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It is a fact, strange but true, that Santa Claus’ corpse was stolen from its tomb. Though Christmas carols and Claymation specials have for some reason neglected the heist of St. Nick’s dead body, the details of that theft actually can tell us a lot about mythmaking and the power of stories, however bizarre, to shape reality. Plus, it’s just a good tale to tell at holiday parties.
The gist of it is this: In 1087 two Italian cities, Venice and Bari, raced to be the first to steal the bones of St. Nicholas—known to us as Santa Claus—from a basilica in what is now southern Turkey. Why? Because the corpse supposedly wept a magical liquor that would cure all ills if you drank it or rubbed it on your body.
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St. Nicholas was a real catch. Forget everything you know about Santa Claus. Almost everything we associate him with—the North Pole, the sled, the reindeer—is a 19th-century confection laid on top of a much older and sterner figure. The historical Nicholas was bishop of Myra, a merchant city on the Turquoise Coast at the edge of the Mediterranean and Aegean seas. He was supposedly imprisoned and tortured during the Great Persecution of the Emperor Diocletian. After his death, stories accumulated around him. He had fought demons. He had sniffed out a serial killer who was pickling boys in his meat locker. He had saved three girls from prostitution by throwing bags of gold through their window late at night—a legend that is the origin of his role as a gift giver to children. And he had saved many sailors by flying through the sky to their aid during storms, calming the waves, trimming the sails, grasping the drowning by their hair and teleporting them to land.
For Venice and Bari, coastal cities on the eastern side of the boot in the north and south, respectively, and dependent on merchant ships arriving and departing from all over the known world, it would be invaluable to have a shrine devoted to St. Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors. Businessmen from all over Europe would choose your port to set out from if they knew they could kneel at the altar of this champion of mariners. It was the best of good luck, a guarantee of calm seas and a prosperous voyage.
That was the thinking of a group of grain merchants on a routine run between Bari and the Syrian city of Antioch. Sitting around one blustery day as they crossed the Mediterranean on their three ships, they discussed the idea of stealing the saint’s bones when they passed Myra, where he was buried. It was a good time to do it: the Christian city, located in present-day Turkey, had just been invaded by the Seljuk Turks. The whole region was in turmoil. This was the time to slip in and steal the body.
It turned out, however, that they were not the only ones with this bright idea. As they discussed it in the seaside taverns of Antioch, where they were loading their return cargo, some Venetian sailors overheard and boasted that they, in fact, were about to plunder the tomb. They had all the equipment at the ready: crowbars, shovels, and mallets. They were heading there on their way home to Italy.
The Bari sailors had been a little anxious about stealing the corpse. He was a holy man, after all, and saints were supposed to hover around their relics. If you steal relics and the saint doesn’t want to go with you, it’s not a theft: It’s technically a kidnapping. The fury of a maritime saint could lead to storms, maelstroms, krakens—all sorts of disasters.
But now that the Venetians had thrown down the gauntlet, all their reservations disappeared. Venice and Bari were great economic rivals, and Venice had been getting the upper hand with sweet trade deals and a powerful navy. Bari, the scrappy underdog, was determined to get its own back. So the three Barese grain ships set out for Myra immediately, hoping to steal the body before the Venetians knew what was happening.
It must have been an eerie sight when they anchored at Myra. Turkish and Turkmen raiders had swept down out of the mountains a couple of years before. The city itself was now deserted, all its population huddled in a fortress up on a nearby hill, surrounded by the tombs of their ancestors. They were probably paying tribute to the Turks, some kind of protection money, but the truce was uneasy, and they rarely ventured out of the fortress.
This meant, however, that only four monks guarded the tomb of St. Nicholas, down in the city, carrying on their ancient duties, filling decorative glass vials with the ooze that drizzled from his corpse.
Cautiously, the Bari sailors assembled a task force of 47 who would march on the church, armed with swords for protection and sledgehammers for breaking into the tomb. A skeleton crew of 20-odd would stay behind and guard the three ships in case the Turks noticed them and got hostile. The Turks, according to one source, also worshipped at the tomb of Nicholas—they had been Islamized for only a few decades, and apparently felt that a holy man was a holy man, regardless of his precise sect. For both Christians and the newly converted Turkish Muslims in the period, there was an almost shamanic, magical property to the holy dead that went far beyond doctrine.
When the Barese thieves reached the walled compound that included the Nicholas church and its abandoned monastery, they posted guards to watch the crossroads and make sure no one was coming to stop them.
When the sailors went into the church, the four guardians assumed they were pilgrims stopping off in the middle of a trade route to ask for a prosperous voyage and buy a vial of the Nick liquor. After all, there were a couple of priests with them. It seemed likely enough that they were on pilgrimage. It only took a few minutes, however, before the sailors’ questions about where the body was stashed started to seem a little too pointed.
Suspicious, one of the guardians demanded, “Why do you ask all these questions? Can it be that you want to take the body? Don’t you know that we cannot possibly agree to such a thing—in fact, we would rather die than permit him to be taken?”
