Empire: World History - 319. Heist of St Nicolas: The Medieval Mafia Who Stole Santa (Part 2)

Episode Date: December 25, 2025

Who were the Italian sailors who stole the bones of St Nicolas from his church in Turkey in 1087? How was the mythology of St Nicolas combined with Germanic pagan stories of Odin riding a white horse accompanied by ravens? How did polar-mania and Coca Cola advertising transform Dutch traditions around St Nicolas into the Santa Claus we know today? William and Anita are joined once again by Sam Dalrymple to discuss his original research on the epic Heist of St Nicolas… Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com  For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mparpoduk.com. And welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Duremberg. And this is the second episode with the wonderful Sam D'Rumpel, author of Shattered Lands. which we also covered in this podcast. Welcome back to you, Sam.

Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. And if we had to do a little subtitle of this second episode, because in the first one, we were talking about the origins of the real St. Nicholas and where his tomb is and all of these different cults which kind of merge into this one character that we now know is St. Nick. This one, I think we would have, as a subheading, Who Stole Santa?

Because it is the story of one of the most extraordinary, you couldn't believe it, heists. So by the turn of the first millennium, St. Nicholas, as we've established in the last episode, was already famous. So you have pilgrims coming, believing that his bones might be able to produce actually a healing liquid called Mur, which I think is tickles me as well, because it's also Christmassy and also Macabre. And Myra itself is named, is this right after Mur? That's right, isn't it? It's all intertwined. So, I mean, Mur is old, than the name Myra, but it's named after it. And we're not quite sure what the early association is,

but to all sorts of people seem to say that his tomb begins secreting myr. As every good saint's tomb should do. Whether the bishops have been pouring muir into his tomb so that it secretes this sacred liquid, no one's quite sure. It becomes very, very famous for this, and there's people who visit Myra from across the Mediterranean to collect vials of myr. If you're asking the Monty Python question, yeah, really happy that you bought the gold. Thanks for the frankincet.

What the hell is myr? Mour, just to remind you, we did cover this one Christmas. It's an incense which is said to have antiseptic qualities as well. So that is the answer to your question. What is me? That is what Mner is. So, yes, tell us, what is this story about the Heist, the Great Christmas Heist? It's one of these stories that you just can't make.

make up. In 1087, 62 Italian fishermen set sail from Pula, the town of Bari, to steal the mortal remains of Father Christmas. Brilliant. Now, the background to this is that Anatolia, modern Turkey, which had been a secure heartland of Christianity since the time of St. Paul, is now facing a dramatic change in its religion and in its ethnicity, because the Turks originally from the steppe have invaded Anatolia. And Sam and I visited last year the extraordinary Armenian capital of Arni, which was in their path, and very close to Arni, the Armenian city that was, I think it was an enormous big metropolis up in what's now Eastern Turkey, but was the capital of the Armenian baghritid kings. This battle, Manzikert is fought, 1071, and the Seljuk Turks, who are invading

from Central Asia, defeat the Byzantines, defeat the Armenians, and move very rapidly into Anatolia. And anyone that's seen that, what's that wonderful Turkish soap opera? Ertigl. That's right, where you would see those Turkish nomads with all their swords and their pasturing animals and their yurts and all these. beautiful women sitting on carpets, all that sort of thing. That's sweeping in into a landscape that had previously been Greek-speaking, Christian in religion, looking to Constantinople, the Byzantine capital for leadership. So this means that all the sacred relics and all the saints' tombs and all the holy churches and sacred sites of Anatolia are now in danger. And so the Italians can

dress up this heist as saving St. Nicholas from the heathes. rather than just pinching it for the benefit of Bari and pinching the pilgrim traffic. They can put a good spin on it, can't they, Sam? Exactly. And I think it's important to remember just how big the relic trade is at this point. It's not just in Christianity, notably. It's also in religions like Buddhism. So you get a million stupas that are dedicated to the teeth of the Buddha.

So many teeth, in fact, that they would fit many whole entire mouths. And likewise, you get this whole trade in early Christians. saints and the relics associated with them. These guys are very intent on getting these bones. And there is an economic motive here, as well as just piety, because if you have the bones of a saint, you get the pilgrim traffic. And it gives the whole town a sort of identity and importance, as well as a sacred protector. This is regarded almost as a kind of force field, isn't it, which protects these places.

