Nicola Paglia

Nicola Paglia was born in 1197 at Giovinazzo in Apulia, in the south of the Italian peninsula, then under the Kingdom of Sicily. He came from a family of some local standing. In his youth he was sent to Bologna to study at the university, then among the principal centres of learning in Europe. There he heard Saint Dominic preach as the Order of Preachers was taking shape. Moved by that preaching, he sought admission to the new mendicant order. Dominican tradition holds that Dominic himself received him at Bologna around 1218 or 1219, so that Paglia belonged to the first generation of friars and to those who had known the founder personally.

As a Dominican he combined study with the apostolic preaching that defined the order. He worked mainly in Italy, including Apulia, Umbria, and neighbouring regions, while the friars were still planting convents and preaching both ordinary instruction and against heretical movements then active in parts of the peninsula. Later Dominican notices state that he served as prior of houses of the order and as provincial of the Roman province, the territory covering much of central Italy, and they credit him with a role in founding or consolidating the convent at Trani. Exact years for these offices are not firmly fixed in surviving contemporary records, and later summaries should be treated with caution.

Subsequent hagiography portrays him as austere, obedient, and given to prayer, and it ascribes to him miracles and a gift of tears. Those traits belong to the conventional portrait of a medieval mendicant blessed and are not independently documented in the manner of a modern critical life. He spent his last years in the Dominican community at Perugia and died there on 16 February 1256. He was buried in the church of his order in that city, later known as San Domenico. His tomb became a focus of local devotion, and reports of favours attributed to his intercession circulated in Perugia and in Giovinazzo.

Paglia was never the subject of a medieval papal canonization. His veneration remained a local and Dominican cult for centuries. On 26 March 1828 Pope Leo XII confirmed that cult, an act which in the procedure of the time constituted beatification. He is commemorated on 16 February. He is remembered chiefly within the Order of Preachers and at Giovinazzo; he does not occupy a prominent place on the universal liturgical calendar, and the biographical evidence rests largely on later Dominican compilations rather than a rich dossier of thirteenth-century documents.