The Translation to Bari (1087)

In the spring of 1087 a party of merchants and sailors from Bari sailed to Myra, forced open the tomb of St. Nicholas, and carried his relics back to their city, where they were enshrined in a great new basilica. The Latin accounts written within a year of the event narrate it candidly as a forcible and partial removal. This file recounts the translation and its sources, the building of San Nicola, the myrrh-like “manna” that the relics are said to exude, and the rival Venetian claim to the remainder of the saint.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Wonderworker; Great Hierarch)

The Setting: Myra in Decline

By the later eleventh century Myra and its region had fallen on hard times. The advance of the Seljuk Turks into Asia Minor after the Byzantine defeat at Manzikert (1071) left the Lycian coast exposed and the shrine of St. Nicholas vulnerable, its monastic guardians diminished (Jones 1978; English 2012). The relics of so great a saint, lying in a weakened and threatened town, were a prize that the maritime cities of the central Mediterranean — Bari and Venice above all — were not inclined to leave where they lay. The translation of 1087 must be read against this background: a famous relic in a place no longer able to protect it, and ambitious port cities eager to possess it both for devotion and for the prestige and pilgrim traffic it would bring.

The Expedition and Its Sources

The event is unusually well documented for a medieval translation, by two Latin accounts composed at Bari within about a year of it — one attributed to a cleric named Nicephorus, the other to John the Archdeacon (both 1088) (Jones 1978; English 2012). According to these narratives, a company of Bari sailors and merchants, having learned that Venetians were planning the same enterprise, resolved to seize the relics first. Arriving at Myra in 1087, they went to the shrine, overpowered or persuaded the few monks who guarded it, broke into the sarcophagus, and removed the bones, which they found lying in a quantity of liquid. They carried the relics to their ship and sailed home, reaching Bari on 9 May 1087 — the date kept ever after as the feast of the Translation (Jones 1978; English 2012).

The accounts are notably frank about the character of the deed. The removal was forcible: the guardians did not freely surrender the relics, and the Barians took them by a mixture of pressure and stealth. It was also, by the sources’ own admission, hurried and partial — in their haste the company did not gather every fragment, and bones were left behind in the tomb at Myra, a detail that becomes important for the Venetian claim (Jones 1978; English 2012). The translation was thus, in plain terms, a pious theft — a furta sacra, the medieval category for the holy robbery of relics, of which it is one of the most famous instances.

The candor of the Bari accounts is not, in fact, an accident but a feature of the furta sacra genre to which they belong. The medieval narratives of relic-theft characteristically advertise the forcible taking rather than conceal it, because the logic of the genre held that a saint could not be carried off against his will: had Nicholas not consented to the removal, the reasoning ran, no human force could have accomplished it, and so the very success of the seizure was read as the saint’s own assent to be moved. The frank admission of pressure, stealth, and haste in Nicephorus and John the Archdeacon thus does double duty — it records what happened and, in the genre’s own terms, it certifies that the relics are genuine and the saint willing (Jones 1978; English 2012). For the modern reader the candor is valuable for the opposite reason: it lets the historian see the deed plainly, without the gloss of later piety, and judge it for what it was.

A Translation and a Seizure

How this event is named depends on where one stands, and honesty requires holding both descriptions together. To the people of Bari, and to the Church that received the relics with joy and built them a magnificent home, it was a translation — a providential rescue of the saint’s body from a town that could no longer guard it, and its enshrinement where it would be honored and accessible to pilgrims. To the historian, and to the monks of Myra who lost their treasure, it was a seizure — a forcible removal of relics from a community that did not consent (Jones 1978; English 2012). Both are true descriptions of the same act, and this collection reports both. The Orthodox Church, it should be noted, keeps the feast of the Translation (9 May) and venerates the relics at Bari without thereby endorsing the manner of their taking; the cult received the saint’s presence as a gift even as the means were violent (see The Cult East and West).

The Basilica and the Manna

At Bari the relics were placed first in a temporary location and then in the crypt of a great new church built to house them, the Basilica di San Nicola, whose construction began in 1087 and whose crypt was consecrated in 1089 in the presence of Pope Urban II (Jones 1978; English 2012). The basilica became, and remains, one of the principal pilgrimage churches of the Latin West and a major destination for Orthodox pilgrims as well — a rare shared shrine of the divided Church.