Exactly. And so crucially, from all the accounts that survive of this great heist to try and steal the relics of St. Nicholas. The Italian sailors from Pulae arrive, I think it's in Antioch, further to the east in Turkey. And they find that there's another group of Venetian ships who are also planning to steal the relics of St. Nicholas. And there's a race between the two sets of sailors between who can get their first. It's like an ocean's 11 set up. And the year is, what year are we talking about? Just let's pinpoint the date. We're 1087. So, It's 16 years after the Byzantines have lost in Manzikert and after this kind of wave of

of Turkish nomads has suddenly entered Anatolia and spread very rapidly in with quite large armies. You know, the border fortress has fallen. And suddenly, you know, even though Constantinople and everything further west is still safe, the whole of eastern Anatolia is now very much under threat. I should say two little things here, which is which people might not know. at the Battle of Manzikert, it was another battle between the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans. So although the official battle is between the Turks and the Byzantines, the Turks had Norman mercenaries working with them, the cousins of the Norman Knights that had just won the Battle of Hastings in 1066,

while many of the defeated Anglo-Saxon aristocracy who'd lost their lands when William the Conquers England goes and joins the Varangian Guard, which is the North European Guard, which guards the Bezant-Ebren, so whatever it was, 1066 to 1071, that's only six years apart. But there's a rematch of the Battle of Hastings in Eastern Turkey. That's the first story. I didn't know that. That's great. The second story is that the Venetians have form in this. this Ocean's Eleven contest for getting the bones, because I think just before this, they'd stolen the bones of St. Mark from Alexandria. So when you go to St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice,

now this great sort of cathedral swarming with tourists, that cathedral is built, the Roammo is built, to house the bones of St. Marks pillaged from Alexandria. This is a game that, you know, the Venetians have got formed, but in this stage, our brave heroes, the sailors of Puglia, get there first. So talk us through what happens. So obviously they cross by sea, by ship. Where do they pull up and how easy is that crossing for them? And is there nobody there to stop them?

Painters a picture. Sure. So it's April 1087. There's 62 Pooley and sailors divided between three ships. Mafiaezi, basically. Yeah, exactly. It's the mafia. The mafia shows up in the port of Adyraki.

The best account of this is that one of the sailors, Nisophoris, would later write to a chronicle about their mission. And of course, he justifies it as the kind of greatest thing that's ever happened to Christendom, saving the relics from the marauding Turks. And of course, you know, you read between the lines, and there are very much still Greek Christians in the church when they get there, who are much less fond of this whole plan. Thanks to Nisephyrus. We have this wonderful sort of, again, Hollywoodish image of like Gandalf, these four monks saying, hang on a minute. you shall not pass. We have these bones. We're doing fine. We're looking after them fine.

What do you mean you're taking them away? These four monks are definitely rather astonished. By all accounts, these sailors show up armed with iron mallets. This really is the mafiosi. Yeah, they are. They ask, where is the saint's body kept? The Mafia army descends, absolutely. Goodfellos has iron mallets, doesn't it?

Yeah. So these four poor monks, They're in a town that by all accounts has been half-emptied. There's worry that these kind of these Turkish nomads are about to descend on the town. And the reason why the sailors have picked this moment is because the town is virtually emptied. People have fled the town. And so this is the kind of moment is ripe to nick the relics. But these four brave monks have stayed on in the church.

They thought that they were going to be facing the Turks. But of course, instead, there's these Italian sailors. And so one of the lines that we have in the memoir is that the monks, is that the monks respond when asked where the saint is being kept. They respond, the holy confessor of God will never let you touch it. And one of the monks tries to run away and call the remaining townsfolk, the few people who've stayed. But the sailors grab them, tie them up and place a card at the entrance of the Basilica. No. Poor monks.

But then it gets a little harder for the sailors because apparently one knocks over a bottle of myrrh. A mure makes, I'm so glad mers in this story as much as it. It feels so festive. Okay, so knocks the mure onto the floor and it doesn't smash, but it makes this enormous vibrating clanging sound. It goes clank on the floor and handily the sailors interpret this as a message from St. Nicholas saying that it is my will to leave with you. This is pure Monty Python. That is why I've hurled mure. on the ground because I want you to take me with you. Take me with you.

Away from the lovely place where I've lived very happily. So then is it easy from there on in? They just scoop up the bones and flee or what happens? So I've seen a picture of the sarcophagus. It's got enormous hole in it. So they use the iron mallets to good effect by look of it. Yeah. No.

I mean, they say that history is written by the victors. So, you know, according to Necephyrus's account, the bottle of myr clangs to the ground, which reveals the voice of, St. Nicholas saying, I must come with you. At which point a sailor called Matthew is kind of, you know, guided to the tomb, figures out which of the tombs

is St. Nicholas's, and smashes it open with his mallet, revealing an explosion of mur that kind of, you know, cascades across the floor of the... There's always more mur. And then supposedly the sailors grab the bones, which are swamped in mur, wrap them in silks,

load them onto the ships, aided by the will of St. Nicholas, the Italian sailors make it onto their ships and the winds are favourable and they've done it. They sail off into the distance. Shocking tale. Okay, in their getaway vehicle, heave him, quick, fast, right faster.

