None of these attempts was successful until, in the year 1084, certain merchants from the city of Bari, in southeastern Italy, landed at Myra to find that the entire countryside had been laid waste by an invasion of the Turks. All the men who could bear arms had gathered together and were now gone in pursuit of the invaders. Three monks only had been left behind to stand guard over the shrine of Saint Nicholas.
It was an easy task for the merchants of Bari to overpower these monks, break open the coffin which contained the body and bear it away with them to their own city.
Here it was received with great joy. A fine new church was built on the site of an old one which had been dedicated to Saint Stephen and which was now torn down to make room for its successor. This was to serve as a shrine for the stolen body. The new church is still standing and though it is now old it is still magnificent. In a crypt or vault under its high altar lies all that was mortal of the one-time Bishop of Myra. On the very day of the re-burial, so it is said, no less than thirty people who attended the ceremony were cured of their various ailments.
Heads of the Christ-child.
Selected from Raphael’s pictures.
Such is the story that is generally accepted. But another story was and is told by the people of Venice. They, too, claim that they possess the body of Saint Nicholas, and insist that it was taken from Myra by Venetian merchants in the year 1100, and reburied in Venice by the citizens.
They do not accept the story told by the Bari merchants, but declare that the latter carried off from another spot the body of another saint, possibly of the same name, which they palmed off upon their fellow citizens as the body of the former Bishop of Myra.
The true body, they claim, is that which lies to-day, as it has lain for centuries, in the church of St. Nicholas on the Lido. The Lido is a bank of sand which projects, promontory fashion, out of the Grand Canal in Venice into the Adriatic Sea.
The fame of a holy man so closely connected with two great trading ports of the Middle Ages was sure to spread wider and wider among the nations of Europe. And, indeed, we find that everywhere sailors acknowledged him as their special guide and protector and sang his praises wherever they landed.
Both at Bari and at Venice the churches dedicated in his honor stand close to the mouth of the harbor. Venetian crews on their way out to sea would land at the Lido and proceed to the church of St. Nicholas, there to ask for a blessing on their voyage. There also they would stop on their home-coming to give thanks for a safe return. Sailors of Bari would in the same way honor the shrine in which lay what they claimed was the true body of Saint Nicholas.