Eleazar

Eleazar of Sabran, known in French as Elzéar de Sabran, was a Provençal nobleman of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries who came to be venerated as a saint of the Catholic Church. He was born in 1285 at the castle of Saint-Jean-de-Robians, near Puimichel in Provence, into the lordly family of Ansouis. His early formation was entrusted in large part to his uncle William of Sabran, abbot of the Benedictine house of Saint-Victor at Marseille, who raised him in a climate of liturgical piety and moral discipline uncommon among lay aristocrats of the Angevin world. While still an adolescent he was married to Delphine of Glandèves, a young woman of comparable rank. Medieval biographers consistently report that the couple mutually vowed to live in perpetual continence, so that their marriage remained unconsummated and was understood as a spiritual alliance rather than a means of producing heirs.

In adult life Eleazar inherited and exercised the county of Ariano in the Kingdom of Naples, a possession that drew him for long periods into southern Italy and into the service of the Angevin kings. He joined the Third Order of Saint Francis and imposed on his household a rule of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Accounts of his government stress that he forbade extortion by his officers, heard the complaints of the poor, and tried to reconcile the harsh realities of feudal lordship with the penitential ideals of the Franciscan tertiaries. He also acted as a counselor and envoy for King Robert of Naples, taking part in the military and diplomatic business of a dynasty that ruled both Provence and southern Italy. Delphine shared this way of life and, after his death, embraced still greater poverty.

In 1323 Eleazar was sent to Paris on royal business connected with the Angevin cause in France. He fell ill there and died on 27 September 1323. His body was carried back to Provence and buried in the church of the Friars Minor at Apt. A cult grew rapidly around his tomb. Pope Urban V, who had been Eleazar’s godson in childhood, canonized him in 1369. The feast of Saint Eleazar is observed on 27 September. Delphine outlived him by nearly four decades, dying in 1360, and is herself honored in Franciscan and Provençal calendars.

Eleazar’s importance in hagiography lies less in miracles attributed after death than in the type of sanctity he represented: a married layman of high rank, a Franciscan tertiary, and a public official held up as a model of conjugal chastity, just lordship, and courtly integrity. His life is known principally through a fourteenth-century Latin legend and through the acts of his canonization, which must be read with the usual caution due to medieval sacred biography, but the outline of his career, his marriage to Delphine, his tertiary profession, his death in Paris, and his canonization by Urban V are well established.