The Relics

The bodily relics of Andrew the First-Called have a documented history of removal and translation reaching back to late antiquity: buried at Patras after his martyrdom, his relics were carried to Constantinople in the mid-fourth century to dignify the new imperial capital, scattered westward in the Latin sack of 1204, and partly reunited at Patras only in the twentieth century. The translations are well attested; the historical certainty that any given fragment is the apostle’s own cannot be supplied across nineteen centuries. This entry reports the tradition and the documented translations, and certifies no relic.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

The Burial at Patras

The relic-history begins where the martyrdom-history ends. The tradition fixes Andrew’s death at Patras (Patrae) in Achaia, in the northwest Peloponnese, where according to the developed passion-narratives he was crucified on the cross that took his name (the martyrdom itself, and the late character of the sources that describe it, are treated at The Cross of Patras). After the martyrdom the body was buried at Patras, and it is from this Patrene grave that every later translation is reckoned. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church registers both the Patras martyrdom and the city as the original resting-place of the relics (ODCC, 3rd ed., s.v. “Andrew, St.”). The place of burial matters for the whole subsequent story: Patras is the fixed origin-point, and the city’s modern claim to the relics is in part a claim to recover what was taken from it.

The Translation to Constantinople (357)

The first and most consequential translation is firmly dated. In AD 357, under the emperor Constantius II, relics of Andrew — together with those of the Evangelist Luke and of Timothy — were brought to Constantinople and deposited in the Church of the Holy Apostles, the great cruciform church that Constantine had raised as an imperial mausoleum for himself (Mango, “Constantine’s Mausoleum and the Translation of Relics,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 83 [1990]: 51–62; Dvornik 1958). Cyril Mango’s study reconstructs the circumstances in detail: Constantine’s church had been built to house the emperor’s own tomb ringed by cenotaphs of the Twelve Apostles, and the actual apostolic relics were introduced under his son Constantius to supply the bodies that the founder’s scheme had only symbolized. Mango places the deposition of Andrew, Luke and Timothy in this context and dates the relevant translation to 357 (Mango 1990, 51–62).

The significance of the act is ecclesiological as much as devotional. Constantinople, the New Rome, possessed civic and conciliar dignity but lacked the tombs of apostles that anchored Rome’s prestige; the importation of apostolic relics in 357 gave the imperial city its own apostolic deposit. This is precisely the material substrate that the later Andrew foundation-legend would build upon — the dignity the translation served is the subject of The Apostolic Throne of Constantinople. It is worth marking the distinction the sources require: the fourth-century translation of relics is one thing, well attested by Mango and Dvornik; the medieval claim that Andrew personally founded the see is another, and later, matter (Dvornik 1958). The relics came to Constantinople in 357; the legend that Andrew had once governed Byzantium came centuries afterward.

[Disputed: the exact date and contents of the fourth-century translation. The deposition in the Church of the Holy Apostles is variously dated to 356 or 357, and the sources do not perfectly agree on whether all three sets of relics (Andrew, Luke, Timothy) arrived together in a single translation or were brought in stages; Mango (“Constantine’s Mausoleum and the Translation of Relics,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 83 [1990]: 51–62) reconstructs the event critically and settles on 357, while older notices give 356. The fact of a mid-fourth-century translation of Andrew’s relics to Constantinople is not in doubt; the precise year and the precise grouping are. See also Dvornik 1958.]

The Latin Sack of 1204 and the Translation to Amalfi

For some eight and a half centuries the relics rested at the Holy Apostles, among the most venerated possessions of Byzantine Constantinople. They were dispersed by the catastrophe of the Fourth Crusade. When the crusading army stormed and sacked Constantinople in 1204 and established the Latin Empire, the relic-treasuries of the city were plundered and their contents carried west into Latin Europe — one of the largest movements of relics in the medieval period. Among the relics taken was the body of Andrew, brought to Italy by Cardinal Peter of Capua, the papal legate, who deposited it at Amalfi in the southern Italian region of Campania in 1208 (ODCC, 3rd ed., s.v. “Andrew, St.”). There the relics were enshrined in the crypt of the cathedral of Amalfi — the Duomo di Sant’Andrea — which has remained their resting-place and the center of Andrew’s western cult ever since. Amalfi thus holds the principal body-relics of the apostle to this day, in the crypt beneath its cathedral, a fruit of the same 1204 sack that so embittered relations between the Churches.

