either of Jesus himself and his apostles or of the early martyrs.
The circulation of fragments of martyrs’ bones and clothing,
which had begun in the fourth century, continued to flourish
throughout the medieval period. From the eleventh century
onwards, moreover, the relic trade in western Europe was supple-
mented by an influx of material from the eastern Mediterranean.
Crusades to bring the Holy Land under Christain control were
accompanied by a scramble for relics, particularly those associ-
ated, often on spurious or legendary grounds, with Jesus and his
disciples: hence the many fragments of the True Cross and the
quest for the Holy Grail. Moreover, western Christians were
not averse to plundering the relic collections of their Eastern
Orthodox brethren. In particular, the thuggish vandalism of 1204,
when the armies of the Fourth Crusade ransacked Constantinople
rather than push on to Jerusalem, led to a veritable deluge of early
Christian artefacts making their way west (Geary 1994: 194–256).
In sum we can see that throughout the middle ages early
Christianity continued to be viewed, much as it had been in
Eusebius of Caesarea’s time, as part of the living tradition of the
church, a source of inspiration to later generations of Christians.
Throughout the middle ages, the early Christian past had been
conceived of within biblical traditions that divided the history of
the world into seven ages. The first five – marked by pivotal events
such as the Creation of the world, the Flood, the birth of the
patriarch Abraham, the reign of king David, and the captivity of
Israel in Babylon – culminated with the birth of Christ. Thereafter
came the sixth age, in which scholars in the middle ages believed
they were living, and which would endure until Christ’s Second
Coming, at which juncture the seventh age would begin (Hay
1977: 27–9). Early Christianity, then, was not a remote, discrete
period in the minds of medieval scholars; rather, it was part of
this sixth age in which they themselves also lived. But from the
fifteenth century onwards there occurred a revolution in European
intellectual behaviour that brought about significant changes in
how early Christianity was regarded.THE HISTORICAL QUEST FOR EARLY CHRISTIANITY
48