Saint Elizabeth of Hungary

Elizabeth was born in Sárospatak in 1207, the daughter of Andrew II, king of Hungary. At four she was promised in marriage to the heir of the landgrave of Thuringia and sent to the court at the Wartburg, where she was raised by her future mother-in-law. She married Louis IV, and it was — all the sources say so — a love match, something very rare in those political arrangements. They had three children in six years. Louis died of plague in 1227, while setting out on crusade. Elizabeth was twenty. The court, which already resented how much she spent on the poor, drove her out with her children. What she did next is what she’s remembered for. She joined the Franciscan Third Order — Francis had died a year earlier, and she was among the first in Germany to follow him — and with her own dowry she built a hospital in Marburg, where she worked as a nurse herself, washing the sick nobody wanted to touch. The legend of the roses comes from here: caught by her husband, or by his relatives, while secretly carrying bread to the poor in her cloak, she is said to have opened its folds, and out came roses. She died in Marburg on November 17, 1231, at twenty-four, worn out. Gregory IX proclaimed her a saint just four years later, in 1235: one of the fastest canonizations in history. If your name is Elizabeth, today is your name day.