Dan Snow's History Hit - Saint Nicholas

Episode Date: December 19, 2023

It's that time of year when the beloved Santa Claus comes around once again. But the celebrated image of this prolific gift-giver is based on an even more fabled figure - that of Saint Nicholas, a 3rd century Christian bishop famed for his generosity and compassion. He was thought to be a miracle worker, and through his divine acts he became one of Christianity's most popular patron saints.His life is unsurprisingly shrouded in myth and legend, so help make sense of it all, Dan is joined once again by Eleanor Janega, co-host of the Gone Medieval podcast.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Ella Blaxill.Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up now for your 14-day free trial.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hello everyone and a warm festive welcome to Dan Snow's History Hits. It's that time of year when we start looking at the history behind our festive moments and what could be more Christmassy than Saint Nicholas, Saint Nick. Also known as Nicholas of Myra or Nicholas of Bari, so-called because the Italians stole his corpse, as you'll hear, and relocated it in Bari. He lived at the end of the 3rd and the beginning of the 4th century AD, so towards the beginning of the Roman Empire's Christian journey, we don't know very much about him. We think his parents died of an epidemic when he was a child. He was affluent and he used his

inheritance to help the poor and the sick before becoming a bishop. Much of what we think we know after that is hagiography. It's legend and myth. And to talk me through it, to help me make sense of it all, is the one and only, the very brilliant, Elena Janica. She's the host of the smash hit history hit podcast, Gone Medieval. She is a brilliant poster on the social medias. She's got a website, goingmedieval.com, which is always fun to read. And she's here with festive stories of St. Nick, from Flanders to Prague. And all these stories seem to have one thing in common.

People love to raise a glass to the memory of St. Nick, and not just on Christmas Eve. This is a man who would eventually inspire the Santa Claus story, become a global rock star. Not bad for an orphan from southern Turkey. Enjoy. T-minus 10. The Thomas bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity.

Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Eleanor, good to have you on the podcast. Dan, you can't keep me away. I'm just, I keep coming back. So who is this guy? What's going on?

Who the heck's St. Nick? Okay, so in the first place, this is a real guy, okay? This is an actual factual man, which isn't to say, you know, that that really matters when we're talking about saints because like, I don't really care if St. George was real or not, right? Like he's cool.

He killed a dragon. That's all that matters to me. But I can tell you that St. Nicholas of Myra, as he is known, was a real guy. Okay. We even know his birthday, which is the 15th of March, 270. And he died on the 6th of December, 343. And this is one of the big reasons why we kind of associate him with Christmas now is because he's got a December feast day. And part of his story is that he gives things away, right? So these are the things we definitely, definitely know. He was the Bishop of Myra, which is why he's St. Nicholas of Myra. We know that for a fact. And so he kind of grew

up in the Greek part of the Roman Empire. So it's Asia Minor, it's Turkey now. But at the time, it was just Rome. So it is what it is. And there are varying historical disputes about him having been at the first council of Nicaea. So this is a really nerdy thing. That happened in 325. And basically, all of the bishops and patriarchs got together to debate this heresy called Arianism, which is basically saying there's a hierarchy to the Trinity. And then everyone decided that there wasn't a hierarchy to the Trinity, right? And there's some possibly apocryphal stories that he slapped one of the Arians at the Council of Nicaea. And then in the later Middle Ages, and you know and then like in the later middle ages that got turned into he punched Arius at the council of Nicaea did that happen probably not do I like a story about a saint who punched

another man in the face yes I do so you know like I want to keep that one even though it's probably not true but this is like you know very late antique normal kind of functions of the church where you get together and you have a big debate in order to decide what we mean. Because, Eleanor, you say late antique, sort of early medieval. This is a period where they are literally working out what Christianity is. This might seem strange to us now, but they're going, should there be like four people in the Trinity or two? Yeah, completely. And this is a huge big deal. Like a very, very popular over in the Western Roman Empire is Arianism. like four people in a trinity or two or like this? Yeah, oh, completely. And this is a huge big deal.

