The Relic Master

by Christopher Buckley

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  Contents

  Map of the World of Dismas, the Relic Master; 1517

  Epigraph

  Rome, 2017

  Part One

  1. Basel, 1517

  2. Rhine

  3. Albrecht

  4. Frederick

  5. Dürer

  6. Boat of the Fisherman

  7. Disaster

  8. The Shroud of Mainz

  9. Render unto Caesar

  10. To Hell with Purgatory

  11. On My Honor

  12. A Great Day

  13. Not a Great Day

  14. Cardinal Sin

  15. Is Something Amiss?

  16. Penance

  17. Dismissal

  Part Two

  18. Cunrat, Nutker, Unks

  19. Count Lothar

  20. Magda

  21. Attack

  22. Paracelsus

  23. The Dance of Death

  24. Gifts

  25. The Bauges

  26. Chambéry

  27. A Plan

  28. Lothar Redux

  29. Rostang

  30. Charles the Good

  31. Three Kings

  32. Digitalis

  33. Very Awkward

  34. Ecce Sindon

  35. That Was a Viewing, Eh?

  36. Did It Do the Trick?

  37. Consummatum Est

  38. At the Bibulous Bishop

  39. Pursuivants

  40. Rehearsal

  41. What Would Jesus Want?

  42. What If They Drink the Wine?

  43. Let Us Ambulate Together

  44. The Last Supper

  45. We Are Finished, You and I

  46. Places, Gentlemen

  47. He’d Better Be

  48. The Bridge

  49. Suggestions, Gentlemen?

  50. Why, Hammering?

  51. Vois. Ci. Loth.

  Vale

  Appendix

  Sources

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Anne Springs Close, with love

  If even a dog’s tooth is truly worshipped it glows with light. The venerated object is endowed with power . . .

  —Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

  In our corrupt times, the virtue of a Pontiff is commended when he does not surpass the wickedness of other men.

  —Francesco Guicciardini, History of Italy, 1561

  Rome, 2017

  BURIAL CLOTH FOUND IN TOMB OF 16TH-CENTURY POPE IS SAID TO BE “IDENTICAL” TO SHROUD OF TURIN

  Vatican City, August 28—Workers doing repairs on the tomb of Pope Leo X in Rome’s Basilica Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva have found a cloth closely resembling the Shroud of Turin, the relic held by many to be the burial shroud of Jesus Christ.

  The discovery occurred two weeks ago. Until now, the Vatican has withheld making any announcement or comment, prompting heated speculation. Word of the finding began to leak almost immediately, and the normally quiet Santa Maria has been overwhelmed by mobs of pilgrims and curiosity seekers.

  According to a source within the Vatican who requested anonymity, the discovery is “extremely problematical.” In addition to the shroud’s remarkable resemblance to that of Turin, the source said, “There is the question—what was it doing in Leo’s tomb?”

  Leo X, a member of the de’ Medici family, died in 1521. He ruled as pontiff during the Protestant Reformation, and was described by one 20th-century scholar as being “as elegant and as indolent as a Persian cat.” He is not held in esteem by the Church, owing to rampant corruption and decadence. His mishandling of Martin Luther’s protest over the Church’s sale of indulgences led to the Reformation, plunging Europe into a century and a half of religious warfare.

  Pope Francis is said to have expressed “consternation” over the discovery of another shroud in his predecessor’s crypt. The Church had always maintained a nuanced stance toward its most famous holy relic, neither asserting nor disclaiming its authenticity.

  In 1988, after carbon-14 testing dated the Turin Shroud to between AD 1260 and 1390, the Vatican formally declared it to be a forgery. At the same time, the Church declared that the Shroud remained worthy of continued veneration “as an icon,” and has certified numerous healing miracles attributed to it.

  Many Christians remain convinced that the Turin Shroud is authentic, and insist that the carbon-14 testing was flawed. The discovery of what appears to be a nearly identical shroud could prove to be as problematical for them as it is for the Church.

