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

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of MPa, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to MPa Club at www.mpaapoduk.com Hello and welcome to MPa with me Anita Arnand and me William Durumpo and this is the second episode with the wonderful Sam Durumpo author of Shattered Lands which we also covered in this podcast welcome back to you Sam thank you very much thank you 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 Saint 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 Saint 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 heights so by the turn of the first millennium Saint 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 some actually a healing liquid called Mer which I think is tickles me as well because it's also Christmasy and also McCab and Myra itself is named is this right after Mer that's right isn't it it's all intertwined so I mean Mer is older than the name Myra but it's named after it and we're not quite sure what the early association is but all sorts of people seem to say that his tomb begins secreting Mer as every good Saint's tomb should do whether the bishops have been pouring Mer into his tomb so that it secrets 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 Mer if you're asking the Monty Python question yeah really happy that you bought the gold thanks of the frankincense what the hell is Mer Mer just to remind you we did cover this one Christmas it's a sort of it's an incense which is said to have antiseptic qualities as well so that is the answer to your question what is Mer that is what Mer 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 up in 10 87 62 Italian fishermen set sail from Puglia the town of Bahri 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 Saint Paul is now facing a dramatic change in its religion and in its ethnicity because the Turks originally from the step have invaded Anatolia and Sam and I visited last year the extraordinary Armenian capital of Arne which was in their path and very close to Arne 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 bagridid kings this battle manzekert is fought 1071 and the Seljuk Turks who 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 vertical article that's right where they were you would see those Turkish nomads with all their swords and their and their pasturing animals and the yirts and all these beautiful women sitting on carpets all that sort of that's sweeping in into a landscape that had previously been Greek speaking Christian and 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 Saint Nicholas from the heathen rather than just pinching it for the benefit of barian and pinching the pilgrim traffic they can put a good spit on it can't they say 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 you know they would fit many whole entire mouths and likewise you get this whole trade in early Christian 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 pirated 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 doesn't it which protects these places exactly and so crucially from all the accounts that survive of this great tice to try and steal the relics of Saint Nicholas um the Italian sailors from Poulier arrive I think it's in Antioch in you know further to the east in in Turkey and they find that there's another group of Venetian ships who are also planning to steal the relics of Saint Nicholas um and there's a race between the two sets of sailors between who can get their first it's like an ocean's eleven set up and and the year is what year are we talking about just let's pinpoint the date we're 10 87 so it's it's 16 years after the Byzantines have lost in Manzekert 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 is full 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 Manzekert it was another battle between the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans so although the official battle is between the the Turks and the Byzantines the Turks had Norman mercenaries working with them the cousins of the Norman Knights and it's just one the Battle of Hastings in 1066 while many of the defeated Anglo-Saxon aristocracy who'd lost their lands when William the Conqueror Conquer's England goes and joins the Virangian Guard which is the the North European Guard which guards the Byzantines so whatever it was 1066 to 1071 that's only six years apart but there's a re-batch 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 ocean's eleven contest for getting the bones because I think just before this they'd stolen the bones of Saint Mark from Alexandria so when you go to Saint Mark's cathedral in Venice now you know this great sort of cathedral swarming with tourists that cathedral is built the Roman was built to house the bones of Saint Mark's pillaged from Alexandria this is a game that you know the the Venetians are quite forward but in this stage our brave heroes the sailors of Poulier get there first so talk us through what what happens so they 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 paint is a picture sure so it's April 1087 there's 62 Poulier and sailors divided between three ships Mafiose basically yeah exactly it's the Mafia the Mafia shows up in the port of Aduac it the best account of this is that one of the sailors Nissa for us would later write a 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 nice effort as we have this wonderful sort of again hollywoodish image of like Gandalf these four monks saying hey 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 are definitely rather astonished by all accounts these sailors show up armed with iron mallets this really is the Mafiaose this is yeah they are they ask where is the saint's body kept the Mafia army descends absolutely a good friend has iron mallets doesn't it yeah so these four poor monks that they're in a town that by all accounts has been kind of half emptied there's there's worry that these can have 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 there's these Italian sailors and so one of the lines that we have in the in the memoir 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 call the remaining townsfolk the few people who've stayed but the sailors grab them tie them up and place a guard at the entrance of the bazenica