Cadouin shroud

The extremity of the cloth is decorated with two strips of tapestry. The first has a series of discs with a green ground enclosing a vermilion cartouche decorated with a fleuron. In the intervals of this series are yellow palmettes. The second is made up of three tangential registers: the one in the middle repeats the decorations in the first strip. The other two, with black grounds, have a line of white writing whose vertical strokes make up regular intervals. In each of these compartments there is an inclined stem, terminating in a red and white knob.

This cloth, held in the Abbey of Cadouin, in Dordogne, was long considered as the Holy Shroud, the cloth believed to have covered the face of Jesus–or enveloped his body–when he was placed in the tomb. This is the head-cloth that the Apostle Peter saw upon entering the sepulchre on the morning of the Resurrection; he observed ‘that the handkerchief that had been on Jesus' head was not lying with the linen cloths but was rolled up in a separate place’ (John 20:7). According to the traditions of the monks of Cadouin and the Chronica of Albéric of Trois-Fontaines, written around the mid thirteenth century, the relic came into the possession of the Bishop of Puy, Adhémar de Monteil, who is believed to have obtained it after the capture of Antioch, during the first Crusade  (1095–1099). It was first mentioned in 1214. The cloth, used for healing, was highly venerated in the Middle Ages. Protected by a reliquary, sometimes hidden and displaced to avoid covetous attention, it attracted to the abbey the thousands of pilgrims on The Way of St James.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, its authenticity was questioned. Around 1930, the cloth was examined by Gaston Wiet, director of the Museum of Arab Art in Cairo. He recognized a tirāz from the Fatimid era (a cloth with a strip of writing produced in the royal ateliers), and deciphered the Arabic inscriptions on it. They revealed the names of Caliph El al-Musta‘lī (reigned 1094–1101) and Vizier al-Afdal. The piece’s decorative style, with its close ornamental strips, tiny elements, and Kūfic calligraphy is characteristic of the end of the eleventh century, as is the lamentation of the name of al-Afdal, minister for three kings. The weaving technique that consisted of inserting a decorative tapestry in a canvass weave—here with silk warp and linen weft—is also an invention of the Copts in Egypt, who had perfected the technique at the end of the third century. It only disappeared with the fall of the Fatimid dynasty (1171). No doubt brought by émigrés, it can be seen in Muslim Spain in certain cloths from the caliphal era, especially in the veil of Hishām II[1]. It was also used in Shustar, in Iranian Khuzistān.

The role played by Muslim textiles in the cult of relics in the medieval West is a major phenomenon[2]. Their distant origins and the unfamiliarity of their inscriptions and motifs gave them an incontestable authenticity. Like the veil of St Anne held at in Apt (Vaucluse, France), the Cadouin shroud is traditionally related to the capture of Antioch (1098). Because of the veneration for them, these are actually the only Fatimid cloths that are completely intact.

When he became familiar with the results of the study carried out by Gaston Wiet, the bishop of Périgueux stopped the pilgrimage to Cadouin in 1934. Today, the piece is exhibited in a capitular room of the Abbey’s cloister.

[2] In Assisi,  a silk Fatimid veil from the twelfth century was deposited in the reliquary of St André, made in 1288. Another Fatimid cloth, inscribed with the name of Caliph al-Hākim, previously held in the treasury of Saint-Denis and Notre-Dame de Paris, is believed to have been brought from Palestine by Saint-Louis (reigned 1226-1270). The ‘shroud’ of Cadouin, like the veil of Saint-Anne d’Apt, the belt of the Virgin, held in Loches Church, and the dress of the Virgin (ninth century, Byzantium or the Near-East), held in Chartres Cathedral, were all cult objects because they were relics.