According to legend, Ursula was a beautiful princess betrothed to a pagan, who set off on a pilgrimage with an entourage of handmaidens. Reaching Cologne, the virgins met with a violent death at the hands of the Huns after refusing to renounce Christianity. Ursula was shot with an arrow through the heart by their King for scornfully turning down his marriage proposal.
These, at least, are the scant details on which most variants of the tale agree. However, one version paints Ursula as a Cornish princess who set sail for her wedding to the governor of Brittany together with 11,000 virgins. A storm blew their ship into a port in Gaul (now Northern France and Belgium) where she determined to embark on a pilgrimage.
Another casts her as a Breton princess who was to marry the English king's son, Aetherius. Jacobus de Voragine in The Golden Legend, wrote that Ursula, opposed to marrying the pagan prince, set tough conditions: he would convert to Christianity while she made a pilgrimage to Rome.
She, meanwhile, converted 11 virgins, instructing each of them to convert 1,000 more. She may have been accompanied by clergy, her fiancé, even Pope Cyriacus (whose name appears nowhere in papal records but may have been scratched by angry colleagues after he quit Rome for this pilgrimage). Her entourage may have comprised only 11 virgins; she may have been killed in the 3rd century (De Voragine says 238 AD), the 4th or the 7th; she may not have existed at all.
Despite these uncertainties (which prompted the Catholic Church to delist Ursula's feast day – 21 October – from its calendar), Europe is awash with relics. The Saint Ursula Church in Cologne boasts about 1,000 bones, Cologne cathedral a smaller collection, while Palencia cathedral in Spain supposedly has the head of Ursula's companion Cordula who escaped the Huns but, according to De Voragine, repented her cowardice and surrendered the next day.
Aside from bones, a small church once existed in the heart of London near Leadenhall. According to some records, it may have been in possession of one of the three axes used in the massacre. On the site of that church, which gave its name to the street now stands that feat of modern architecture known as the Gherkin - official address 30 St Mary Axe.
Back in Belgium, the Sint Janshospitaal Museum in Bruges has a collection of works by Hans Memling, a German-born but Flemish School artist. Among these is a gothic reliquary, depicting the legend of Saint Ursula on a wooden house-shaped shrine, which once contained fragments of saintly bones.
On this, she is depicted with an arrow in her hand (she is patron saint of archers as well as students and orphans) and ten virgins, each one representing 1,000 virgins, shielded by her cloak. Six arched scenes on the sides of the shrine depict the legend of Saint Ursula. In Memling's version of the events, Ursula's fiancé and the pope were also massacred.
"An amazing number of Saint Ursula relics have survived. That tells you something about how popular the cult was and how much it appealed to the popular imagination," said Frieda Sorber, a textile historian and curator of the ModeMuseum in Antwerp who has made an in-depth study of the Herkenrode collection.
The relatively small collection of 114 bones found their way to the Abbey of Herkenrode near Hasselt, sometime before the 13th or 14th century and were, according to Sorber, likely to have been a gift from the Abbot of Sint Truiden, whose niece was the Herkenrode Abbess. "We know he gave her relics from Cologne."
What makes the Herkenrode collection unique is their decoration. "They were wrapped and rewrapped several times. Sometimes I would examine up to five layers. We dated the silk in the oldest layers to the 13th or early 14th century," she said, adding that an abbey needed something to make it popular to pilgrims.
Fanny Van Cleven, head of KIK-IRPA's textile department, who is busy adding the tiniest of stitches, barely visible to the naked eye, to support and repair some of the fine handiwork on the Herkenrode pieces, said each piece is also different in its design, whereas the skulls in Cologne are mostly dressed in red silk and decorated with gold thread.
Carbon dating of a sample of these bones shows that they could have come from the 4th or 5th century, while a pathologist report shows they had been buried for some time, cleaned and dried in the sun. They could therefore have been among a series excavated sometime in the 12th or 13th century in a Roman graveyard close to the Saint Ursula church in Cologne.
Van Cleven opens a cupboard and pulls out one of the skulls. Part of one is exposed and sun-bleached. She opens a drawer where a range of other bones are encased in delicately embroidered fabric. There's even a finger bone with a nail still visible. The endurance of these relics was, for followers of the Ursula legend, further proof of their origin.
The institute houses a state-of-the-art laboratory and hosts a team of experts including chemists, pathologists, anthropologists and art historians. Its researchers have found that among the bones are those of men and children and even an animal. Van Cleven said: "This is where we see the legend breaking down a little bit."
While the male bones could be explained by the version of the legend which records clergymen and Ursula's fiancé present at the massacre, the presence of animal bones shows that the collection may have, at least in part, been the result of what has been termed by art historians the 'Ursula cult'. This emerged from the 13th to the 15th century, and sparked a flurry of trade in fake relics, which was eventually banned in 1392 by Pope Bonifacius XI.
But the presence of only one animal bone could also be cause for optimism. Sorber said: "What's really nice about this is that in some collections you find lots of animal bones." The collection in Cologne, for example, was said by an eminent surgeon to have contained bones of mastiffs, according to an 1835 edition of the British working class weekly Penny Magazine.
When it comes to questions about the bones’ origin and links to the myth, Sorber said: "Those 11,000 virgins never existed but I'm almost positive Ursula existed, that she had a retinue of virgins and that she was murdered by Atilla the Hun." But does that mean the Herkenrode bones belonged to the virgins?
"I was happy we could link these bones to Cologne," said Sorber. "What we historically know is that the bones were excavated and, since most of us can't tell the difference between men's, women's and children's bones, that's how history was made. I don't think in the end it really matters."
She posed a crucial question, "what is authentic?" After all, the carbon dating shows the skulls are exceedingly old and even their decorations hold an interesting history of the nuns' veneration of such objects. Sorber added, "Legends are legends. Even if it's not true, it's a good story and reliquary treasures are a goldmine for textile historians."
I asked her if, despite the numerous fake relics which pervaded Europe during the Middle Ages and the obsession with Ursula (explorer Christopher Columbus even named the British Virgin Islands after the legend), she believed the Herkenrode collection could possibly be those of Saint Ursula and her virgins. Without hesitation, Sorber answered: "Yes, I think so."
The collection will be on display in Hasselt's Saint Quintus cathedral from 13 August to 12 September, daily from 9.00 to 16.30. After that, the treasures of Herkenrode will only be available for viewing by arrangement.
XI. M. V. - Sounds pretty straightforward for anyone who knows their Roman numerals. Yet a misinterpretation of this text could be an explanation as to why the legend of Saint Ursula has taken on such gargantuan proportions.
These Roman numerals, which have been used as a shortening in medieval texts to describe Ursula's entourage, could be interpreted as 11,000 virgins (XI M virgins). It could also stand for eleven (XI) martyred virgins.
Just the thought of gathering such an entourage and trekking across Europe on a pilgrimage would lead to the suspicion that an element of exaggeration may have crept into the tale, perhaps to fuel a thriving trade in Ursula relics.
In the longhand version, there is also room for interpretation. Undecim martyres virgines (eleven martyred virgins) could have been poorly translated as undecim millia virginum (eleven thousand virgins).
To confuse matters further, Undecimilia, found in some texts, could be translated as 11,000 or it could simply be the name of a single virgin. It might also be the result of a transcription error from Undicimila, Latin for 11.
Flanders Today is a 
-8°C / -2°C
