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the many surviving examples of “St Menas ?asks”. St Menas was a mar-
tyr and wonder-worker whose shrine was near Alexandria in Egypt, and

?asks containing oil from the shrine were given to pilgrims. These have
been found as far a?eld as England, Germany, Italy, France, Sudan Tur-
key and Jerusalem. In Rome, pilgrims would lower pieces of cloth, called
brandea, into the tombs of the saints and carry those away as relics19.

As the practice of pilgrimage grew people would sometimes travel
long distances to visit a saint’s tomb. And this created new routes of
communication and therefore trade. Fairs were held on saint’s days

around the churches enshrining their remains, and trade was often
brisk. The cult of relics changed the economic geography of Europe.

Along with the cult of relics there came the art of the reliquary.

The British Museum exhibition, “Treasures of Heaven”, held a couple of
years ago, was hugely popular and assembled many splendid examples of
containers for holy relics from di?erent centuries.

The demand for relics led of course to a trade and some abuses.

As early as the Fourth Century St Augustine of Hippo denounced some
monks who travelled around selling dubious relics20 , a problem which
has resurfaced in every age. The desire to possess relics led to rivalry,

fraud, and theft. Even the greatest relics were not immune; the reliquar-
ies containing the heads of St Peter and St Paul in the Lateran Basilica,
the cathedral of the Bishop of Rome, have been stolen and recovered

many times.
There were also completely indefensible acts such as the sack of

Constantinople, in which hundreds of relics and other sacred treasures
were looted and brought into the West. Some of the looted objects have

been returned in recent years in gestures of reconciliation, but the
crimes of the past still cast long shadows over the present relationship
between the churches.

In the West, the golden age of relics and reliquaries was the calm
before the storm. The currents of thought that led to the Reformation

19 Bentley, op. cit., p 44
20 Sox, op. cit., p 8

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