The True Home of the Crown of Thorns
The restoration of Notre Dame is to be celebrated, but the Crown of Thorns belongs in Sainte-Chapelle.

The burning of Notre-Dame, on the 15th April 2019, marked a painfully symbolic nadir in the fortunes of modern France, Europe, and broader Christendom. Five years on, a satisfactory explanation has yet to be provided as to what, or who, was behind this act, which only compounds the disaster and suspicion surrounding it — especially in light of the spate of unambiguous arson attacks against churches across France ever since.
Nevertheless, on the 8th of December 2024, the restored Cathedral was reopened to the world, in a grand ceremony cynically attended by many world leaders — many of whose governments were presiding, live, over the abandonment of one of the world’s oldest Christian communities.
Yet there was another highly symbolic moment to accompany the proceedings, in the form of what has widely been referred to in the media as the “return” of one of the holiest relics in Christendom to Notre-Dame last week, on Friday the 13th no less.
Triumphant was the imagery, yet to label this “the return” of the Crown of Thorns betrays its true history, and its true home — which lies less than five hundred yards away…
The Veneration of the Crown of Thorns
“Then Pilate therefore took Jesus, and scourged him. And the soldiers platted a crown of thorns, and put it on his head, and they put on him a purple robe, and said, Hail, King of the Jews! and they smote him with their hands.
Pilate therefore went forth again, and saith unto them, Behold, I bring him forth to you, that ye may know that I find no fault in him. Then came Jesus forth, wearing the crown of thorns, and the purple robe. And Pilate saith unto them, Behold the man!”
John 19:1-5
Second only to the Cross itself as the most iconic of the Instruments of the Passion, the Crown of Thorns was intended to humiliate Christ and mock the legitimacy of the divine kingship. Yet such an act only served to ensure its reverence as a holy relic ever after.
One of the earliest unambiguous references to the practice of this is the word of Saint Paulinus of Nola, who recorded that in the year AD 409, the Crown was being venerated by the faithful in Jerusalem. Over a century later, Cassiodorus in his commentaries on Psalm 86 exalts the Crown as it dwells in the Holy City, “set upon the head of Our Redeemer such that all the thorns of the world might as one be broken”. Multiple accounts, including that of the Pilgrim Bernard, attest to the housing of the relic on Mount Zion at least until AD 870.
While individual thorns are recorded as having been gifted to Christian sovereigns during the latter centuries of the first millennium, and the former centuries of the second, it is generally sustained that the remainder of the Crown was moved to Constantinople, seat of the Eastern Roman Empire, during the reign of the Emperor Constantine X in AD 1063.
Such a move can be readily explained by the rapidly deteriorating position of the Romans in the East, with the old limes of the Empire by then thoroughly overrun by the Seljuks, and the Levant and even Anatolia herself seemingly lost for good. Moreover, the 11th century would witness the increasingly violent end to the relative tolerance until then displayed by the Caliphs of Islam towards the Christians of the Holy Land.
How did the Crown of Thorns come to France?
The trail becomes irrefutably concrete in the 13th century, after the Fourth Crusade had reduced Constantinople to the ‘Latin Empire’ — a vassal state of the Republic of Venice. In dire need of funds, the last Latin Emperor Baldwin II pawned the Crown of Thorns to his overlords in exchange for a hefty loan. In 1238, with his situation scarcely better, the Emperor offered the relic to Louis IX, King of France.
By agreement with both the Latins and Venetians, Louis paid an estimated 135,000 livres, near half the annual revenues of the French Crown, to spare the sacred wreath further indignity. Yet it was no earthly cynicism nor reckless profligacy which drove the young King.
A profoundly pious man, and the only King of France thus far to be canonised, King Saint Louis IX ranks among the most virtuous of all Christian princes. As a boy, Louis would take to heart the words of his mother, Blanche of Castile — “I love you, my dear son, as much as a mother can love her child, but I would rather see you dead at my feet than that you should ever commit a mortal sin.” As King, he would incarnate both regality and humility before his subjects and God alike.
The charity of Louis was legendary. Poverty, not arrogance, would earn one invitation to the royal palace, where a hundred among the needy would be fed from the King’s table every day. As often as he was able, the King served them and washed their feet by his own hand. Should any out of want or desperation beseech him, he would move Heaven and Earth to receive them, and never would such an audience conclude without his generosity.
As was ever the most ancient charge of Christian monarchy, the King served dutifully as the arbiter of earthly justice. Following attendance at church, Louis would often settle beneath a nearby oak and call out to the crowd, “Have any here a case to settle?” Whenever dispute might then arise between the wealthy and the poor, Louis was predisposed to give his most diligent attention to the latter, asserting that the former could already have counted on many ears.
Thus when the Crown of Thorns entered the stewardship of this monarch, it was with such fervour that he resolved to house this Instrument, its barbs stained with the blood of the Saviour, in the grandest reliquary of them all — Sainte-Chapelle.
The Holy Chapel

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