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According to legend St Helene, mother of Constantine, had discovered Christ's Cross in c. 300, but pieces of it flooded the west only after 1204, when the Crusaders, on their way to wrest Palestine from Muslim control, sacked the great eastern Christian capital of Constantinople. They brought back as booty large numbers of images, icons, and relics. One of these tiny fragments of the wood of the Cross was given to the abbey of Floreffe, in present-day Belgium, and was later placed in a scintillating Gothic reliquary triptych, now in the Louvre, Paris.
The reliquary, in the form of a miniature Gothic chapel with pinnacles and gables, opens to display a flowering golden Cross at the centre, held aloft by two angels and flanked by smaller, three-dimensional scenes of Christ's Passion.
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