions become more bold. There are a lot of examples of crucifixion iconography, you know, especially sort of in sort of the Latin East, where you start to see Jesus dead on the cross more and more, almost as a reflection of, again, what everyone was going through there during the Crusades, you find death on the cross and sorrow more and more that Jesus is reflected as dying. And that's just because the confidence, as you say, is growing more and more. Yeah. And just to end on, do you see the art in these circumstances around things like the Crown of Thorns as an example? Do you see the art leading the theological debate? Is it driving questions or is it reflecting the evolution of theology as a way to then present it to the faithful?

Is it controversial, I guess, is the question I'm asking? I would say that it often is a reflection of the theology of the time, especially early on. I talk a lot of the book about why things are depicted the way they are and it has a lot to do almost as a teaching mechanism, especially in churches, in monumental art, but even in manuscript art that you find that these images are actually used. for a didactic purpose. So they're trying to teach the monks or the congregation sort of about Jesus and the theology behind Jesus through the avenue of art. Because you think a lot of people at this time were illiterate. So they needed to have these images teaching their congregation about

the art and as a reflection of the new theologies that were coming about. And even within the manuscripts, you'll find that there can be very complicated, but they would use of these manuscripts as, you know, devices to memorize scripture. And the images were supposed to help with that. But the images weren't just helping to remind you of what the psalm you were supposed to be reciting. They were reminding you of how this psalm was actually associated with Jesus later on. So the Psalm is a reflection of the theology of Christianity, or even more, even more deeply, this image is a reflection of the theology that talks about this Psalm. So it might have nothing to do with the Psalm or even its association ecclesiastically.

It can just have to do with Augustine's thoughts on this Psalm. And so it's used as this teaching device. And I think that's fascinating with the art and how the art is so specific to its time and place. And we see that too with the crown of thorns, is that it had nothing to do with artistic precedent. It had to do with the politics of the time. And a lot of the medieval world that we're talking about, communication was hard, right? We all know how hard it was to get, you know, from Italy up to Britain. Like, who did that, right? No one. You're taking your influence from your time and place. You're taking your influence from theology that's trying to spread around Europe.

you're taking your artistic influence from the politics that are going on at the time. And so a lot of the art is so reflective of what the people were thinking at the time, which I think is sometimes, you know, as art historians, is a fascinating perspective to have because a lot of historians, they'll look at the chronicles, they'll look at the written, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, but they not always reflect on the art. And the art often gives huge insight into what people were thinking and feeling. at the time. And there's loads of examples of that. There's even even in early art, you know, you see the sarcophagus in the Vatican Museum and you turn around and there's another sarcophagus.

And you recognize Jesus, right? He's got his curly hair. He's beardless. And, you know, you see loaves of bread or the fishes or the jugs of wine or water that he's turning into wine. But for all of these stories, he's got a wand in his hand. He's carrying a wand to make these miracles because for the people at the time, it made no sense that Jesus could just turn water into wine. He needed an object from his magic into the other object. He needed something to connect from his magic, right, to whatever he was doing. And so they put a wand in his hand, because that's what made sense to his audience. So we see this over and over again where the art looks strange to us, of course, but we have to remember to put ourselves or try to put

ourselves and the time and place in which it was created because it just explodes our understanding of the medieval world or the classical world when we can try to understand the art that the local people were creating. And that sounds like a perfect note to leave it on for everybody to think about the ways that we approach medieval art. And I thoroughly enjoyed the book and it really gave me lots of food for thought about the way the church was evolving, but also the way politics was influencing the church and the art and everything else. So it really is a, a different window into medieval society and politics and everything else. So thank you so much for joining us, Faith.

It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you. No, Matt, this has been great. Thank you so much. If you've enjoyed this episode, we've got lots more in the back catalogue around the Crusades that so affected the Holy Land on Charlemagne and one on the emergence of Christianity as the dominant European religion. If you haven't already heard them, have a dig around in the vault. You never know what you might find in there. There are new installments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday,

so please come back to join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can sign up to History Hit to access hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week and all of HistoryHits podcasts add free. Head to HistoryHit.com forward slash. subscribe. Go on. You know you want to. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hits.