From New Rome to Old: Andrew’s Head and the Circulation of Sanctity

In 1462 Pope Pius II (r. 1458-1464) welcomed a new treasure – the head of the Apostle Andrew – into Rome.  Rome’s acquisition of this precious relic resulted from the fall of Constantinople to the Turks and Pius’s energetic lobbying of Thomas Palaiologos, a claimant to the Byzantine throne, who had fled to Italy from the East, bringing with him the alleged head of Andrew from Patras.  Accordingly, Pius II, as he describes in his Commentaries, used the occasion to call anew for a crusade against the Turks.  At the same time, however, Pius II staged the event as a triumphal procession that reunited the prince of the apostles, Peter, with his long-lost brother, Andrew and, concomitantly, the traditions of Old and New Rome.  Furthermore, he sought to perpetuate Andrew’s presence in Rome, both at St. Peter’s and at the Milvian Bridge, where Pius II received the relic.  This paper focuses on how Pius II’s stylization of “alma Roma” as a natural home to St. Andrew and an asylum for all saints drew on a long history of the circulation of sanctity in the Mediterranean World that centered around Old and New Rome, as competing imperial capitals and storehouses of sanctity.  Armed with Constantinople’s apostle, Pius II sought to assert, definitively, the primacy and universality of Rome’s sanctity.