The True Cross is the name for physical remnants that, according to Church tradition, are believed to be from the cross upon which Jesus was crucified. Empress Helena, the mother of Constantine, the first Christian Emperor of Rome, traveled to the Holy Land in 326–28, where she discovered the hiding place of three crosses that were believed to be used at the crucifixion of Jesus and of two thieves, St. Dismas and Gestas, executed with him, and a miracle revealed which of the three was the True Cross. Fragments of the Cross were broken up, and the pieces were widely distributed; in 348, in one of his Catecheses, Cyril of Jerusalem remarked that the "whole earth is full of the relics of the Cross of Christ." Most of the small relics of the True Cross in Europe came from Constantinople after the city was captured and sacked in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade. They were carved up by the present bishops and divided with other very precious relics among the knights, who, after their return to the homeland, donated them to churches and monasteries.
"Vraie croix" (literally "True Cross") refers to a religious relic that was brought back by a crusader from the Holy Land and housed in a chapel in the town of La Vraie-Croix, in Brittany, France. According to legend, a crow stole the relic and placed it in its nest at the top of a hawthorn tree. The chapel was built over the site of the tree, and the relic is still kept inside a 15th-century reliquary within the chapel, which itself is built over a street.
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