Duae cruces de cristallo et ligno Domini: culto e pirateria nel Mediterraneo

In the middle XIIIth century, both the King of France Louis IXth and pope Innocent IVth (Sinibaldo Fieschi) showed noteworthy interest for cult objects. Among a lot of sacred and precious objects the Fieschi family, to whom the pope belonged, kept the reliquary Fieschi-Morgan over the centuries until it came to the J. Pierpont Morgan Collection (and in 1917 to the Metropolitan Museum of Arts of new York). The reliquary is proper to contain a double cross. This double cross very likely correspond to the one now inserted in a XVIth century reliquary, showed in the Diocese Museum of Chiavari in Liguria. A similar object is described in two unpublished documents of 1245 which talk about a double cross de cristallo et ligno domini. Presumably after a piratical assault or robbery this reliquary with some other precious objects came from the Syrian-Palestinian coasts to Bonifacio, which was a Genoese pirate stronghold in Corsica where this booty was kept by local authorities . The present paper confronts shape and type of the cross described in the above mentioned documents with similar objects described in other Genoese sources and relates it to the Truth Cross cult in Byzantium, Holy Land and the West with the aim of considering the duae cruces in the Mediterranean context of provenance and destination. The object described in the above mentioned documents presents remarkable analogies with the cross conserved in Chiavari, which presumably had to be contained in the Fieschi-Morgan shrine.