Okay, so they get back. The Pope, I'm guessing, must be beside himself with delight. He must have been cock a hoop. They've got their bones back. I mean, what does he do to commemorate this great heist? Yeah, so they build a massive new business. in Bari. So today, if you go to Bari and Puglia, there is a massive basilica dedicated to St. Nicholas to house his mortal remains. It's very gorgeous. It's gorgeous and has all these

very early pictures of him, again, all along the walls. And today, you know, it's a kind of Romanesque church. But what's rather interesting is that Bari itself had been part of an Islamic Emirate within the last century, I think. And so as a result, many of the craftsmen had earlier been working and building Islamic art. So despite the fact that it's a Romanesque church, behind the bishop's chair is a motive that resembles Allah written in Arabic. But it's clear that the craftsmen don't actually know Arabic. It's kind of pseudo-Arabic, you know, it's kind of pseudo-Arabic, you know, resembles the shapes that Allah reads when you know Arabic. But it's a kind of, Islam-esque symbols are dotted all over this church. Because all these craftsmen are the

grandchildren of people who've been working for the Islamic Emirate of Bari. Islam leaving one place and arriving in another. Exactly. So Bari does very well from this. It now becomes, it tracks all the pilgrim traffic that was heading off tomorrow. Exactly. And for good measure, there's a lovely image in the church at Bari with St. Nicholas saying, my bones will rest here, because obviously his voice had announced to the sailors that he'd wanted this to happen. And so, yeah, it becomes the departure point later for the Crusaders. So you get all of those, all of the famous knights who then charge off to the Holy Land during the Crusades. Kneel at his crypt because, again, he's the patron saint of sailors.

The Poseidon conflation. And so all of these guys who are about to take off their boats do so after kneeling to him. When I was at college, I followed the route of the First Crusade in Jerusalem. I got a college grant and went off. And I went through Bari. The first time I ever went to St. Nicholas, at Bari, was following the reach of the Crusades. And I followed in the footsteps to the church. But Sam, only two decades later, the poor monks of Myra have another visit from relic hunters.

So, yes, two decades later, the Venetians finally arrived. You would have thought that they'd arrived around the same time, considering, according to those accounts, You know, the Venetians had also been in Antioch looking for the relics themselves. But the poor monks seems to still be there. We don't know whether it's four monks still. But the church is very much still active. But this time, a bunch of sailors arrive and rather usefully for the sailors of Venice, they, through divine revelation, discover that the Pooleyan sailors have got the wrong tomb in my...

He couldn't make this up. So they also go in with a bunch of iron mallets. and smash up a different model sarcophyses. And there is a photograph that you've sent us, Sam, of another beaten up early Christian sarcophagus, also smashed by Iron Malice, and poor monks of Mara and having a very hard time. Yeah, they were just saying, you know,

everything was fine until you arrived. Nothing was smashed. Everything was all quite tidy. Let's take a break. Join us after the break, where we delve into this story a bit more and also the spread of the cult of St. Nicholas. across the world. Welcome back. So just before the break, we had the sailors from Puglia who got some bones,

and then the Venetians going, well, you got the wrong bones because we have the right bones. And the poor monk saying, we had all the bones and they were fine, but now where is St. Nicholas? And this is the point, Sam, that suddenly the reliquary spreads around Europe. And also the mythology and name of St. Nicholas becomes a big deal in Europe at this point. Exactly. So you quite quickly get kind of, you know, fingernails of St. Nicholas showing up in kind of Normandy or Calais or, you know, that suddenly there's all sorts of, now that they're in Italy. Bits of him. Bits of him start spreading to all sorts of churches. And this didn't happen. I mean, you and I have been to the tomb of St. Francis Xavier in Goa. In the 1960s, when they displayed the uncorrupted body of St. Francis Xavier, a local pilgrim, went down and bit off his little toe, which she smuggled out and goa in her mouth. It's a disgusting story.

And then she got caught. They someone alerted the ferry's point, and they found the bone of St. Francis Xavier in her mouth. And now when you go to the basilica, you can kiss, if you wish, her toe in a separate monstrance, which is kept for visiting pilgrims. And while the uncorrupted body of St. Francis Xavier is only available once every 10 or 50, years, you can kiss the toe any day you like. So this is how these things get moved around. Yeah, yeah, okay.