  The Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints, the office within the Roman Curia responsible for the verification and preservation of holy relics, today announced that it has appointed Monsignor Silvestre Prang, S.J., to undertake “a thorough and rigorous scientific investigation” of the so-called Leo Shroud.

  Prang, a Jesuit, holds a PhD in cellular and molecular physiology from Yale University. The Vatican declined to make him available for comment until his report is made public next year.

  Part One

  1

  Basel, 1517

  Dismas might have purchased the finger bone of the Apostle Thomas, but there was something not quite right about the man offering it for sale.

  For one, his asking price was far too low. A relic of the finger that had probed the spear wound in Christ’s side after his resurrection would fetch as much as forty or fifty gulden. And he was asking only fifteen. More troubling was the absence of fragrant odor when Dismas held it to his nostrils. A genuine relic was always pleasant to the nose. Finally, there was the variety of items the fellow had for sale: the tongue (entire) of St. Anthony of Padua; an ampulla of the Virgin’s breast milk; a stone from the scala santa, the steps of Pilate’s palace; a few pieces of straw from the sacra incunabulum, the holy manger in Bethlehem; and shavings from the chains of St. Peter. A suspiciously vast array of goods.

  Experience inclined Dismas to trust more in dealers who concentrated in specific fields. Say, relics of the Diocletian persecution. Or brandea, items that had been in physical contact with the Holy Family. Relics of St. Anne, mother of the Virgin, a category at the moment in huge demand.

  Most revealing of all: when Dismas thanked the man and turned to leave, he immediately lowered the price to five gulden. One saw more and more of this disgraceful behavior these days at the Basel Relic Fair.

  • • •

  Dismas stood in the market square in front of the new town hall with its marvelous polychrome arcades. His glance swept over the expanse, humming with commerce. There must be over three hundred exhibitors.

  He noted with amusement two adjoining booths, each advertising thorns from the Crown of Thorns. Unfortunate placement. But there were so many exhibitors these days. Space was tight. Placards and banners flapped in the late afternoon breeze. One advertised a Mandylion, another a sudarium, another a foot (whole) of the Magdalene. There was always a surcharge for an entire appendage.

  On the north side of the square, by the fish market, appropriately enough, was this year’s most-talked-about piece: an entire boat avouched to have belonged to St. Peter in his pre-apostolic Galilean fishing days.

  Owing to his status in the relic community, Dismas had been given a preview. The asking price, three thousand gulden, was preposterous, even if it were authentic, which Dismas highly doubted. To the consternation of its seller, Dismas crawled undern
eath with a magnifying glass. There he found wormholes of the type made by saltwater worms.

  Dusting himself off, he gave the fellow a look of rebuke. Odd, wasn’t it—saltwater worm damage, in a freshwater fishing vessel?

  The dealer cleared his throat and said, well, see, the boat had been briefly anchored in the Mediterranean, at Joppa, before, er, being taken aboard ship for Marseille.

  “Um. Well, thanks for letting me have a look.”

  A shame, Dismas thought, for what a splendid centerpiece it would make in the courtyard of the castle church in Wittenberg. Or the cathedral cloister at Mainz. Someone would buy it, perhaps a recently ennobled Bohemian, who’d paint it in garish colors and put it in his moat. In time he’d grow bored of it and allow his children to reenact famous sea battles in it. And finally it would rot and sink, and the nobleman would say that he’d always had his doubts about it.

  More and more, these days, there was an emphasis on size. Last year, the English dealer Arnulfus of Tewksbury had brought to Basel three whole mummified camels. These, he averred, were the very ones that had carried the magi to Bethlehem, bringing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Dismas friskily asked Arnulfus why he had not also brought with him the star in the east? Really, it was all getting a bit out of hand.

  How many years now had he been coming to the relic fair? His first time was in 1508, so—nearly ten, now. Realizing this made him feel old, for embedded in the math was the alas undeniable fact that he was now past thirty years of age.

  He thought back to the time he’d first stood here in the square, almost in this very spot. There’d been a quarter the number of booths and tents. Who’d have imagined such growth as this? The annus mirabilis was 1513. These last four years had been almost indecently profitable for Dismas, owing to the passion—lust, really—for relics on the part of his two principal clients.

