A linen cloth bearing the faint front-and-back image of a man, first recorded at Lirey in Champagne in the 1350s and radiocarbon-dated in 1988 to between 1260 and 1390.
The Shroud of Turin is a length of linen about 4.4 metres long and 1.1 metres wide carrying the faint image of the front and back of a naked man, head to head, as though a body had been laid along one half of the cloth and the other half drawn over it. It has been kept in Turin since 1578, and many Catholics venerate it as the cloth in which Jesus was buried.
Its medieval history is unusually well documented and runs in a straight line: first shown at the collegiate church of Lirey in Champagne in the 1350s, denounced as a painting by the bishops of Troyes, permitted by Clement VII in 1390 only as a representation of Christ's shroud, and passed to the House of Savoy in 1453. When the linen was radiocarbon-dated in 1988, the laboratories placed it between 1260 and 1390, the same window in which the documents first find it.
The linen is woven in a three-to-one herringbone twill. The figure is not drawn in outline but appears as a faint sepia discolouration, with the hands crossed over the groin, and it reads far more clearly in photographic negative than to the naked eye. That is why the first photograph of the cloth, taken by Secondo Pia on 28 May 1898, turned a late-medieval controversy into a modern one.
The most visible marks on the cloth are damage rather than the figure. On 4 December 1532 fire broke out in the chapel of the dukes of Savoy at Chambéry, and molten silver burned holes and scorch lines down both long sides of the linen. Poor Clare nuns of Chambéry repaired it between 16 April and 2 May 1534, sewing on fourteen large triangular patches and eight smaller ones over a Holland-cloth backing. The 2002 conservation removed the patches and the backing, an intervention that has itself been criticised as damaging.
Geoffroi de Charny, lord of Savoisy and Lirey, founded a collegiate church at Lirey dedicated to the Annunciation on 20 June 1353. The foundation charter says nothing about the cloth. What ties him to it is later testimony from his son Geoffroi II and his granddaughter Margaret, and a pilgrim badge now in the Musée de Cluny in Paris showing the cloth beside the arms of Charny and of his wife Jeanne de Vergy.
Charny was a renowned knight of the French court, the author of a book of questions on chivalry, and in 1356 the bearer of the Oriflamme, the royal war banner, for John II of France. He was killed holding it at the Battle of Poitiers on 19 September 1356. The exhibitions at Lirey were probably overseen by his widow, and they drew enough notice for Henri, bishop of Troyes, to open an inquiry and stop them.
Attempts to give the cloth an earlier history, by identifying it with a burial cloth owned by the Byzantine emperors that vanished when the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople in 1204, rest on that identification alone. No document connects the Byzantine cloth to the one exhibited at Lirey a century and a half later.
In 1389 Pierre d'Arcis, bishop of Troyes, wrote to Clement VII, the Avignon pope of the Western Schism. His memorandum states that his predecessor Henri had found the cloth to be "cunningly painted", the truth "attested by the artist who had painted it". It names neither the artist nor any record of the inquiry. Charles VI of France ordered the cloth brought to Troyes, but his officers could not carry out the order.
Clement VII answered in four bulls dated 6 January 1390. The exhibitions could continue, but the cloth was not to be treated as a relic, and whoever displayed it had to declare that it was not the true shroud of Christ but an image or representation of it. The bulls attached indulgences to devotion on those terms, accepting neither d'Arcis's charge of forgery nor the cloth's claim to be a relic.
In 1418 Humbert of Villersexel, count of La Roche and husband of Charny's granddaughter Margaret, took the cloth from Lirey for protection to his castle at Montfort in the Doubs. It was a year of open war in France: the Burgundians seized Paris that May, and by the end of July Henry V had begun the Siege of Rouen. After Humbert's death the Lirey canons sued for the cloth's return, but the parlement of Dole and the court at Besançon found for Margaret, who kept it and travelled with it, exhibiting it as she went.
The canons never had it back. In 1453 Margaret passed the cloth to Louis, duke of Savoy, receiving the castle of Varambon in return; the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia dates the transfer to 1452. It is the last step in the cloth's medieval documentary history. In 1464 Louis agreed to pay the Lirey canons an annual sum to settle their claim, and the Shroud became a dynastic relic of the House of Savoy.
On 21 April 1988 samples were cut from a single site on the main body of the cloth, away from the patches and scorch marks, and shared between laboratories at the University of Oxford, the University of Arizona in Tucson and ETH Zürich. Working independently, they placed the flax between 1260 and 1390 at 95 per cent confidence. The result was announced on 13 October 1988 and published by P. E. Damon and colleagues in Nature in 1989.
The dates fall across the decades in which the documents first find the cloth at Lirey. The principal objection, Raymond Rogers's argument that the sample came from a medieval repair rather than the original weave, has not persuaded textile specialists: the conservator Mechthild Flury-Lemberg judged invisible reweaving of that kind technically impossible without visible traces. How the image itself was formed has never been explained, and the Catholic Church has made no ruling on authenticity; Pope Francis called the cloth "an icon of a man scourged and crucified" while stopping short of calling it the burial cloth of Christ.