other · 330 · Myra
There was a bishop of Myra in Lycia named Nicholas in the first half of the fourth century. That is very nearly the whole of the contemporary record. Everything else — the three daughters saved from prostitution by gold thrown through a window, the sailors in the storm, the three boys in the pickling tub, the grain ships that were not lighter for the corn he took from them — comes through Michael the Archimandrite about 830 and the tradition after him. The Nicaea story is worth stating carefully because this dataset carries it: he is on the attendance rolls in some later lists and not in the earliest ones, and the famous scene in which he strikes Arius across the face is not attested before the fourteenth century. His page keeps the attendance and marks it traditional. The afterlife is the largest of any saint here. The dowry gold became the pawnbroker's three balls and the stocking of presents; the Dutch Sinterklaas became Santa Claus in New York; and the relics were taken from Myra to Bari in 1087 by merchants who were, on any reading, stealing them — which falls outside this dataset's era and so is recorded here in prose rather than as an event.
Why is so little known about the most popular saint in Christendom?
Because everything told about him was written five hundred years later.