Charlemagne, the Nuns, and the Revolution

The Argenteuil tradition holds that the tunic came west as an imperial gift: the Byzantine empress Irene is said to have sent it to Charlemagne, who around the year 800 gave it to his daughter Theodrade, a nun and later abbess at Argenteuil. During the Viking raids on the Seine the nuns reportedly walled the relic up for safety, and it was found again by the monks of the priory of Saint-Denys around 1156, after which its record at Argenteuil is continuous. Its most dramatic escape came during the French Revolution, when the parish priest Ozet, fearing the relic would be seized and destroyed, cut the tunic into several pieces and hid them separately; after the Terror the surviving fragments were recovered and sewn back together, which accounts for the garment's present patched state. The current basilica of Saint-Denys, a neo-Romanesque church, was built between 1862 and 1866 specifically to shelter the tunic and to accommodate the crowds who come to venerate it.