The Chains of Saint Peter

On our visits to Rome, we entered the Basilica of San Pietro in Vincoli, whose name literally means “Saint Peter in Chains”. The church is best known today by many visitors for Michelangelo’s magnificent statue of Moses, but beneath the main altar is something much older and even more connected to the earliest history of Christianity: the chains traditionally believed to have bound Saint Peter.

The tradition involves two sets of chains. One was believed to have held Peter when he was imprisoned in Jerusalem by King Herod Agrippa I. The story is told in the Acts of the Apostles: Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with chains, when an angel appeared and the chains fell from his wrists, allowing him to escape.

A second set of chains was traditionally associated with Peter’s later imprisonment in Rome before his martyrdom. According to a tradition that developed in late antiquity, the Jerusalem chains were brought to Rome and presented to Empress Licinia Eudoxia in the fifth century. When they were placed beside the Roman chains, the two miraculously fused together. The joined chains became a treasured relic and were preserved in the church built to house them.

The basilica we see today traces its history to the fifth century, although it has been altered and restored many times. The chains are preserved in a gilded reliquary beneath the high altar and  are an object of devotion that pilgrims have traveled to see for centuries.

There is something amazing about finding an object like this in Rome. Whether we approach the chains through faith, tradition, archaeology, or history, they represent nearly two thousand years of Christian memory. Generations of people have stood before this same relic thinking about Peter—the fisherman from Galilee who became one of Jesus’ closest disciples and whose story eventually became inseparable from the story of Rome itself.