Elizabeth of Hungary

Elizabeth of Hungary, also known as Elizabeth of Thuringia, was born in 1207 in the Kingdom of Hungary, the daughter of King Andrew II and Gertrude of Merania. Her mother, who belonged to the powerful Andechs family, was murdered in 1213 during a conspiracy of Hungarian nobles, a trauma that fell on Elizabeth in early childhood. In 1211 she was sent from Hungary to the Thuringian court at Wartburg Castle to be brought up as the future wife of Louis, heir of Landgrave Hermann I. At Wartburg she received the education of a German princess and already displayed a strong inclination toward prayer and toward the relief of the poor.

She married Louis IV, Landgrave of Thuringia, in 1221. Contemporary testimony and the early lives present the marriage as a genuine companionship: Louis did not prevent her large-scale almsgiving, even when courtiers complained that she was dissipating the resources of the landgraviate. The couple had three children, Hermann, Sophie, and Gertrude. Franciscan friars, then newly established in German lands, influenced her spirituality. She founded a hospital at the foot of the Wartburg, visited the sick, and is recorded as having cared personally for people with leprosy and other severe illnesses. Later legend attributed to her the miracle of the roses, in which food hidden for the poor was said to have appeared as flowers; that story, shared with other holy women in medieval tradition, is not a documented historical event.

Louis died in 1227 at Otranto, on his way to the crusade, leaving Elizabeth a widow about twenty years old. Disputes followed concerning her right to dispose of Thuringian income for charity. Later vitae describe a dramatic expulsion from Wartburg in winter by her brother-in-law; modern historians treat that scene with caution and note that she may have withdrawn under political and financial pressure. She spent a short time under the protection of her uncle Eckbert, Bishop of Bamberg, then settled at Marburg, which belonged to her dower. There she submitted to the direction of Conrad of Marburg, a severe preacher who imposed fasting, corporal discipline, and separation from her children. She took on the way of life of a Franciscan tertiary, founded a hospital in honor of Saint Francis, spun wool for a living, and served the sick with her own hands.

Elizabeth died at Marburg on 17 November 1231, aged about twenty-four. Reports of miracles at her grave spread rapidly. Pope Gregory IX, who had known the Franciscan movement from its beginnings, canonized her on 27 May 1235, only a few years after her death. The Gothic Elisabethkirche was begun at Marburg over her tomb and became one of the principal pilgrimage churches of the Holy Roman Empire. Her daughter Sophie married into the ducal house of Brabant and became an ancestor of the landgraves of Hesse; Gertrude entered religious life and became abbess of the Premonstratensian monastery of Altenberg. Elizabeth remains one of the most widely venerated saints of the thirteenth century, invoked as a model of royal charity and of lay Franciscan holiness, and the Church keeps her feast on 17 November.