Like a very, very popular over in the Western Roman Empire is Arianism. Like, and it keeps going for a few hundred years, even after the Council of Dicea, right? Where people are like, no, I like a hierarchy. It doesn't really matter what anyone says because, you know, think of Christianity kind of like jazz. You know, everyone's still kind of like noodling around trying to figure out what the beat is in the late antique period, you know? So maybe St. Nicholas

was there. He shows up on longer lists of attendees, but not shorter lists. And that might be that he kind of gets added in later because people like it or not. But these are kind of like the things that we know about him. All right. And those are the actual historical facts. kind of like the things that we know about him. All right. And those are the actual historical facts. But he's just mad popular. People absolutely love St. Nicholas, right? And so he gets this great legend, or as we say in the trade, hagiography, that builds and builds and builds across the medieval period. And he starts out really popular, especially in the East. So with what we now call the Orthodox Church, people love St. Nicholas. They're like, yes, like he's almost immediately sainted. Like that's our guy.

We're keeping him really, really wonderful. You know, he's so popular with the Orthodox Church that like in some, you know, Russian Orthodox things, you commemorate him every Thursday along with the apostles. Like it's just like, oh, yeah. And then there's our boy, St. Nick. Like get him in, great guy. But the genesis of interest in Saint Nicholas in Western Europe is that some Italians kind of show up in Asia Minor around about in 1087. It's rather a time when a lot of people are kind of going through Byzantium on their way to the Holy Land for, you know, sure, some religious reasons, but who knows,

on your way through, you might steal the corpse of a saint, you know, a little souvenir. Why not steal the corpse of Saint Nicholas and take it back to Bari in Italy? Much to the chagrin of the good people of Myrarah, who were like, did you just take our patron saint? And Italians are like, well, you asked us to come. So it's kind of like, this is payment. It's like, if you're going to come back from the Holy Land, you want some kind of relics. And they're like, baby, we got relics. So from then on, you have a big locus of worship of him, especially in Bury at the Basilica of St. Nicholas, which is still there. And then the Venetians take it up and the French take it up and the Bohemians take it up and it just kind of explodes.

What is it with like venerating saints and the kind of popularity that what's the vibe there? Why do people take it up? Is it fun? Do people like the stories? What's going on? Or does he deliver miracles to those people? I mean, yes, is the answer to all those things, right? So first of all, it seems like people take it up because they like it and it's nice to tell different stories. But part of the reason that people really react to the saints is like, you know, God is divine, right? And even Jesus is divine, right?

Because he, sure, he was like hanging out as a man for a while, but these are, this is like actual divinity, right? Saints are incredibly holy people and they are now in the presence of God, right? But they're humans. So they really understand what it's like to be a human. They really understand the kind of varying pressures that there are in the world and how difficult it is really to be holy. So if you're a little afraid of God or you are like, I don't know, the big man's busy, what you can do is kind of talk to saints instead of God. And then the hope is that the saints will put in a word with the big guy, and then that will help you out, right? So think about it like, you know, you don't want to escalate all the way to the boss maybe,

but like you asked to speak to a manager first. And saints are also seen as having like specialties, right? So if you've got like one particular issue that you need seen to, then it's like, oh, well, I can go to St. Nicholas for that because, you know, he's got some miracles associated with it. So he's like the patron saint of sailors, the patron saint of soldiers, the patron saint of bakers. They're like, I mean, this man barely doesn't have a patronage somewhere. But so you're a sailor, you're in a storm, you pray to Saint Nicholas.

Very relatable. And you know what, Eleanor, I like this because I was talking to my kids about this the other day when they were watching footballers coming off the pitch and they were thanking God for the goal. We did discuss as a family, it is a bit hardcore going straight to the big guy. It's the second half of Nottingham Forest versus Bournemouth, and you're going to God, or you've lost your wallet. You're like, I could use some help here. I don't think I need to get God involved right at the moment, you know, but definitely a kind of useful local holy figure makes total sense because there is a smattering of the divine, but it's like, realistically, the creator of the universe doesn't really care where my lost wallet is. Exactly. But Saint Nicholas might.

