The Black Cross of Scotland

Copyright July 2012 by Jeff Nisbet / www.mythomorph.com1

This is the tale of a famous relic, considered lost foralmost 500 years. It begins in 326 AD, when Constan-tine, the first Christian emperor of Rome, sent his

mother, Helena, on a mission to the Holy Land in search ofrelics of the Judeo-Christian tradition. While there, Helenafound several buried crucifixes. One of them, by miraculous-ly curing a dying woman, was believed to be the “TrueCross” upon which Christ had suffered and died.

It was an archaeological find for the ages, and a brilliantmarketing coup.

Over the centuries that followed, pieces of the cross werewidely distributed around the ever-growing Christian world.By the end of the Middle Ages there were reputed to be somany pieces that Reformationist John Calvin quipped: “If allthe pieces that could be found were collected together, theywould make a big ship-load -- yet the Gospel testifies that asingle man was able to carry it.”

Genuine or not, fragments of the cross were made abun-dantly available. Some were presented to heads of state.Others were enshrined in churches along the lucrative pil-grim trails. Still others were captured and recaptured duringthe Crusades. While some still survive, others became lost tothe historical record.

One of these now-lost pieces found its way to Scotland, andwas given a name: The Black Cross, a.k.a. The Holy Rood.

When the Normans conquered England in 1066, Hun-garian-born English princess Margaret fled to Scotland, mar-ried Malcolm III, and became the mother of three subsequentScottish kings. From Hungary, it’s claimed, she brought arelic of the True Cross, and was accompanied by a William“The Seemly” Sinclair. William was allegedly a member ofthe family that would later build Rosslyn, the Da Vinci Codechapel, but historians have yet to verify his existence.Margaret died in 1093, clutching her precious cross, and wascanonized in 1250.

The cross remained in Scotland for 130 years, duringwhich its reputation was enhanced with a miracle. On HolyCross Day, 1127, Margaret’s son King David I went huntingnear Edinburgh, and was thrown from his horse when a beau-tiful but angry white stag startled it. David was saved fromthe stag’s furious charge by the sudden apparition of a crossbetween its antlers, causing the stag to turn away. In grati-tude, David founded Holyrood Abbey near the spot wherethe miracle occurred, and his mother’s Holy Rood becamethe abbey’s most prized possession.

In 1296, however, King Edward I of England seized the

The Black Cross of ScotlandHas the long-lost relic been found at last?

By Jeff Nisbet

This article was originally published in the July / August 2012 Atlantis Rising magazine and the August 2012 Girnigoe: Scotland’s Clan Sinclair Magazine.Pages five and six have now been added with material that could not be included by the original deadline.

Discovery of the True Crossby Agnolo Gaddi (14th century)

cross and took it to London, where it remained for 32 years.In 1328, by request of Scotland’s King Robert the Bruce, itwas returned to Holyrood, but was again lost to the Englishat the 1346 battle of Neville’s Cross. For the next two cen-turies the cross was given pride of place in the relic collec-tion of nearby Durham Cathedral until the English ProtestantReformation of 1540, when it was lost forever -- or was it?

There is yet another legend that connects the Sinclairs tothe cross. One Simon Sinclair is said to have retrieved thecross from Durham, hiding it in Rosslyn Chapel. Once again,though, historians can find no record of this particularSimon. Nevertheless, there is a document that may lend somesupport to the story.

In 1546, just six years after the cross is lost to history,Marie of Guise, mother of Scotland’s beloved Queen Mary,strikes a curious contract with William Sinclair of Rosslyn. Init, she pledges to “keep secret” what was shown to her, andthe nature of that secret has been debated ever since. Perhapsit was the Black Cross. Indeed, of all speculations made aboutRosslyn, Scotland’s newspaper of record, The Scotsman, hassaid that possession of the relic is “the least bananas.”

Besides the fact that William and Marie were bothCatholics in a country that would predictably soon becomeProtestant, it would have been folly to let such a nationaltreasure fall into Protestant hands, since the staunchestProtestants looked upon all such objects as idolatrous. And asthe English Reformation had shown, Catholic propertywould soon become easy pickings for the gentry. If Williamhad the cross, why should he not keep it? As it happens, thereis evidence the Sinclairs may have done just that.

Two years ago I received a data disc containing 88Rosslyn-related photographs. One was of a rough woodencross inside a reliquary. Upon further inquiry I discoveredthere is a very small handful of people who believe this crosswas fashioned from the wood of the True Cross, and that it isin the possession of the current Earl of Rosslyn, but I’ve beenunable to discover whether or not they also believe it to bethe Black Cross, or simply a relic acquired more recently.