At first, the Bari crew tried lies—they claimed they’d actually been sent by the pope to seize the body—and they tried bribery—100 gold pieces for the bones. The guardians were horrified. St. Nicholas’ body had lain under the floor of their church for 700 years. It defined the city of Myra. They weren’t about to give it up.
So the thieves decided it was time to use force. This was a big step. They were in a holy place. They were worried about curses. Nonetheless, they grabbed the four guardians and tied them up. They sent men out into the courtyard to watch for resistance. And then, in superstitious fear, they asked their own priests to sing a few chants, asking Nicholas for permission to steal him—to translate him, in the term of art used by relic hunters everywhere.
A young hothead named Matteo was sick of playing nice. He walked to the point in the floor where there was apparently a hole for drawing out the sacred oil, and he started battering it with his hammer. Soon, other sailors were feeling bolder, and they all joined in. They bashed apart the marble floor of the basilica and found, under it, a sarcophagus. (There is some possibility that Nicholas’ sarcophagus survives to this day, with holes drilled in its scalloped lid to draw the oil out—and, tellingly, to pour holy oil in. It appears that this was the method by which the oil was renewed: The guardians of the body were pressing their own olive oil in the compound, infusing it with local myrrh, and pouring it through a siphon into the sarcophagus, where it would be irradiated by the holiness of the sacred bones, and could then be packaged for resale.)
Matteo smashed the lid of the sarcophagus. The sailors found that the whole box was welling with dark oil. Unfazed, Matteo dunked his arms into the oil and felt around for the bones. He was frustrated; he couldn’t find the skull, which was obviously the real get. To the horror of everyone who looked on, he lowered himself into the bath of oil, drenching his clothes in sacred ichor, and fumbled around, feeling for the saint’s head. Modern investigation of the bones suggests that in the process, he almost certainly shattered the ribs and pelvis, which he must have been kneeling on.
When—aha!—Matteo found the skull, he handed it up, and the two priests connected to the heist carefully lay it on a cloak to be folded up with the other long bones. As quickly as possible, the crew wrapped up their ill-gotten gains and made for the exit as the four guardians wailed pleas and threats and curses behind them.
The armed band walked back through the deserted city of Myra toward their ships. They would have gotten there without incident—except, of course, there is no honor among thieves: They stopped to argue about whose ship should actually carry the corpse. While they argued, one of the guardians somehow made his way up to the fortress where the Christian population of Myra hid and sounded the alarm.
The people of Myra had suffered enough. Their city had been overrun. They’d been locked up in their fortress for a year, maybe longer, paying tribute so they could at least go out in the day to tend to their fields and whatever livestock was left. And now their saint, their city’s one claim to fame, was being carried off by some hooligans from the heel of the Italian boot. They poured out of their fortress and charged down through the streets of the city, screaming in rage.
At this, the Bari sailors picked up the pace, trotting toward their ships, which were pulled up on shore to the south of the city. The bones, wrapped up in a bundle like Santa Claus’ bag of toys, slapped up and down on the back of the priest who carried them, drizzling grease down his back.
The townspeople reached the ships too late. The crew had already scampered aboard. The people of Myra demanded the bones back. They wailed in sorrow that their city’s saint was about to sail away to foreign lands. Some even cursed Nicholas himself, the father of the city, for abandoning his children. But nothing would persuade the thieves: They pushed off and started to row toward open waters.
Men and women plunged into the sea behind them, grabbing at the ships’ oars. Back on shore, they found one of the holy guardians and blamed him for letting the Italians snatch the saint. They began to beat him to death on the shore.
But the ships were getting farther away. The Bari sailors were almost mocking as they pulled away from Myra. They would not have an easy voyage home—some of the sailors themselves would steal joints and fragments of the saint, a transgression that, as they believed, caused them to suffer through storms and almost capsize. But the saint was theirs.
They drove a hard bargain when they got home to Bari. All of them were to get a cut of the pilgrim income from those who came to pray to the saint. This is one of the reasons we know about this heist: Not only do we have a couple of narratives, written a few weeks or months after they got back to Bari, but we have a full financial account of the annual payments still being made to their families 80 years later.
Bari’s bid for pilgrim traffic worked. A decade after the heist, in the mid-1090s, the emperor of Byzantium, frustrated at the Turkish invasion of his lands to the east, including the region around Myra, asked the kings of Western Europe to send armies to assist him in pushing back the Seljuk Turks. The barbarian monarchs of the West sent hordes east—a counterinvasion we call the First Crusade. It was the beginning of two centuries of senseless bloodshed in the Middle East that forever tainted Muslim–Christian relations, a series of disastrous massacres and incompetent defeats that still swells the hearts of contemporary white supremacists with pride.
And many of the expeditions set out from Bari, where the soldiers could pray to Nicholas for calm seas and a prosperous voyage. The city thrived as invasion forces supplied themselves at the merchant stalls of the port of St. Nicholas and set forth on their mission of destruction.
And what about the Venetians, the city’s great rivals? What happened when they got to Myra and demanded the bones?
Well, that’s a story for another Christmas.
