The Relics and Venice

The body of St. Mark, buried at Alexandria after his martyrdom, became one of the most storied relics of Christendom. In 828 Venetian merchants removed it from Alexandria to Venice, where it became the treasure and the patron of the city, enshrined in the Basilica of San Marco, and where the winged lion of St. Mark became the emblem of the Venetian Republic. In 1968 a portion of the relics was returned to Cairo by Pope Paul VI to the Coptic Pope Cyril VI. This file traces the relics of St. Mark through these translations.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle and Evangelist)

The Relics at Alexandria

After his martyrdom (see The Martyrdom), Mark was buried by the Christians at Boukolou, the district east of Alexandria where he had been seized, in a tomb cut into the rock beside the church (the Acts of Mark; the History of the Patriarchs, trans. Evetts, PO 1). There his relics rested and were venerated for some eight centuries, a focus of the devotion of the Alexandrian church and the resting-place of its founding apostle. The shrine survived the persecutions, the Christological divisions of the see, and the Arab conquest of Egypt in the seventh century, remaining in Christian hands as a place of pilgrimage into the ninth century.

The Translation to Venice (828)

In 828 the relics were carried off to Venice. According to the ninth-century Venetian account, the Translatio Sancti Marci, two Venetian merchants — named Buono of Malamocco and Rustico of Torcello — removed the body of St. Mark from its shrine at Alexandria, with the connivance (the account says) of the Greek monks who guarded it and who feared the relics might be desecrated amid the troubles of Muslim Egypt. To smuggle the relics past the Muslim customs officials, the merchants are said to have concealed the body in a basket or barrel under a layer of pork, which the inspectors, as Muslims, would not touch or search (the Translatio Sancti Marci; Geary, Furta Sacra, 1990). The relics were carried by ship to Venice and presented to the Doge.

This episode belongs to the medieval phenomenon of furta sacra — the “holy thefts” of relics, which the age regarded not as crimes but as the saint’s own choice to be translated to a new home (Geary, Furta Sacra, 1990) [Disputed: the *Translatio Sancti Marci* is a Venetian account written to justify and glorify the acquisition; its details (the names of the merchants, the pork stratagem, the monks' consent) are the claims of an interested ninth-century source and are received as pious tradition rather than as documented fact]. Whatever the precise circumstances, the relics of St. Mark were in Venice by 828, and their arrival transformed the city.

Mark, Patron of Venice

The acquisition of so great a relic gave Venice an apostolic patron to rival the great sees. St. Mark displaced the earlier patron, St. Theodore, as the protector of the city; the cry “Viva San Marco!” became the rallying-word of the Republic. To house the relics the Venetians built, beside the Doge’s palace, the great Basilica of San Marco — begun in the ninth century and rebuilt in the eleventh in its present Byzantine splendor — which became the ducal chapel and the spiritual heart of Venice. The relics were enshrined beneath the high altar (and, after being lost in a fire and “rediscovered” in 1094, re-enshrined with great ceremony). The winged lion of St. Mark — the evangelist’s symbol (see Veneration and the Lion) — became the emblem of the Venetian Republic, blazoned on its banners, its coins, and its possessions throughout the Mediterranean, usually shown holding an open book inscribed Pax tibi Marce, evangelista meus (“Peace to thee, Mark, my evangelist”). For nearly a thousand years St. Mark and his lion were the very identity of Venice.

The Return to Cairo (1968)

The relics’ last great chapter is modern and ecumenical. In 1968 a portion of the relics of St. Mark was returned from Venice to Egypt. As the Coptic Orthodox Church completed the new Cathedral of St. Mark in Cairo (the seat of the Coptic Pope), Pope Paul VI of Rome presented a relic of St. Mark to the Coptic Pope Cyril VI (Kyrillos VI), and the relic was received in Cairo and enshrined in the new cathedral amid great celebration in June 1968, more than eleven centuries after the body had left Alexandria. The gesture — the bishop of Rome returning the relic of the founder of Alexandria to the successor of St. Mark’s own see — was received as a sign of reconciliation between the Churches and as the homecoming of the apostle to the land he had evangelized. The Coptic Church keeps the memory of this return among the feasts associated with St. Mark, and a portion of his relics now rests once more in Egypt, while the principal relics remain in Venice.

The Meaning of the Relics

The history of Mark’s relics is, in miniature, a history of the Church’s veneration of the saints and of the way the bodies of the holy ones bind together places and ages. The Orthodox theology of relics — that the bodies of the saints, sanctified by the indwelling Spirit and destined for resurrection, are worthy of honor and become channels of grace — underlies the whole story, from the rock-hewn tomb at Boukolou to the high altar of San Marco to the cathedral in Cairo. The translations also trace the strange paths of Church history: a Galilean-Jewish evangelist martyred in Roman Egypt, his body carried by Italian merchants to a lagoon-city that made him its patron and his lion its flag, and a portion returned in the twentieth century in a gesture of reconciliation between Rome, Venice, and the Coptic successors of his see. Through it all the relics testify to the enduring honor in which the Church holds the Apostle and Evangelist Mark (on the theology of veneration and the lion-symbol, see Veneration and the Lion).

See Also

References

  • The Translatio Sancti Marci (the ninth-century Venetian account of the translation of the relics). Discussed in McCleary and other studies of the Venetian cult.
  • Geary, Patrick J. Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages. Rev. ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990 (the translation of St. Mark to Venice as furta sacra).
  • The History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria (Severus of Al’Ashmunein). Trans. B. Evetts, Patrologia Orientalis 1 (the burial at Alexandria).
  • Demus, Otto. The Church of San Marco in Venice: History, Architecture, Sculpture. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1960.
  • Atiya, Aziz S., ed. The Coptic Encyclopedia. New York: Macmillan, 1991 (entries on St. Mark, the relics, and the 1968 return).