On display in the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen is an elaborate altarpiece depicting the Scottish saint, Ninian of Whithorn. Before the Protestant Reformation, it had adorned the altar of St Ninian in St Olaf ’s Church, Helsingør. Elsinore, as it is better known in English, was an important port town at a key juncture in the trade between the Baltic Sea and North Sea and was home to a large community of Scottish merchants, including the Lyall family who had founded the altar in 1511. Altars and chapels founded by Scots, and dedicated to St Ninian, could also be found in other key trading towns in the later Middle Ages, including Bruges (1366), Bergen Op Zoom in Brabant (1510) and Copenhagen (c.1500).
Flanking Ninian on the altarpiece in Copenhagen is St James (the patron of the Stewart dynasty) and Andrew the Apostle. Andrew had been recognised as the patron saint of the kingdom of the Scots since at least the late 13th century, a status summed up in the Declaration of Arbroath (1320) which described him as ‘our patron or protector’. By the later 14th century, Scottish soldiers wore the cross of St Andrew, the same saltire could be found on Scottish coinage and on royal seals, and a chivalric order in Andrew’s name was founded in the late 15th or early 16th century. In that period, the official altar of the trading community in Bruges, the main hub for Scottish exports to mainland Europe, was dedicated to Andrew, Scottish monks in the Bavarian city of Regensberg had a confraternity in his name, and Scottish students at the universities of Orleans and Paris observed 30 November as their special feast day and used the saltire as their emblem. For the students, monks and merchants who lived around the North Sea and Baltic in the later Middle Ages, fraternities based around altars and chapels in local churches were key hubs that bound the expatriate communities together around a common Scottish identity.
Why then, did the Scottish merchants in Helsingør, and elsewhere around the North Sea margins, choose Ninian for these altars rather than Andrew, the official patron
