ABSTRACT
On 21 May 630 the emperor Heraclius restored the relics of the True Cross in a grand ceremony in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Aelia Capitolina/ Jerusalem.1 By the beginning of the seventh century, Jerusalem was the Christian city par excellence, the emblematic capital of Christianity and the symbolic centre of the world. Over the centuries, the Christian ideology of the later Roman Empire and of its emperors had become closely connected with the city of Jerusalem and with the most important symbol the city had given to the world of Christendom: the Cross, which stood for life, salvation, victory and power. While the capture of Jerusalem and the Cross by the Sasanids in the spring of 614 must therefore have been felt as a tremendous shock and defeat, the return of the cross relics to their city of origin sixteen years later was celebrated by Heraclius, the inhabitants of Jerusalem and the whole Christian world as a great victory. In spite of the great symbolic importance of Jerusalem in the Christian world and the imperial attention it received from Constantinople, it is a remarkable fact that Heraclius was the only Christian Roman emperor who ever visited the city. The restitutio crucis was evidenty an event laden with great symbolic meaning. Apart from restoring Jerusalem to its former glory, it presented Heraclius with
* Earlier versions of this paper were presented not only at the Conversion in Late Antiquity seminar in Oxford (24 April 2010), but also at a colloquium about Jerusalem at the Radboud University Nijmegen (27 May 2011), the conference ‘Religious Practices and Christianisation of the Late Antique City’ (Brussels, 19-21 January 2012) and the annual conference of the Israel Association for Byzantine Studies (Tel Aviv, 1 March 2012). I am grateful for the remarks and observations of the participants at these meetings from which this article profited greatly.