Part of the reasons why you pick someone out as a patron saint is you look at things from the saint's life and you go, oh, well, if he did that while he was alive, then he'll probably still see things that are in that arena after his death. So he's a patron saint of sailors because he was allegedly sailing to the holy land on pilgrimage and a big storm brewed up and he stood up in the boat and commanded the waves to quiet down and they did it right so you know if he would do it for himself and the other sailors on the boat why wouldn't he do it for you like some sailor in the mediterranean and indeed like one of the big places we see cults of St. Nicholas crop

up is usually around where there are a lot of sailors. So it's huge, for example, in the low countries, everything's underwater. So you're sailing constantly. So everybody loves St. Nicholas because if you get in a boat and you're feeling a little dodgy, then he can help you out. The next time I'm off Hearst's spit in a southwesterly gale and there's a massive ebb tide pouring out of the Solent, St Nick's name will never be far from my lips. Listen to Dan Snow's history talking to Eleanor Jarnagher about St Nick. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr Eleanor Jarnagher. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. To be continued... of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to

Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Was there any persecution? Did he have a reasonably nice tenure as a leader of the Christian community in Asia Minor, or was he persecuted? It's been alleged that he was persecuted during the persecutions of Diocletian, which was rather the style at the time. And it's not unbelievable. We don't have any records of it, but the legend is that he gets thrown in jail. And if you are the Bishop of Myrna and a particularly antagonistic emperor comes along, sure, that's completely within the range of possibility. And then the legend is he then gets let out of jail by the Emperor Constantine, who eventually

converts and is absolutely fine. There's also the story about him slapping someone at the Council of Nicaea. There's also a story that everyone is like, well, you really shouldn't be slapping people. And he kind of gets his mitre taken away from him and he gets thrown in jail. And then his boy Jesus and Mary show up that night and he says, guys, I'm in here simply for slapping an Aryan. And they say, oh no, that won't do. And they let him out of jail and they give him back his mitre and everything. And everyone goes, wow, amazing direct intervention from Jesus and Mary. Again, historicity on that one, low, but I really, really like it. So these are the major persecutions in his life, it seems, but it's not all roses. It's a difficult time. Towards the end

of his life, one of his other miracles is that there is a famine going on and a big grain ship pulls into harbor. And it's headed to Constantinople because in Constantinople, they have to have all this grain brought in to feed the imperial court and also they give grain away in the streets. And Nicholas is like, hey, guys, my boys are starving in the streets. What are we going to do here? Help us out. And the sailors are like, we'll get in trouble if we get over to Constantinople and the grain is light. And St. Nicholas says, no, don't worry about that. Just unload some. I promise you, you'll get to Constantinople. Everything will be fine. They get to Constantinople and lo and behold, the grain is no lighter than it was when

they stopped. And St. Nicholas managed to get enough grain off the boat that it fed everyone in the city for two years and there was enough for seed. There are all kinds of famines. Famine is one of the big things that crops up, which is, again, not unbelievable. It's a relatively dry part of the world. But it does connect to this particular story, which is one of my favorite St. Nicholas stories, which also doesn't crop up until the late medieval period. But in this same famine, there's a very bad butcher. Okay. And it gets very Sweeney Todd very quickly. And he lures three little boys into his house and then kills them. And then he puts them into a like salting barrel and he's like prepared to cure them like prosciutto or something. And St. Nicholas, like his spidey

sense tingles. He's like, oh, something's afoot. And he goes in there, opens the barrel and finds the corpses of the three little boys and he resurrects them from the dead. And this is a massively popular story in the late medieval period. People love this story and it suddenly starts cropping up everywhere. So you'll see pictures of St. Nicholas with three little naked boys coming out of a barrel who are all praying. And he's like, ta-da, you know, like the prestige or whatever. And people like this because, you know, the 14th century had gone through rather a bad famine, you know? So this idea that there is a saint who's involved in kind of like stopping the worst excesses of that is good. There are all these rumors that people were resorting to cannibalism during the Great