  He bought a grilled sausage and a mug of lager from a vendor and, finding shade, consulted his purchase lists.

  Frederick’s wish list had four dozen items. Albrecht’s was, as usual, more extensive: nearly three hundred. Though he would never admit it—even to Dismas, his chief supplier—Albrecht was determined to catch up to Frederick, whose collection now stood at more than fifteen thousand holy relics. Dismas sighed. He was tempted to blow Albrecht’s entire budget on the St. Peter’s fishing boat and be done with it. Frederick’s list was, no surprise, far more discerning than Albrecht’s. Frederick wanted quality; Albrecht, quantity.

  “Saint Bartholomew—jaw particles, teeth, skull fragments (frontal).”

  Frederick was mad for St. Bartholomew. Insatiable. He owned more than forty relics of the apostle, including his entire facial skin. Bartholomew had been flayed alive by the King of Armenia for introducing Christianity. The apostolic epidermis was mounted in Wittenberg in a splendid jeweled monstrance.

  There were theories about Frederick’s Bartholomew obsession. One was that it was due to Bartholomew being the patron saint of bookbinders. Frederick was a great bibliophile. A more mischievous theory was that it was snobbery, Bartholomew being the only apostle born of noble blood, though Dismas could find no scriptural authority for this. Sometimes, when Frederick was in the right mood, Dismas teased him about it.

  St. Afra was also on Frederick’s list. Always a challenge, Afra. She reflected Frederick’s current taste for German saints. She’d been a prostitute of the Roman Temple of Venus in what was now Augsburg. She converted. When she refused to renounce her new god, she was taken to an island in the river Lech, tied to a stake, and suffocated with smoke. Frederick wanted her relics because she was a martyr of the Diocletian persecution and Diocletiana had long been a theme with him.

  Dismas rarely proposed a specific relic unless it was something truly unusual or spectacular. Frederick’s knowledge of the field was vast and scholarly. He’d been collecting relics since 1493, when he made his pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He knew exactly what he wanted and, happily for Dismas, he wanted a lot. His collection was now second only to the Vatican’s, which numbered some seventy-six thousand. But there was really no competing with Rome for relics.

  And yet—Dismas suspected that Frederick was competing with Rome. Certainly, Albrecht was competing with Frederick. Unlike Frederick, Albrecht was suggestible, especially where vogue entered in. When fourth-century Slavic martyrs became the rage, Albrecht dispatched Dismas to comb the Adriatic coast and corner the market. Frederick was above these vicissitudes. He set the chic.

  Dismas returned to his list.

  St. Agatha, patroness of wet nurses. A young and beautiful Sicilian girl, virgin, lusted for by the Roman consul. (How lucky, the homely, unlusted after female Christian converts.) Agatha refused the consul’s attentions and was handed over to the torturers. They sliced off her breasts, which miraculously grew back. The now livid consul ordered her to be roasted to death over coals. Frederick wanted a nipple, but any other part would do.

  After months and months of inquiry, Dismas reported to Frederick that no Agathan nipples were to be had. However, he had succeeded in locating a partly melted gold ring said to have been on her finger when she met her terrible but sanctifying end on a brazier in Catania, Anno Domini 250.

  As for St. Afra, another martyr requiring assiduous searching, he’d finally located a fragment of her patella. Given the time and effort that had gone into these two commissions, Dismas could have charged more than his usual commission. But he didn’t. If the search had been for Albrecht, he’d have surcharged triple.

  He consulted Albrecht’s list. Weaponry. Albrecht had a penchant for knives, daggers, axes—anything that had been used on a saint. One of his most treasured pieces was the hammer used to drive the nails into Christ’s hands and feet.