So take us now to a place where I know they still, you know, they don't go in for all this Father Christmas stuff. They still very much say, Sinter class, you know, so St. Nicholas, it is all based around the cult of St. Nicholas. And I remember, you know, just not so long ago that Sinterclass was a big deal. with his sidekick Black Pete, who we've also discussed on this podcast before being problematic as an image. But at what point did the, now we call them the Dutch, the Netherlands, when did it embrace St. Nicholas and make him their own? Sure. So this seems to be around 1,300 that again,

thanks to his association with sailors, you know, the Netherlands is famously, largely kind of, you know, reclaimed land from the ocean was very much a kind of port region where sailors would trade. And so Amsterdam becomes associated with him by about 1,300. And curiously, it's the kind of Dutch name for St. Nicholas that becomes Sinta class, class being Nicholas. But here, it takes on a whole stranger thing, because as we mentioned in the last episode, St. Nicholas's own legend is very much associated with the old Greek cult of Poseidon. It's in Amsterdam that it begins to be mixed with local pagan Germanic traditions surrounding Odin.

So Odin, crucially, rides a flying white horse through the air, which becomes the flying reindeer. And he's always accompanied by these two black ravens who tell him about the good or bad behavior of mortals, i.e. whether people have been naughty or nice. So this is from the myth of Odin? Yes, it's from the myth of Odin. And the reindeer is originally a white horse. Crucially, when you go to Amsterdam today and you see the Sinterclass procession,

he's still there, rides a white horse rather than a reindeer. The reindeer is an American tradition that comes later, and we'll get to that in a bit. So essentially, here it meets a whole new range of pre-Christian traditions. But of course, everything begins to change in the Reformation. Saint worship is outlawed across the region. And interestingly, Synthoclast is one of the only surviving kind of, you know, because his feast day is still recognized, despite the fact that all his reliquaries are smashed. Your average kind of farmer would still recognize the feast day of St. Nicholas. Tell us quickly about the transformation of the two ravens of Odin into a black moorish.

sidekick called Zvarte Piet. Black Pete. Yes. So that is a rather, that's a much later story. What seems to happen is that the images of St. Nicholas dropping bags of gold coins in the kind of three daughters myth is transformed into him dropping oranges. Again, that's why we have oranges in stockings, etc. But at this time, oranges are associated with Moorish Spain.

with Anne Lucia, the Black's Water Peat are meant to be basically kind of Moors from Morocco and Spain, associated with oranges. The oranges are one part of it, but also is there the story that you're naughty and nice, you know, it doesn't just mean you're going to get presents or not get presents, because if you are naughty in the Centreclass and Black Pete mythology, you will be thrown into a sack. So there are sacks, there are Christmas sacks here, but you will be as a child thrown into the sack and taken back to Moorish Spain.

So it's one of those things that parents would threaten their children with until, I believe, you know, not fairly recently saying, you know, well, you don't want Black Pete to take you away. And there are these sort of tabloughs that take place in the streets, or certainly there were, where, you know, people would reenact this and they'd grab like a screaming child and say, ah, we're coming to get you. You know, it's all part of the, you know, sort of the Christmas, not the Christmas plays. Oh, no, I won't. Oh, yes, you will. All that. festive hijinks that would happen around Holland. But this is the origin of our Santa Claus myths. And there's all sorts of bits of the kind of, you know, our present day things that we associate now with Christmas that are actually originally associated with the Feast of St. Nicholas. I think one of the more intriguing ones is in 1663, the Protestants try to outlaw the Feast of St. Nicholas in addition to his icons, because people would begin making. icons of him made from bread. There's what, again, Jeremy Seal in his book, Santa Life describes as an insurrection

of 11-year-olds in Amsterdam who ridiculed the authorities by marching for their rights to make gingerbread cakes of St. Nicholas. And that's where the association of gingerbread with the feast of St. Nicholas begins. This is that your boys, Anita. You can imagine your two lads

doing an insurrection against their mother when she tries to stop them doing something. Can I just say there is a daily, daily insurrection in this house over one thing or the other. So, okay, strong in the Netherlands, but the place which has given Santa, the kind of livery that we recognize now internationally, you know, the red and the white, you know, that all comes from America and advertising, a Coca-Cola. We know that. That's a widely spread story. But is it the Dutch who first take this saint with them? Because they do found New Amsterdam, which is now New York. That is

part of their colony, that is their colony, I should say. Is there a demonstrable link between those Dutch sailors who go off to the new world and take their old saint with them? Yes, that's exactly how it happens. It seems that the Dutch bring their traditions of Sinterclass to New Amsterdam. And then when the British take over the city, they rename New Amsterdam as New York, and they anglicise Sinterclass as Santa Claus. And so that's where our current name for the saint comes from. And of course, interestingly, the British themselves had a whole separate set of traditions to do with St. Nicholas,