Famine. Do we know if that actually happened? Not really, but people talk about it. So this is the sort of thing where it seems like they then retrofitted something they wanted off of a saint. They're like, well, I like Saint Nicholas already. So who am I going to pray to in this famine? Bada bing, bada boom, story about three boys. Funnily, because everyone would then see this thing of like these three boys, then he subsequently becomes the patron saint of brewers because everyone saw the barrel and was like, I don't

know, something about brewing. Sure. So again, you mentioned like these stories become wildly popular. Is that because that is the cultural currency of the day? Why don't stories about William Wallace become super popular? Is it that just when you and I are hanging out in the ale houses and in the fields, we are reaching for biblical and religious stories. That's what we talk about. That's what we're engaging with. Like today, people are watching Marvel movies. Yeah. I mean, I think that's quite apt because it's hard to explain to us now because we see religion as incredibly unfun, how you get forced to go to mass on Sunday or something like that. But medieval people love

this stuff. For them, the idea of a really fun night out is it's like, oh, there's an itinerant preacher who's come through town. Let's all go hear a sermon. And they love that. Like for them, that's very, very fun. And so you can tell these stories of St. Nicholas, but also they can get told by professional storytellers in the persons of clergy, preachers. So they can tell you that from the pulpit and everyone gets really engaged and they're like, oh yeah, that's really good. That's a really exciting kind of story that I can apply to my life. And he makes for really good art and people really engage with art a lot. So art is incredibly important in a kind of non-literate world. And if you have in your

church, for example, a statue of St. Nicholas or a painting of him on an altar. This is like one of the stories that you kind of tell yourself. I mean, think about it like, you know, anyone who has children, you know, how they always reach for that one pop-up book over and over again. It's like, what if you only had the one pop-up book? You know, that becomes the story that everyone likes to tell. And they feel a real personal relationship there. They really do feel like there is this guy up in heaven looking out for them that they can go to who does these incredible things. And speaking of the incredible things, what's going on with the Father Christmas connection? The giving nice stuff down chimneys. So it starts off with a pretty interesting story about there's a family who they seem to be of the nobility and they've

fallen on hard times. So they've got absolutely no money. And the father's got three daughters who are all of marriageable age, but nobody will marry them because he doesn't have enough money for a dowry. So he's like, well, girls, I guess it's time to go on the game. So, which is rather the thing in the Eastern Roman empire, you know, brothels abound. And, you know, from a Christian aspect, you know, the relationship to sex work is tricky, where it's like, well, you got to have it because otherwise everyone will just be too horny to function. But it's not good, right? And it's definitely not great if it's not your first choice. And the girls don't really want to go work at a brothel.

So anyway, St. Nicholas gets wind of this and he's like, no, absolutely not. And so at night when the family's asleep, one day he goes and he throws a sack full of gold in the window. They wake up the next morning, they find a sack full of gold. The father says, yes, incredible. I can use this as a dowry. And the first daughter gets married. Second night, same thing. Throw in the thing of gold. Second daughter gets married. She's got a dowry and the first daughter gets married. Second night, same thing, throw in the thing of

gold. Second daughter gets married. She's got a dowry with that. On the third night, the dad stays up all night because he's like, who is this who is throwing gold through the window? And he finds that St. Nicholas is there with enough money for the dowry for the third daughter. And St. Nicholas is like, homie, do not tell anybody that I did this. I'm like swearing you to secrecy, which must not have worked out because, you know, here I am telling the story, you know, 1800 years later. But this becomes kind of the origin of, oh, St. Nicholas gives things to children, right? Little light on the good vibes in this particular one, but it kind of comes about, there's this idea that you find little gifts. And if you're from a tradition that celebrates St. Nicholas still,

as I am, it's a really big Czech thing. You basically get this mini Christmas, right? So you put shoes or stockings outside your door and you got little things like tchotchkes, as we would say in Czech, candy and things of this nature. And if you ever have the chance, I very much recommend going to Prague in the first place. Jot that down. But if you're going to do it,

a great night to show up is on December 5th. Okay, so it's like St. Nicholas Eve because St. Nicholas' feast day is on December 6th, which is when he died. But St. Nicholas Eve is like a massive party. So I'm talking big stages with dancing. There's fireworks, like everyone's out in the squares, you know, having a great time drinking mulled wine and everyone dresses up like St. Nicholas and angels and demons. And it's kind of like the, like in the German thing, you have like Knecht

Lupecht and stuff, who's like the bad guy who like gives you coal or whatever. So it's like the demon, if the kids are naughty, will spank you. But if kids are good, then the angel gives them treats. And it's very difficult to explain because it's very idiosyncratic, but it's like a huge party and it's all connected to that. Did it survive communism out of interest? It did. So this was allowed, like sometimes they would crack down on it and be like, it's a little bit too religious. But then on other times people would be like, hey, hey, party.

