MONEY, OATH AND JUSTICE: THE ICONOGRAPHY OF SAINT NICHOLAS AND PARADIGM SHIFTS IN MEDIEVAL LEGAL HISTORY

The depiction of a dishonest debtor, feigning the return of money hidden in a hollow stick whileswearing an oath before a judge or an image of Christ (or the saint) appeared twice in an impressive cycle of stained-glass windows in the Chartres Cathedral. The depictions of the story in the later Middle Ages, including images in the church of Santa Croce in Florence, and the parish church of one of Europe’s most important centres of medieval coinage, the multi-ethnic city of Kremnica (Cremnicium, German Kremnitz, Hungarian Körmöcbánya) in the Carpathian Mountains, changed some essential details of this iconography. This investigation of the changes in depictions of the posthumous miracle of the saint combines the research of iconographic succession with crucial questions of the legal history to illuminate the saint’s role in the coeval social imaginary and legal rituals. Nicholas represented an invisible yet personalised guardian of the effective administration of justice, aimed at harmonising social relations between the various population groups of the cities in question, including the Jewish merchants.