no poor monks but then it gets a little harder for the sailors because apparently one knocks over a bottle of mer a mer makes I'm so glad that this story as much as it feels so festive okay so knocks the mer onto the floor and it doesn't smash but it makes this enormous vibrating clanging sound it goes clang on the floor and handly the sailors interpret this as a message from St Nicholas saying that it is my will to leave with you this is pure body python this is that is why I've held mer on the ground because I want you to take me with you away from the lovely place I've lived very happily so then is it easy from there on in they just scoop up the bones and and play or what happens so I've seen a picture of the of the sarcophagus it's got enormous holiness and they use the iron mallets to get effect by looking at no I mean they say that history is written by the victors so you know according to the sephiruses account the bottle of mer 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 mer that kind of you know cascades across the floor of the warmer it's always warmer and then supposedly the sailors grab the bones which just walked in mer 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 faint of favorable and they've done it the sail off into the distance shocking tail okay and they get away vehicle he even quick fast okay so they get back and the Pope I'm guessing must be beside himself a delight he must have been cockahoe they've got their bones back I mean what does he do to commemorate this this great heist yeah so they they build a massive new basilica in barry so today if you go to barry and poulier there is a massive basilica dedicated to St Nicholas to house his mortal images yeah it's gorgeous and has all these very early pictures of him again all along the walls and today you know it's it's a kind of Romanesque church but what's rather interesting is that barry 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 bishops chair is a motive that resembles Allah written in Arabic but it's clear that the craftsmen don't actually know Arabic they're kind of 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 Islamesque 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 barry Islam leaving one place and arriving in another exactly so barry 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 barry with Saint 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 you know 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 due so often kneeling to him when I was at college I followed the reach of the first crusade to Jerusalem I got a college grant and went off and I went through barry and the first time I ever went to Saint Nicholas at barry was following the reach of the crusades and I followed in the footsteps to the to the church but Sam only two decades later the poor monks of barra have another visit from Bredeckhampton so yes two decades later the the 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 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 and rather usefully for the sailors of Venice they through divine revelation discover that the pulean sailors have got the wrong tomb in you can't make this happen so they also go in with a bunch of iron mallets and smash up a different marble and there is a photograph that you've sent us out of of another beaten up early Christian sarcophagus also smashed by iron mallets the poor monks of barra having a very hard time yeah I mean they were just saying you do everything was fine till you arrived nothing was smashed everything was it was all quite tidy let's take a break join us after the break uh where we delve into this story a bit more and also the spread of the cult of St Nicholas across the world hello I'm Professor Hannah Frye and I'm Michael Stevens creator of Vsauce we thought we would join you for a moment completely uninvited we are not going to stay too long and she wants us to of course we're here to tell you about our brand new show the rest is science every episode is going to start with something that feels initially familiar and then we're going to unpick you and tear it apart until you no longer recognize it at all yeah banana flavor doesn't taste like bananas yeah what is that about so it is supposed to taste like an old species of banana that was wiped out in a banana apocalypse and now you will only find it in botanical collections in the gardens of billionaires wow banana candy isn't actually the ghost of a long extinct banana so if you like scratching the surface thinking a little bit deeper or weirder yes definitely that too you can join Michael and I every Tuesday and Thursday wherever you get your podcasts welcome back so just before the break we had the sailors from Poulier who got some bones and then the Venetian's going well you've 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 Saint Nicholas and this is the point Sam that suddenly the relic tree spreads around Europe and also the mythology and name of Saint Nicholas becomes a big deal in Europe at this point exactly so you you you you quite quickly get kind of you know fingernails of Saint Nicholas showing up in kind of Normandy or Calais or you know that suddenly there's all sorts of right now that they're in Italy bits of him bits of him starts spreading to all sorts of churches and this didn't happen I mean you and I have been to the the tomb of Saint Francis Xavier and Goa in the 1960s when they displayed the uncorrupted body of Saint Francis Xavier a local pilgrim bent down and bit off his little toe which she smuggled out of Goa in a mouth it's a disgusting story and then she got caught they they saw someone alerted the ferries point and they found the bone of of Saint 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 for visiting pilgrims and while the uncorrupted body of Saint Francis Xavier is only available once every 10 or 15 years you can kiss the toe any day you like so that is trying to get rude around yeah yeah okay so it take us now to a place where I know they they still you know they don't go in for all this Father Christmas stuff they still very much say center class you know so Saint Nicholas it is it is all based around the cult of Saint Nicholas and I remember you know just not so long ago that Saint Nicholas 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 the