And it was sort of like, there's ebbs and flows with it where you would get away with it a little bit more, not in Prague. So like if you're in Olomouc or something, it's like, what are they going to do? Right. You can't keep the peasants down. But it's one of those things where it's incredibly intrinsic. And this is true of a lot of places in Europe, you know, who still have celebrations. So, you know, it's big in France, in Germany, places like that, but Czechs go in for it super, super heavily, you know, and it's probably not as heavy as Russians who are like, oh,

it's Thursday again, time to Saint Nick up. But eventually this whole thing, right, of the gift giving and the naughty and nice, and I don't know it's in December, that kind of gets smooshed together in especially kind of American contexts, but that's because of people from the lowlands. So people who were Dutch, people who were Belgian, again, they have a really big celebration there where all the sailors would go down to the harbor to celebrate St. Nicholas Day. And all the sailors in the lowlands, it's like, well, that's everybody. Okay. So, and as a result, they would have these markets set up called St. Nicholas markets. And when you kind of come home through town, you would collect little presents and bring them home to the kids

or something like that. So when Dutch people settled New Amsterdam, they bring this sort of tradition over and for them, like a Saint Nick that turns into like Saint Nick that turns into Santa, as we kind of know him in the English vernacular now. And it comes very specifically kind of through the Dutch transmission in that way. The central message there has moved a fair bit from him helping to stop these three young women engaged in sex work. But just to come back to that story, was that in any way like vaguely contemporary or is that a medieval hagiographic sort of legend? This kind of starts showing up for the first time around in stories from the 8th century. Okay. So a few hundred years later.

It was. I mean, that's the thing. We don't really have any of his biographies. We know he's sainted right away, but we don't have any biographies of him until around about the 8th century. And that's when the first big one comes out. And then that gets subsequently added to and added to in order to include all of these other things. But that is one of the earlier inclusions. So, you know, punching Arius, that's a lot later. The assaulted children, that's a lot later. Earlier ones are like the calming of storms, the saving the girls. There are some legends also about him basically getting three generals who were wrongly accused of crimes off of execution. You know, so he's also like a patron saint of prisoners. And these things kind of just get added to all the time. And it's because

he is already in the public imagination and they're like, I don't know, who does this seem likely that it would be? And you can just kind of hook that on St. Nicholas, who you already got and you already quite like, I think. Isn't it interesting that for nearly 2000 years, St. Nicholas has been co-opted by different groups in different places and to do different things. Now he's a strange Coca-Cola created giver of plastic crap. He's just this useful piece of content that we all dress up and take from in different ways. Yeah. It's really interesting because for whatever reason, people just love him. So for example, you know, St. George, he's one of those and everybody loves St. George and St. George is,

you know, the patron saint of a million countries. So St. Nicholas, St. Nicholas is one of those guys where everyone is like, yes, we're having him. The Maltese love him. And the Italians love him and everybody just likes him. And to be fair, he seems like this really good kind of friend to regular people, right? That's his whole shtick is that sure, he knows hoity-toity things about Christian dogma and he's involved in that fight. Absolutely. He is a rich guy who becomes bishop, but he does all that stuff people love, which is like give away all his worldly goods, help out the poor. And that is a really, really big deal. Like the helping out poor people, helping out people who've been wrongly accused of crimes, seeing the side of the underdog.

That's something that's incredibly important. I mean, now even, but in the medieval context, even more so. So the idea of a bishop who genuinely really cares about the little guy, that's incredibly seductive. And I think he is a lot like a superhero, right? So it's like, Superman's going to come along and save you, guy on the street who's getting mug know, getting mugged or whatever. St. Nicholas does that same thing. It's the same function. You can ask somebody for help. And they're like, yeah, actually, it's good to be nice to poor people.

That's the lesson to end on. Elena, are you in the Czech Republic over the festive period? I am going to be earlier on, yes. So I'm trying to make it back for Mikuláš, as we say. going to be earlier on yes so i'm trying to make it back for meek lash as we say so okay well listen everyone follow elena's instagrams and twitter as ever because she posts great updates thank you very much elena for coming on the pod thanks so much for having me dan you