Inside the reliquary stands a woman, looking up and out-ward from the foot of the cross. Nothing hints at her identi-ty. Is she the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus, or MaryMagdalene, believed by some to have been the wife of Jesusand mother of his children? While we cannot be sure,Biblical tradition relates it is Mary Magdalene who first wit-nesses the risen Christ, making no mention that his motherwitnessed the event.

Also in the reliquary are two angels, each holding a scrollthat, when read as one, reads EX LIGNO SSME CRUCISDOMINI NOSTRI JESU CHRISTI (From the Wood of theMost Holy Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ). While the use ofthe letters U and J argues against the reliquary being older than16th century, since before that time the letters V and I wereused instead, even a reliquary made as recently as the 16th cen-tury still fits into the period the cross may have been retrievedfrom Durham by the historically nebulous Simon Sinclair.

While researching this article, I consulted a 1903 transla-tion, with editorial notes, of The Rites of Durham, four Latin

scrolls containing an inventory of the cathedral’s pre-Reformation relic collection.

The scrolls relate that two crosses were carried to theBattle of Neville’s Cross. One is described as carried “by twoor three men,” while the other is described as “but a palm inlength.” This smaller cross, the editor suggests, would havebeen carried around the neck of King David II, son of theman who, ironically, had asked for the return of the BlackCross just 18 years earlier, King Robert the Bruce.

Why, we may ask, was Margaret’s cross called the “black”cross? The prevailing wisdom is that the relic was containedinside a much larger cross made of ebony, a black wood,encrusted with gold and jewels, and bearing an ivory imageof Jesus. While it is easy to believe that such a treasure mayhave been intentionally lost to history, why must it have beenlost with the “true” cross still inside?

A careful reading of The Rites suggests a reason why bothcrosses may be considered black. They are described asappearing “smoked all over,” which may mean that the woodhad been considerably darkened by centuries of devotionalcandle smoke, and the cross in the Rosslyn reliquary certain-ly fits that description.


The RosslynReliquary

To better understand this humble relic we should ask howMargaret acquired it.

As the daughter of exiled English Prince Edward, she wasborn in Hungary during a period of social turbulence. KingStephen I, who had won Hungary for the Catholic church ofRome, had been dead for only seven years by the time shewas born, and while her English patrimony is certain, the pat-rimony of her mother, Agatha, is still widely disputed,although it has been proposed that Agatha was, in fact, thedead king’s daughter.

Now enshrined in the Parliament building in Budapest, theCrown of Saint Stephen is the most-venerated object inHungarian history. This crown, we are told, was raised byKing Stephen upon his coronation, making the Virgin Marythe Queen of Hungary, and all subsequent kings of Hungaryservants of the crown. Atop this crown is a gold cross thatdoes not seem to belong there, and perhaps it isn’t meant to.It looks disproportionately small, pushes crudely through anicon of Jesus, and is bent at an angle.

Éva Kovács, in The Hungarian Crown and Other Regalia,states her belief that this cross is a substitute for an originaldouble-barred relic of the True Cross, noting that the ancientHungarian coat of arms bears a double-barred cross. Kovácscontinues that renowned Hungarian genealogist, SzabolcsVajay, “called to my attention a strange incident in thecrown’s history which had completely escaped everybody’sattention. Before Queen Isabella handed over the regalia toFerdinand in 1551, she broke the cross off the crown’s peakfor her son, John Sigismund. According to a contemporaryPolish chronicler, John Sigismund wore this cross on hischest till the end of his life, ‘…because he who possesses thiscross will again come into possession of the missing partswhich, subjected to the power of the cross, had belonged toit.’” [Italics mine]

What are we to make of the words “the missing parts?”Is it conceivable that Margaret and her family, possibly in

line of succession to the contested throne of Hungary, hadtaken the two horizontal bars of the original double-barredcross with them when they returned to England, and that asmaller single-barred cross had been fashioned from theremaining upright bar, which sat atop the Holy Crown untilQueen Isabella broke it off and gave it to her son? CouldScotland’s Black Cross have been fashioned from those twomissing bars, and is there any more evidence, however tenu-ous, that connects the Scottish cross to the Hungarian cross?

Yes, there is …• The Scottish legend of David I’s encounter with the

white stag is curiously similar to the Hungarian legend that awhite stag led the brothers Hunor and Magor to Scythia,which in turn led to the foundation of the Hun and Magyarpeople. And regarding Scythia, the signers of Scotland’sfamous Declaration of Arbroath, the inspiration forAmerica’s own Declaration of Independence, stated that theirforebears came from “Greater Scythia.”