The Skull: To Rome, and Home Again in 1964

The head, or skull, of Andrew followed a separate and later path. It was carried to Rome in the fifteenth century by Thomas Palaiologos, the brother of the last Byzantine emperor and Despot of the Morea, who fled the Ottoman advance in the Peloponnese carrying the relic with him; in 1462 he presented the skull of Andrew to Pope Pius II, and it was enshrined in St. Peter’s Basilica, where it was kept for five centuries. The return of this relic is the best-documented episode in the whole history. In 1964 Pope Paul VI, in a gesture of goodwill toward the Orthodox during the rapprochement of the Second Vatican Council era, returned the skull of Andrew from Rome to the Church of St. Andrew at Patras, restoring to the city of the martyrdom a relic that had been five hundred years and more in the West. The 1964 restitution belongs to the same conciliatory impulse as the contemporaneous lifting of the mutual excommunications of 1054 between Paul VI and the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras, and it is regularly cited as a concrete sign of the reopening between Rome and Orthodoxy.

The Relics at Patras Today

Patras today is the principal Orthodox shrine of the apostle. The great Church of St. Andrew at Patras — a vast domed basilica completed in the twentieth century and reckoned the largest church in Greece — houses the relics that have returned to the city: the skull restored by Paul VI in 1964, and a relic of the cross of Andrew’s martyrdom, venerated together as the city’s apostolic treasure. The feast of Andrew the First-Called on November 30 is kept at Patras as the patronal celebration, drawing pilgrims to the relics of the saint whose name and crucifixion the city has carried since antiquity (the feast and Andrew’s many patronages are treated at Veneration and Patronages). Between Amalfi, which keeps the body, and Patras, which has recovered the head and a relic of the cross, the physical cult of Andrew is now divided between West and East — a division that is itself a map of the translations: Patras the origin, Constantinople the imperial enrichment of 357, Amalfi the legacy of 1204, and Patras again the beneficiary of the twentieth-century return.

A Caveat on Certification

The translations narrated above are matters of documentary record: the 357 deposition is reconstructed by Mango and Dvornik from the sources; the Amalfi translation of 1208 and the Roman and Patrene history of the skull, including the 1964 return, are well attested. What cannot be supplied is historical certification that the relics moved in each translation are, as physical fact, the bodily remains of the apostle who died at Patras. Nineteen centuries, repeated removals, partitions, and the disorder of the 1204 sack all lie between the grave and the present shrines, and no method available to the historian can close that gap by certificate. In keeping with the method of this collection (METHODOLOGY §3.5), what is reported here is the tradition and the documented chain of translations — not a verdict that any given relic is authentic. The relic is venerated as Andrew’s; the historian records the venerable and well-evidenced history of its movements and declines to issue an authentication the evidence cannot bear.

References

Mango, Cyril. “Constantine’s Mausoleum and the Translation of Relics.” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 83 (1990): 51–62. (The critical reconstruction of the Church of the Holy Apostles as Constantine’s mausoleum and of the translation of the relics of Andrew, Luke and Timothy under Constantius II, dated to 357.)
Dvornik, Francis. The Idea of Apostolicity in Byzantium and the Legend of the Apostle Andrew. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958. (The foundational study of the Andrew tradition, including the fourth-century translation of relics to Constantinople and its service to the apostolic dignity of the see; distinguishes the translation from the later foundation-legend.)
Cross, F. L., and E. A. Livingstone, eds. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, s.v. “Andrew, St.” (The martyrdom and burial at Patras; the translation of the relics to Constantinople; the carrying of the body to Amalfi by Cardinal Peter of Capua in 1208; the history of the skull, including its presence at Rome and the modern return.)