I’ve heard. You are assuming it’s the same shroud.
Hanging my hat on the data, not claims. This is why the collimated neutron burst was put forward by Shroud defenders, to get around this rather large problem.
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You’re right that we can’t simply assume it’s the same cloth as the Turin Shroud. Let me be more precise about what I’m claiming and what I’m not.
What de Clari actually reports:
A full-length burial cloth (li sydoines) in the church of St Mary of Blachernae in Constantinople, “in which Our Lord had been wrapped,” which was raised upright every Friday so that “one could clearly see the figure (form) of Our Lord on it,” and whose fate “no one, Greek or Frank, ever knew” after the city was taken. That modest statement about a shroud with Christ’s body-image in Constantinople before 1204 is all de Clari himself gives us.
What follows historically:
Independently of Turin, de Clari (plus Nicholas Mesarites and a few other Byzantine sources) is evidence that Constantinople did have some kind of image-bearing sindon / burial cloth associated with Christ prior to the Fourth Crusade, and that it disappears from Byzantine custody after 1204.
Where the hypothesis starts:
The step that says “that same cloth later turns up in Lirey and ends up in Turin” is an historical hypothesis, not something de Clari asserts. It may be right, partly right, or wrong, but it’s built on:
– a real object in Constantinople whose fate is unknown after 1204, and
– a real object with very similar claimed properties appearing in mid-14th-century France.
I’m not asking anyone to treat the identification as proved. I am saying that de Clari’s testimony, taken on its own terms, makes it harder to wave away the idea that such a cloth existed at all, or that its post-1204 whereabouts are irrelevant to the discussion.