Netherlands when did it embrace Saint Nicholas and make him their own sure so this seems to be around 1300 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 court region where sailors would trade and so Amsterdam becomes associated with him by about 1300 and curiously it's the kind of Dutch name for Saint Nicholas that becomes center class class being Nicholas but here they it takes on a whole stranger thing because as we mentioned in the last episode Saint 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 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 center class process 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 but so essentially here it meets a whole new range of gonna pre-Christian traditions but of course everything begins to change in the Reformation. St. Worship is outlawed across the region and interestingly center class 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 your average kind of farmer would still recognize the feast day of Saint Nicholas tell us quickly about the transformation of the two ravens of Odin into a black mourish sidekick Cosvarte Piet. Black Pete yes. So that is a rather that's a much later story what seems to happen is that the images of Saint 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 mourish Spain with Andalusia and the blacks waterpeats are meant to be basically can of mules from Morocco and Spain associated with oranges. The oranges are one part of it but also is that the story that you naughty and nice you know doesn't just mean you're gonna get presents or not get presents because if you are naughty in the Saint Nicholas and 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 Mourish and 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 tabloos 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 they are going to get you you know it's all part of the you know sort of the Christmas not the Christmas play oh no I won't oh yes you will all that festive hijinks that would happen around all it 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 Saint Nicholas I think one of the more intriguing ones is in 1663 the Protestants try to outlaw the Feast of Saint 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 a 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 Saint Nicholas and that's where the association of gingerbread with the Feast of Saint Nicholas begins this is that your boy is a leader you can just 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 for over one thing or the other and so so okay strong in the Netherlands but the place which has given Santa the kind of livery that we recognise now internationally you know the red and the white you know that all comes from America and advertising a Coca-Cola we know 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 Cinterclass to New Amsterdam and then when the British take over the city they rename New Amsterdam as New York and they anglicise Cinterclass as Santa Claus and so that's where our current name for the saint comes from and of course interestingly the the British themselves had a whole separate set of traditions to do with Saint Nicholas as in Saint Nicholas's church and Chiswick but suddenly there's a kind of new figure of Santa Claus you know New York is known for it's it being a melting part of all different migrants so over a period of time I guess they would have brought their own traditions their own Christmas beliefs as well and and sort of added on so you get all of this embellishment to the the Cinterclaw 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 will 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 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 Saint Nicholas who you know is especially the patron of little children to that of New Year and so you get you get a moving of the date first to New Year and then very soon there's a the same decade in fact there's a writer called Clement Clarke Moore who writes a children's poem about Santa arriving the night before Christmas and so suddenly again the date shifts to Christmas even until this point until 1827 you've always had the feast of Saint Nicholas and the gift giving et cetera 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 had never made the link that Santa Claus was completely different from from the Christmas story but it because we we've always bundled it together but it is too completely different bits of the Christian calendar that get conflated 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? Yep so that same poem has him arriving via flying reindeer and and the white horse that Santa Claus that Santa class has an Amsterdam that flies through the air accompanied by ravens suddenly turns into flying reindeer and we get the beginning of a kind of Rudolph story but why they have horses in America? This writer it's just it's children's poem it's a random children's poem the night that set the night before Christmas that has a huge impact on the Santa Claus myth interestingly also this is a moment when you know the exploration of the north pole is happening lots people are heading north discovering new bits of Canada and it says 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 hanging out with 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 San 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 a center class 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 and the coke is red and white before this and they transfer their their colors on to Santa so it's very simply in 1931 Coca-Cola doesn't add 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 white 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 in centuries past in the following decades Coca-Cola itself is 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 you know 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 you know very a lot of places in the world will have you know commemoration of St. Nicholas it's as separate from a 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 of these 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 I say um so so good to have you and and a really kind of quirky look at this time of year at an Empire store it's a true Empire story um going through many different Empire Sam Doreenple 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 Arnon and me William Doreenple