Relics of the foreskin appear in the record from the early Middle Ages, with a persistent tradition that Charlemagne gave one to the pope around the year 800, said to have been an angelic gift to the emperor. Through the medieval centuries rival prepuces were venerated in several French and Italian churches, including Charroux, Rome, Antwerp and later Calcata, each with its own legend of arrival. The obvious problem that a single body cannot have many foreskins fuelled scepticism even among the devout. In 1900 the Holy Office under Leo XIII issued a decree discouraging the cult and forbidding writing about it, effectively suppressing the devotion, while allowing Calcata north of Rome to keep its yearly procession on the feast of the Circumcision. In 1983 the Calcata relic was reported stolen from the parish, and it has never been found, ending the public history of the cult.
At the height of its medieval veneration, more than a dozen European churches simultaneously claimed to possess the Holy Prepuce, the purported foreskin of Jesus removed at his circumcision eight days after birth per Luke 2:21, a multiplication of claimants comparable to the proliferation of True Cross fragments recorded elsewhere in this atlas and, for the same reason, treated by relic scholars as itself evidence against any single claimant's authenticity. Rival relics were venerated at, among other sites, Rome's Basilica of St John Lateran, Coulombs in France, Chartres, and Calcata in Italy, each community maintaining its own independent tradition of how its particular relic had reached them, with no coordinating authority ever attempting to reconcile the competing claims into one recognised original.