ABSTRACT
In october 1191, six months after his election as Pope, the aged Celestine III, who had been Alexander III’s fellow exile in France, welcomed with great honour and reverence the French King Philip II, visiting Rome on his return from the Crusade to the Holy Land.1 In a period when pilgrimages to Jerusalem (as well as to Compostela) had become more and more popular, almost overshadowing the devout ad limina journey to Rome, the pope decided to show the king and his retinue what must have been the most highly prized and impressive Roman relics of the time: the heads of Peter and Paul, the ‘bulwarks’ of the Roman Church, and the Veronica or Holy Face (the Sudarium), the cloth miraculously imprinted with the face of Christ on the road to Calvary.2 The decision to ‘display’ these remains before the King of France, instead of conducting him to pray at the tomb of a martyr or saint, seems to reflect the devout visitors’ and pilgrims’ increasing demands to see and even touch relics. Such demands had generated corruption, abuses, and the production of false relics for profit, as well as scepticism and criticism, which found expression in treatises and writings against false saints and relics.3