  Item: “Maurice—sword.” The one used to decapitate St. Maurice, Roman legionary of Thebes. During a campaign to punish the insurrectionary Helvetii, the Roman commander had ordered his men to sacrifice to the Roman gods. Maurice and other Christian converts in the ranks demurred. The commander ordered decimation, every tenth soldier killed. (Hardly morale boosting, in the middle of a campaign.) When the converts still refused, a second decimation was carried out. When they refused again, the commander ordered the entire troop slaughtered.

  No easy commission, this, but Dismas had a good relationship with a dealer in St. Gallen who’d sent word that he thought he could lay his hands on at least a portion of the sword hilt.

  Dismas worked his way down Albrecht’s list. Not another? Yes, another St. Sebastian arrow.

  Albrecht had a particular taste for apostate Roman soldiery, and in that category, St. Sebastian reigned as the beau ideal. Into the bargain, Sebastian was a member of the Emperor Diocletian’s own Praetorian Guard. The irony with Sebastiana was that he survived the firing squad of archers. Perhaps they’d taken pity on him and fired into nonessential parts. When Diocletian learned that his former bodyguard was still alive (if presumably heavily bandaged) and still ministering to Christians, he furiously ordered him to be hacked into pieces until well and truly dead, then tossed into the Cloaca Maxima, the Roman sewer. Sebastian arrows were always in demand, and not just by Albrecht. Over the course of his relic-hunting career, Dismas had come across enough of them to supply the entire Roman army.

  Next on Albrecht’s list was another item wielded by a Roman soldier. The Holy Lance. He sighed.

  Again and again—and again—Dismas had explained to the Archbishop, ever so patiently, that the “one and true” Holy Lance was simply not available. Yes, the relic marts teemed with “one and true” Holy Lances—dozens, scores. But as Dismas had pointed out, the spear tip most likely to have pierced Christ’s side was in a vault in St. Peter’s. In Rome. Since 1492, when Sultan Bayazid of Constantinople had gifted it to Pope Innocent VIII, by way of lessening the pontiff’s inclination to crusade. Dismas had told Albrecht that it was beyond all likelihood that the present Pope Leo X would part with such a prize piece. Though Leo, being Leo, might be induced to sell.
His asking price would be exorbitant. All this Dismas had explained, only to be told by Albrecht that he was not convinced that the one true Holy Lance really was in the Vatican. By which he meant: Just bring me a lance. Any lance.

  Since arriving in Basel a week ago, Dismas had been offered no fewer than ten “one and true” Holy Lances, one for as little as twenty-five gulden. Absurd. His integrity would not allow it, even if it meant being able to scratch “Holy Lance” off Albrecht’s wish list once and for all.

  In all his years of relic hunting, Dismas had never wittingly purchased or sold a relic he knew to be fraudulent. To be sure, with relics it was impossible to be entirely confident of the provenance. You never really knew that it was the thumb bone of St. Contumacious of Tyre, or a bar of the iron grille on which St. Lawrence was broiled alive. All you could do was honor your profession and the relevant questions: Did the relic emit fragrance? Had there been verification by ordeal? Had it caused a miraculous healing? Finally, had the saint permitted it to be stolen from its prior shrine? The correct term was “translation.” There was logic to it: Saints were living beings, even dead. No saint, or member of the Holy Family, would permit his or her relic to be translated from one owner to another unless they favored relocation.

  Another test was: Had the saint exacted punishment if his relic had been disrespected? St. Appianus had famously paralyzed a young woman when she squatted to urinate beside his tomb. She remained frozen in this mortifying posture until the entire town, including the bishop, interceded with prayers for her forgiveness.

  So at the end of the day, a reputable relic hunter had only his judgment—and honesty—on which to rely. Alas, of late there had been a marked increase in counterfeit and charlatanry, of hunters and dealers of the most dubious kind. Like all too many of the characters here in Basel.

  Dismas had shared his chagrin with Master Schenk, chief registrar of the relic fair. Schenk said, yes, yes, indeed, it was unfortunate. He suggested that Dismas, so respected by his peers, should address the exhibitors himself on the subject. Schenk would arrange it. Dismas could share his misgivings with the other brokers and vendors on the final day of the relic fair, at the farewell wine and cheese reception.