Saint Nicholas of Trani, the Pilgrim

Nicholas of Trani

Nicholas of Trani or the Pilgrim (Steiri, Greece, 1075 – Trani, Apulia, 1094) was a Greek Christian, a preacher in Apulia. He is venerated as a saint by the Catholic Church.

Biography of Saint Nicholas of Trani

Nicholas had been born in Boeotia. He was a shepherd and lived in solitude in the mountains, devoted to prayer and meditation. He took up a hermit’s life and began to travel through the region with a cross in hand, saying to everyone the invocation Kyrie eleison (“Lord, have mercy on us”) and singing religious hymns and praises. This led others to mock him or take him for a madman.

He thought of making a pilgrimage to Rome and boarded a ship bound for Otranto (Apulia). According to a popular and implausible legend, his constant repetition of Kyrie eleison led the sailors to throw him into the sea, yet he still reached port before the ship did. In Otranto he was not well received, and his preaching was likewise not understood in Lecce or Taranto.

He arrived in Trani on 20 May 1094, and died a fortnight later, on 2 June. When Archbishop Bisanzio interviewed him, Nicholas said he was following the Gospel counsel that whoever wished to follow Christ should take up his cross and become as a child in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. He behaved like the so-called “fools for Christ”, who acted in a manner commonly branded as madness. His simplicity and innocence moved the bishop to allow him to preach and remain in the city.

San Nicolas Camino de Santiago Frances — **Saint Nicholas of Trani**

But on the 23rd he fell ill, and in the bed of a man who had taken him in, Sabino, he received numerous visitors who asked him for prayers and spiritual guidance. Nicholas instructed his visitors and gave them comfort, until he died on 2 June, a Friday.

Veneration of Saint Nicholas of Trani

Miracles were soon attributed to his intercession. In 1098, Archbishop Bisanzio of Trani requested at a synod in Rome that Nicholas be included in the catalogue of saints for his virtue and the miracles that had occurred after his death. Urban II authorised the bishop to permit the cult, and the bishop, on returning to Trani, canonised him and erected a basilica where he was buried, today’s Cathedral of San Nicola Pellegrino. The house where he died is now the Chapel of San Nicolino. In 1748, Benedict XIV included him in the Roman Martyrology.