The Strangest Christmas Gift Ever
By: Gregg Newby
Tags: The Middle Ages, Charlemagne, Circumcision, Christ, Christmas

The Strangest Christmas Gift Ever

When the Holy Roman Emperor gave the Pope a tiny bit of penis.

Circumcision of Christ (detail),by Friedrich Herlin | Public Domain

On Christmas Day of 800, a curious exchange took place. The place was the Basilica in Rome, believed to be the final resting place of St. Peter. As the story goes, the Frankish king Charlemagne was kneeling in prayer before an assembled congregation. Pope Leo III stole up behind him and placed an imperial crown on his head, making him the very first Holy Roman Emperor.

The event may or may not have been staged but, either way, it made Charlemagne the second-most powerful man in Europe, just behind the Pope himself. His surprise coronation meant the Frankish King was now a Roman Emperor. He took his place in a line of succession leading all the way back to Julius Caesar.

Charlemagne then presented the pontiff with a Christmas gift of his own. With appropriate solemnity he handed Leo III a heavily jeweled handbox. Inside it was found a most uncommon relic known as the Holy Prepuce, a tiny sliver of flesh believed to be the foreskin of Christ himself.

Born a Nazarene Jew, the infant Jesus would have certainly been circumcised eight days after his birth. But Jewish custom decrees the skin afterwards be buried, which is what they probably would have done. It’s a practice still widely observed today.

Medieval fresco in Tingsted church, Denmark | Photo by Stig Alenas | Downloaded from Shutterstock

But ancient Christian tradition told a different story. There’s an apocryphal tale that says Mary and Joseph secreted the baby to a remote desert cave to have it done there. Instead of a rabbi, an elderly Hebrew woman performed the honors, afterwards placing the foreskin in a container of spikenard oil. Legend also says this was the same oil Mary Magdalene would later use to anoint Christ’s head and feet.

Wherever and however the cutting took place, the resulting relic would have been but a tiny remnant of flesh. It would probably have fitted easily into a thimble-sized container, perhaps even calcifying despite being placed in spikenard oil. It could have just been a little speck of a thing floating around in that ointment. An infant’s phallus is awfully small, not yet fully developed, so the prepuce might have just been barely noticeable, if even a human prepuce it was.

Charlemagne’s gifting of it was the first reported sighting of this most venerated of relics. But how did he come by it? His story was that an angel brought it to him as he knelt praying in Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher. But word also went around that it was just a wedding gift from the Byzantine Empress Irene. Its authenticity as the actual foreskin of Christ would later be ‘verified’ by the 14th-century mystic Bridget of Sweden, who would later be canonized a saint.

Then, in 1527, German soldiers descended on Rome, pillaging churches and monasteries and forcing Pope Clement VII to pay a hefty ransom. In all the melee, one of the Teutonic invaders made off with the Prepuce, only to be captured a short distance up the road from Rome, in the village of Calcata. After a priest brought it to the local church, Calcata became the prepuce’s new home. The Pope even offered to forgive the sins of pilgrims who went to see it.

By that time, however, the Holy Prepuce had a number of competitors. The lucrative trade in relics meant other foreskins were now being sold as the real article. Like the miracle of the loaves and fishes, the Holy Prepuce had seemingly multiplied. By one estimate there were as many as 18 prepuces circulating Europe during the High Middle Ages, all of them masquerading as the actual foreskin of Christ himself. Notable examples were found in Antwerp, Chartres, and various other cities scattered around The Western European mainland.

Circumcision of Christ, fresco from the Preobrazhenski Monastery, Bulgaria | Public Domain

But with the 16th Century came the Reformation and the splintering of the Christian Church along denominational lines. Protestantism frowned angrily on the veneration of relics, so most of the foreskins were destroyed. Calvinists took offense at the idea of humans owning such a personal piece of Christ’s body. The prepuces that remained were later lost in when Napoleon marched his way across Europe.

Even so, the original prepuce still drew crowds to Calcata. It was even paraded through the streets every January 1st, the date the Church had designated the Feast of the Circumcision, in commemoration of the blessed event.

Then, in 1983, the unthinkable happened. Thieves broke into the church in Calcata and stole the sacred reliquary, foreskin and all. Almost immediately, devotion to the Holy Prepuce became a thing of the past, an increasingly distant memory. In any case, Pope John XXIII had already proclaimed in 1960 that the Feast of the Circumcision would now be known as the ‘Octave of the Nativity.’ The new name merely emphasized it as the 8th day following Christ’s birth. The church apparently wanted to retain the annual celebration without necessarily commemorating the circumcision.

It’s now no longer clear whether any surviving Prepuces remain. In 1997, Britain’s Channel 4 aired a documentary in which a journalist traveled Italy in search of one. He wound up empty-handed. National Geographic followed suit in 1997. only to meet with the same conclusion. All the same, the gifting of the Holy Prepuce on Christmas Day 800 proves at least one thing. There’s always something you can find for the man who has everything.