ABSTRACT

In the early spring of 1205 – less than a year after contingents of French, Flemish and Venetian crusaders captured the city of Constantinople and established a new Latin empire in the East – the same men began to send relics from the Byzantine capital to churches, chapels and individuals in the West. It was during that spring that Count Louis of Blois, one of the

*Email: anne.lester@colorado.edu 1 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Poems and Other Writings (New York: Penguin, 2000), 616. 2 Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: a History of the Image Before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 10.