The Crown of Thorns: A Ring of Rushes in Paris

On the evening of 15 April 2019, as the roof of Notre-Dame de Paris burned, the chaplain of the Paris fire brigade, Father Jean-Marc Fournier, went into the cathedral with firefighters to bring out its treasures. Among the objects carried to safety was a circlet about the size of a dinner plate, sealed in a ring of crystal and gold. Inside it was no thorn at all, only a ring of bundled rushes bound with gold thread. It is the object that King Louis IX of France bought for a sum close to half his annual revenue, and for which he built one of the most beautiful buildings in Europe. It is venerated as the Crown of Thorns placed on Jesus' head before his crucifixion.

This entry follows the crown from the Gospel text to the fire. It separates the documented chain of ownership, which runs from the thirteenth century, from the earlier tradition, which cannot be traced object by object.

The text

The crowning with thorns appears in Mark (15:17), Matthew (27:29) and John (19:2):

Καὶ οἱ στρατιῶται πλέξαντες στέφανον ἐξ ἀκανθῶν ἐπέθηκαν αὐτοῦ τῇ κεφαλῇ, καὶ ἱμάτιον πορφυροῦν περιέβαλον αὐτόν.
And the soldiers wove a crown of thorns and put it on his head, and they clothed him in a purple robe.

In the Gospels the crown is mockery: a parody of royal insignia placed on a man condemned as "King of the Jews". None of the Gospels records what became of it.

The documented history

• Late antiquity and Byzantium. Pilgrim accounts from late antiquity mention a crown of thorns venerated in Jerusalem. Later, a crown was kept among the Passion relics of the Byzantine emperors in Constantinople. The continuity between these and the Paris relic cannot be demonstrated object by object. It is a tradition of succession, not a chain of receipts.
• 1238. The Latin emperor of Constantinople, Baldwin II, was desperate for money. His barons had pledged the crown to Venetian lenders. Baldwin turned to Louis IX, who paid off the debt. Sources give the sum as 135,000 livres tournois, close to half the royal budget.
• 1239. Two Dominican friars escorted the relic to France. Louis received it in person, by the accounts barefoot and in penitential dress, and brought it to Paris.
• 1242–1248. Louis built the Sainte-Chapelle in his palace on the Île de la Cité as a walk-in reliquary for the crown and his other Passion relics. Most of its walls are stained glass.
• French Revolution. The Sainte-Chapelle's treasury was dispersed and many reliquaries were melted down. The crown survived and was placed in the Bibliothèque nationale. In 1806 it was given to Notre-Dame.
• 2019. It was rescued from the fire and kept for safety at the Louvre.
• December 2024. At the cathedral's reopening it was returned to Notre-Dame in a new reliquary designed by Sylvain Dubuisson, installed in the axial chapel behind the choir. It is shown for veneration on set days.

The object

What Paris holds is a circlet of rushes, a ring of bundled plant stems about 21 cm across, held together by gold thread. It has no thorns. Over the centuries individual thorns were detached and given as gifts by Byzantine emperors and French kings. That is why many churches across Europe claim a "Holy Thorn". One of the finest reliquaries made for such a thorn, the Holy Thorn Reliquary made for the Duc de Berry (c. 1390s), is now in the British Museum. Some historians have suggested that the rush ring once supported thorny branches woven around or into it. That reconstruction is a hypothesis.

The ring has not been radiocarbon-dated, and no botanical study establishing its age has been published. Its age and origin before the thirteenth century are unknown.

Symbology and sacred meaning

A crown that inverts kingship. In the Gospels the crown is a parody of royalty. Christian theology turned the parody around, so that the true king is crowned in suffering. That inversion drives the late-medieval image of Christ as Man of Sorrows, crowned with thorns and displaying his wounds.

The building as reliquary. The Sainte-Chapelle is architecture used as a shrine. Its upper chapel is a cage of stained glass, telling the biblical story from Genesis to the arrival of the relics in Paris. The windows literally write Louis IX's acquisition into sacred history. It is one of the clearest documented cases of a building designed as a theological statement around a single object.

Sacred kingship. For Louis IX, later canonised as Saint Louis, owning the crown bound the French monarchy to Christ's kingship. The relic and its chapel were political theology in stone, glass and gold.

The Arma Christi. In late-medieval devotion the crown joined the lance, nails, scourge, sponge and dice as the "weapons of Christ" (Arma Christi). They were a visual rosary of the Passion, painted in books of hours and carved on church furniture. Each instrument called up one moment of meditation.

Connections

The crown belongs with the archive's chapter on scholasticism and the high-medieval church (ch28), the Byzantine chapter (ch60), and the theme chapter on sacred kingship (ch49). In the Vault it sits beside the Holy Lance (V05), part of the same Constantinopolitan relic hoard that the Latin emperors dispersed, and the Shroud of Turin (V04).

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/crown-of-thorns.html