• A time-honored tool of genealogists is Onomastics, thestudy of name origins. While the patrimony of Agatha, moth-er of Scotland’s Margaret, is one of the great unresolved

questions of medieval genealogy, let’s consider that a tribecalled the Agathyrsi is supposed, by Greek historianHerodotus, to have originated in the Scythian plains of whatis now the Ukraine, and that a male contingent of theAgathyrsi is supposed, by others, to have made their way toScotland, agreeing to a contract with the indigenous peoplesguaranteeing a tradition of future matrilineal descent inreturn for wives. This theory has a history of raising hacklesin various camps by touching on the unpopular theories ofBritish Israelism and the origins of the blue-painted Picts --and yet the Onomastic similarity between Agatha and Aga-thyrsi remains.

Regardless, let’s think more about the mystery behind thebent cross currently atop the crown. Depictions of the crownprior to the 17th century show an upright cross. Those aftershow it bent, presumed damaged. Why was the damage doneto Hungary’s most treasured artifact never repaired? Whydoes the cross look disproportionately small, and why does itpush crudely through an icon of Christ? Are we being quiet-ly persuaded to consider there was once a different cross atopthe crown than the one we see today, and are we to wonderwhat happened to it?

Might there also be a message encoded in the angle atwhich today’s cross is tilted, and might that be the reason itwas never repaired? Could that angle be telling us the fate ofthe original relic?

Of the several photographs of St. Stephen’s Crown I wasable to obtain, only one showed a directly frontal view of it,and from that perspective the cross appears to be left-leaningat an angle of 22.5 degrees.

Three years ago, in Atlantis Rising #76, I published an arti-cle speculating the north/south line along which lay severalUK megalithic sites was a post-diluvial prime meridian lyingprecisely 33 degrees west of the Great Pyramid at Giza, so Iadmit to being predisposed to think along geodesic lines, andto draw conclusions therefrom. I was nevertheless astonishedto find that Buda Castle, seat of the Hungarian Kings, andDunfermline Abbey, where Hungarian-born Margaret of


The Crown ofSaint Stephen

Scotland was both married and buried, are separated by 22.5degrees of longitude.

Is the angle of the small bent cross atop the Holy Crowntelling us that the cross went thataway? Well, there is yet anoth-er element of the crown that may be saying precisely that.

Around the lower circle of the crown are affixed enamelportraits of four angels, two saints, an emperor, and a king.Only the king holds a cross - Géza I of Hungary, who reignedfrom 1074 to 1077. Éva Kovács says that this cross, with itsstylized foliage, represents the wood of the True Cross.Géza’s eyes are cast suspiciously towards the cross, which heholds at a 22.5-degree angle, and there is no cross on hiscrown. The crown he wears is not the St. Stephen’s crown weknow today, and one arm of the 22.5-degree angle points tothe area where the relic cross may have been originally fixed.

It has been widely assumed that at least some part oftoday’s crown dates back to Stephen’s coronation, but thatmay not be so. In 1981, a team of international experts stud-ied the crown for the first time, and generally concluded thateven the lower and older part of the crown cannot date backearlier than 1067 -- thirty years after Stephen’s death. Sowhat happened to the original?

Margaret’s family left Hungary in 1057, ten years earlierthan the date given by experts for the crown we have knownsince. Could it be that Margaret and her siblings, as grand-children of Stephen, were strongly advised to abandon theHungarian line of succession before returning to England,and took parts of the True Cross and the original Crown ofSt. Stephen with them when they left? And might today’sHoly Crown be a storyboard on which the truth of the matterhas been written?

While the appearance of the original crown is unknown,Éva Kovács speculates it may resemble “the diadem set with

gems and provided with a pinnacle decoration of lilies thatcan be seen in King Stephen’s portrait embroidered on themantle,” the coronation robe considered the only part of theHungarian royal regalia that dates back to Stephen’s reign.

On the obverse side of the Great Seal of King David I ofScotland, Margaret’s son sits on his throne, wearing a crownsimilarly pinnacled with lilies. In his left hand he holds theRoyal Orb topped with a single-bar cross, and in his right heholds a sword, inclined towards his crown at the by-now-familiar angle of 22.5 degrees. Directly above the crown, butnot attached to it, floats a second cross, marking the begin-ning and end of the seal’s inscription As David sits, he gazesover the Orb towards the east, and seems to be saying, “Aye,we have your crown and your cross - and we bloody wellmean to keep them.”

This was the point at which my original investigation ended,but there proved to be one more story the Crown of King


King Géza Iof Hungary

Buda Castle toDunfermline Abbey The Great Seal

of King David I

Stephen had to tell, and it is perhaps the most remarkable of all.It concerns Saint Andrew, Scotland’s patron saint.

