Nicholas the Pilgrim

Nicholas the Pilgrim (Italian: Nicola Pellegrino; Greek: Nikolaos ho Proskynetes) was a Byzantine Greek Christian who became the object of a rapid and enduring cult in Norman Apulia. He was born in 1075 in Steiri, a village in Boeotia in central Greece, then under Byzantine rule and near the monastery of Hosios Loukas. The principal source for his life is a Latin vita written shortly after his death by Adelferio, a deacon of the church of Trani, at the prompting of Archbishop Byzantius. That account describes Nicholas as a youth of extreme simplicity whose religious life consisted above all in the unceasing repetition of the Greek prayer Kyrie eleison (Lord, have mercy). After his father's death he lived in humble circumstances. His behavior was treated as folly or nuisance; he is said to have been mocked and physically abused and at last to have left his native region.

About 1094 he crossed the sea to southern Italy and came ashore in Apulia, the vita indicating the district of Otranto. He wandered through the peninsula as a barefoot pilgrim, still crying Kyrie eleison, and became a familiar if controversial figure in the towns of the Salento and along the Adriatic. Apulia at that date was under Norman rule but retained a large Greek-speaking population and close cultural links with the Byzantine world, which helps explain why a young Boeotian wanderer could be understood, and eventually venerated, there. Nicholas reached the port of Trani, a prosperous city whose bishop was Archbishop Byzantius. Tradition places miracles and a strong popular impression in this last stage of his life.

He died in Trani on 2 June 1094, aged about nineteen. Reports of miracles at his grave spread at once. Archbishop Byzantius fostered the cult, and Adelferio composed the vita to record the saint's life and wonders. Pope Urban II, present in Apulia in 1098 for the Council of Bari, is credited with giving papal approval to the public veneration of Nicholas, an approval later remembered as canonization. Work on the Romanesque cathedral of Trani, dedicated to San Nicola Pellegrino and built on the waterfront to enshrine his relics, began in the closing years of the eleventh century. The cathedral remains the architectural symbol of the city, and the saint's relics are still kept there.

Nicholas is honored on 2 June and is the patron saint of Trani. Later writers have sometimes classed him with the Eastern fools for Christ, but the documentary basis for his biography is almost entirely the Trani tradition of the late eleventh century. No independent Byzantine chronicle of his Boeotian years is known, and the historian must therefore treat the hagiographical portrait with caution while recognizing that the cult itself is securely attested within a few years of 1094. His Greek origin, brief wandering life, early death, and swift recognition by a reforming pope made him a distinctive saint of the Latin-Greek frontier in Norman southern Italy.