Church of the Virgin of the Pharos

[7] Together with the churches of St Stephen in the Daphne Palace and the Nea Ekklesia, the Virgin of the Pharos came to hold one of the major collections of Christian holy relics.

By the end of the 12th century, according to accounts by Nicholas Mesarites, the church's skeuophylax, and travellers such as Anthony of Novgorod, the collection had grown to include even more relics, particularly of the Passion: the Crown of Thorns, a Holy Nail, Christ's clothes, purple mantle and reed cane, and even a piece from his tombstone.

[5] The chapel itself avoided plunder during the sack: Boniface of Montferrat moved swiftly to occupy the area of the Boukoleon Palace, and the relics passed safely on to the new Latin Emperor, Baldwin I (r.

[12] Over the next decades however, most of these were dispersed throughout Western Europe, given as gifts to powerful and influential rulers or sold off to procure money and supplies for the embattled and chronically cash-strapped Latin Empire.

[4][14][15] The concept was again imitated in the relic chapel of Karlstejn Castle, built by Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV (r. 1346–1378) and tied to his pretensions of being a "new Constantine".