as in St. Nicholas's church and Chiswick. But suddenly there's a kind of new figure of Santa Claus. You know, New York is known for its being a melting part of all different migrants. Over a period of time, I guess they would have brought their own tradition. their own Christmas beliefs as well and sort of added on. So you get all of this embellishment to the Santa Claus,

now Santa Claus that we have in New York. I mean, what kind of thing did we see? What kind of metamorphosis does he go through? So you get, of course, Dutch migrants, English migrants, Italian migrants, and Eastern European migrants who all bring their different traditions together. So from Eastern Europe,

you get the idea of dropping presents down chimneys. Whereas, you know, the name is obviously, the Dutch name. What's interesting is that they all had slightly different traditions associated with him. And there's evidence that eventually it's in the 19th century New York, that finally they decide to move the date that they're going to observe his feast on. There's an account from 1827 that says the old Dutch settlers transferred the observance of the eve of St. Nicholas, who you know is especially the patron of little children, to that of New York. year. And so you get you get a moving of the date first to new year. And then very soon there's a

same decade in fact, there's a writer called Clement Clark Moore who writes a children's poem about Santa arriving the night before Christmas. And so suddenly again the date shifts to Christmas Eve. And until this point, until 1827, you've always had the feast of St. Nicholas and the gift giving, etc. on the on the fifth or sixth of December. But now suddenly it's the 24th of December. And this is a crucial new American idea. I don't think I'd ever made the link that Santa Claus was completely different from the Christmas story. Because we've always bundled it together.

But it's two completely different bits of the Christian calendar that get conflated in New York. I have a question, though. I have a crucial question for those who are gearing up to the big day. Reindeer, because they do a lot of heavy lifting in the modern day story. Quite literally. Quite literally, they do a lot of heavy lifting. So where do the rain, are the Americans responsible for reindeer as well? Yeah. So that same poem has him arriving via flying reindeer and the white horse that Santa Claus, that Sinterclass has in Amsterdam that flies through the air accompanied by Ravens,

suddenly turns into flying reindeer and we get the beginning of the whole kind of Rudolf story. But why? They have horses in America. This writer, it's just a children's poem. It's a random children's poem that set the night before Christmas that has a huge impact on the Santa Claus myth. Interestingly, also, this is a moment when the exploration of the North Pole is happening. Lots of people are heading north, discovering new bits of Canada and is trying to get to the North Pole. And so Polar mania is everywhere in New York at this time. And so there's lots of, I think, kind of imagery of people hang out with race. reindeer on the streets at the same time of the year that everyone's hanging up images of

Santa Claus. They're just put up images around town at the same time of year and people just begin associating the two. And Sam, when do Coca-Cola get into that? Because we've always heard about Coke. Yes, because I mean, just in case you haven't heard, so the Dutch export of Sinterclass, it was always dressed in green. He was sort of in a very fine green cape, green hood. You know, very handsome. He looked too. He had the beard. But nothing of the red and white that we see. That is Coca-Cola livery, isn't it? And the Coke is red and white before this, and they transfer their colours onto Santa. So it's very simply, in 1931, Coca-Cola does an ad trying to basically show that Coca-Cola is really great when you chill it. So, you know,

put it in your fridge kind of thing. And in order to get that kind of cold sort of theme across, they have him opening a new fridge dressed in a red outfit with kind of woolly sleeves that look a bit like his beard and with a Santa hat. And the Santa hat is also an invention of Coca-Cola. Now, of course, Coca-Cola then, much like St. Nicholas in centuries past, in the following decades, Coca-Cola itself has spread across the world. And this very distinctly American version of St. Nicholas is exported back across the world, often to places. that already worship St. Nicholas, but it's now at this moment in kind of the 1940s and 50s that many people in Russia or Greece or Turkey or India

begin associating Santa Claus as a completely different figure. A lot of places in the world will have, you know, commemoration of St. Nicholas as separate from an entirely separate veneration of Santa Claus who increasingly becomes a kind of mythological creature, a bit like the Easter bunny that's not really associated with any ecclesiastical things at all, exactly. Associated with fridges full of coke rather than tabernacles full of relics.

It's been such a ride, a sleigh ride, they say. So, so good to have you and a really kind of quirky look at this time of year at an empire story. It's a true empire story going through many different empire. Sam Durenple, thank you so very much. We hope that you've enjoyed this. And thank you so much for listening and for those of you who celebrate, a very Merry Christmas and a happy new year from me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Duremberg.