How Andrew became the patron saint of Scotland is an inter-esting story that seems to have been cobbled together for thepopular imagination from rather suspect accounts.

In the 4th century, a Greek monk named Regulus was toldby an angel to hide some of the saint’s corporeal remains fromthe Emperor Constantine’s relic hunt, mentioned at the begin-ning of this article, and to sail west with them. Wherever theywere shipwrecked, the angel said, they should found a church.Unsurprisingly, Regulus and the relics were shipwrecked inthe land now known as Scotland, at a place now called SaintAndrews, more well-known today as The Home of Golf. ThePictish king of that land, promised victory over his enemiesby an apparition of the dead saint, dedicated the churchfounded by Regulus to Saint Andrew and his Christian God.Four centuries later, during the Battle of Athelstaneford, thePicts are once more heartened on to victory by divine inter-vention - this time the appearance in the sky of the X-shapedcross that Andrew was supposedly crucified on by his owninstruction, not feeling worthy of a death on a cross of thesame configuration as Christ’s. Or so we are told.

Tidy tales, still accepted by the faithful, to explain howAndrew, whose ministry never took him anywhere nearScotland, became that country’s patron saint. His ministrydid, however, take him to Hungary, where he was wellrevered at the time Margaret and her family lived there.

Since the first appearance of the Saint Andrew’s Cross asa Scottish national symbol is on the seal of the Guardians ofScotland, dated to the late 13th century, one might be forgiv-en for suspecting that it was 11th-century Margaret whomade Andrew a household word, and that the legends ofRegulus and Athelstaneford were specifically written to pre-

date her appearance on history’s stage. It should be noted thatthe first mention of a Bishop of Saint Andrews is in 1108, fif-teen years after Margaret’s death.

Which brings us back to the Crown of St. Stephen …Andrew is one of eight apostles portrayed on the upper bands

of the crown. He is shown only with a book, not with the X-shaped cross that has become his symbol in Scotland, but weknow that he is Andrew because it says so above his head.

All of the apostles’ portraits were made using an ancientprocess known as cloisonné, a several-step decorating tech-nique. First, the artist would inscribe the outline of the fin-ished piece on a metallic base; then, metallic wires would beattached to that base, conforming to the inscribed outline;and finally the areas separated by the wires would be filled inwith enamel paints. It is a painstaking process, affording sev-eral chances to correct any obvious mistakes that might havebeen made along the way.

When you look at the accompanying portrait of St. An-drew, then, does it not beggar belief that his index finger isshown to have been more than twice the length of a normalindex finger? Not only that, is it not astonishing that the fin-ger’s middle joint does not, like a normal joint, turn inwardtowards the palm, but instead turns sideways, then bendsaround the thumb, pointing to the northwest at an angle ofprecisely 22.5 degrees.

Is he saying he was taken thataway, too?While mainstream history, leavened by ecclesiastic dogma,

is careful not to step on too many toes, and keeps an ever-vigi-lant eye on which side of the bread the butter’s on, the truth ofthings is often written between and beneath the lines of vener-able source documents, waiting for its day. Might not Margaret,living in a time when Hungary was not ready to accept amonarch who was half English and England was not ready to


Saint Andrew’s astonishingly long index finger is bent at an angle of 22.5 degrees.

22.5 Degrees22.5 Degrees

accept a monarch who was half Hungarian, have decided tomarry into the royal bloodline of a third country - Scotland?

We might guess what dowry she brought ...In a 2006 Scotsman interview with Roddy Martine, author

of The Secrets of Rosslyn, one of the more circumspect booksabout the chapel, Martine admits “there is a fairly strong pos-sibility that the Holy Rood of Scotland is concealed therebecause it was certainly taken there for protection on severaloccasions for safekeeping.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Martine describes Dan Brown’sThe Da Vinci Code as “a rollicking thriller but it is fiction.”And regarding The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail, the bookthat Brown’s central storyline -- that Jesus married and had

children with Mary Magdalene -- was first presented in,Martine is not quick to discount the theory. If such a bloodlineexists as described, he says, then it could be genealogicallytraced to the UK’s present ruling monarch, Queen Elizabeth II,adding that the current Earl of Rosslyn is Commander of theelite London Metropolitan Police unit charged with protectingthe royal family, “so there could be something in it.”

As far as the Earl’s possible possession of the Black Cross isconcerned, my experience while investigating the February2010 discovery of bones at the chapel, later published as TheRosslyn Bones, has shown that any questions I ask of the Ross-lyn Chapel administration will remain unanswered.

I am hoping someone else would like to do the asking.

END


King Malcolm III and his wife, Queen Margaret, by Sir Noel Paton (1821 - 1901).

Documents

The Black Cross of Scotland