Saint Nicholas was dead, to begin with. On 6 December 343, to be precise, in Myra, in present-day Turkey. But, as is the way with saints, death was no hindrance to miracles. Indeed it was an accelerator. Myrrh flowed from his tomb from the moment of interment. Solving problems, giving gifts; that was what he did. Once, it is said, he saved three daughters of a poor man from prostitution by throwing gold through their windows at night to give as dowries.
The eleventh century was particularly fruitful. In the space of sixty years, fifty sites of worship were consecrated to him in France and Germany alone. In the spring of 1087, Nicholas’s remains were stolen from Myra and brought to Bari in Norman Apulia, a stepping-off point for pilgrims the Holy Land. Bari had five churches dedicated to Nicholas even before his bones arrived. A raiding party of sixty-two men – merchants, seamen, priests – sailed into the Seljuk empire to effect the rescue.
Is it possible that Nicholas never lived at all? Pope Paul VI thought so. In 1969 Paul revoked his feast day on just such a technicality. But surely that just makes Nicholas’s strange afterlife as Santa Claus all the more miraculous. A gift, if you will.
This piece first appeared in the December 2023 issue of History Today.
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Mathew Lyons 
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