The local politics of the translation are themselves instructive, for the relics were a prize over which Bari’s own factions contended even before the basilica rose. The accounts let it be seen that the question of who would control the saint’s body — the secular and ecclesiastical powers of the city, the abbot chosen to guard the shrine, the archbishop — was bound up with the prestige and pilgrim revenue the relics would draw (Jones 1978). The choice to build a new church under the patronage of the saint, rather than to lodge the relics in the existing cathedral, settled the matter in favor of a dedicated foundation, and the speed of the work — crypt ready for consecration within two years — measures the urgency the city felt to make its possession permanent and magnificent. That Pope Urban II himself presided at the 1089 consecration set the seal of the reforming Roman papacy on the new shrine and lifted it from a civic coup to an event of Latin Christendom; Urban, who would soon summon the First Crusade, presided over a translation that had itself been spurred by the Seljuk pressure on Byzantine Anatolia, so that the relic and the wider confrontation of Latin West and Muslim East stood, even here, in the same frame (Jones 1978; English 2012).

Associated with the relics is the phenomenon of the manna (Italian la manna di San Nicola): a clear, watery liquid that is said to collect in the tomb and to be drawn off from the relics, traditionally on the feast of the Translation. The accounts of 1087 already report that the bones were found lying in liquid at Myra, and at Bari the exudation has continued to be reported and is gathered annually by the clergy and distributed, diluted, to the faithful (Jones 1978; English 2012). The myrrh-streaming or manna-yielding character of the relics is part of why Nicholas is honored in the East with the title myroblytes (“myrrh-gusher”), shared with a handful of other wonderworking saints. As with all such phenomena, this collection reports the manna as what the tradition attests and the faithful venerate; the natural and supernatural explanations offered for it are not adjudicated here (METHODOLOGY §3.5). What is securely attested is the long, continuous tradition of the liquid and its veneration, from the eleventh-century accounts to the present.

The Venetian Counter-Claim

The partial character of the 1087 removal opened the way for a rival claim. The accounts admit that bones were left at Myra; and in 1099–1100, during the First Crusade, a Venetian fleet is said to have stopped at Myra and gathered the relics remaining there, carrying them to Venice, where they were enshrined in the church of San Nicolò al Lido (Jones 1978; English 2012). Venice thus claims to hold a portion of the same saint whose principal relics rest at Bari.

The two claims need not be mutually exclusive, and modern study has been used to argue that they are in fact complementary. Because the Bari removal was admittedly incomplete, the Venice relics could represent precisely the fragments left behind; and comparative anatomical examination has been adduced to suggest that the Bari and Venice bones may belong to a single skeleton, the one set largely complementary to the other (English 2012; see What the Relics Tell Us). [Disputed: both Bari (principal relics, seized 1087) and Venice (San Nicolò al Lido, relics said to be gathered c. 1099–1100) claim relics of St. Nicholas. Because the 1087 removal was by its own sources' admission partial, the claims may be complementary rather than rival; comparative anatomical study has been used to argue the Bari and Venice relics are parts of one skeleton (English 2012). The matter cannot be settled with certainty, and this collection reports both claims.]

The Meaning of the Translation

For the history of the cult, the translation of 1087 is a hinge nearly as important as the original life. It moved the physical center of Nicholas’s veneration from a declining Byzantine town to a thriving Latin port at the gateway between East and West, and in doing so it gave the Western cult a tangible focus that fueled its enormous medieval growth. The pilgrims who came to Bari carried the saint’s fame outward; the date of the translation entered both calendars; and the relics, now in Italy, became a bridge of devotion between the two halves of a Christendom that had formally divided only decades before, in 1054. The road that would eventually lead from the bishop of Myra to the Dutch Sinterklaas and the American Santa Claus runs through Bari (see The Making of Santa Claus); and the universal cult that Bari helped spread is the subject of the companion file (see The Cult East and West).

References

Jones, Charles W. Saint Nicholas of Myra, Bari, and Manhattan: Biography of a Legend. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. (The 1087 translation; the accounts of Nicephorus and John the Archdeacon; the basilica; the manna; the Venice claim.)
English, Adam C. The Saint Who Would Be Santa Claus: The True Life and Trials of Nicholas of Myra. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2012. (The expedition and its forcible, partial character; the basilica and Urban II; the manna; the Venice relics and the anatomical comparison.)
Anrich, Gustav. Hagios Nikolaos: Der heilige Nikolaos in der griechischen Kirche. 2 vols. Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1913–1917. (The Greek and Latin translation material in the dossier.)
METHODOLOGY.md §3.5, this repository.