Melania the Younger

Melania the Younger was born in Rome around 383 into one of the wealthiest senatorial families of the late Roman Empire. She was the granddaughter of Melania the Elder, a noted aristocratic ascetic and pilgrim to the East, and the daughter of Valerius Publicola and Albina. The family's estates were spread across Italy, Sicily, Spain, Britain, Africa, and other provinces and produced revenues on a scale that made the household among the richest in the western empire. Although Melania showed an early desire for virginity and an ascetic life, her relatives arranged her marriage at about the age of fourteen to her cousin Valerius Pinianus in order to keep the family fortune intact and to secure an heir. The marriage joined two branches of the same senatorial milieu and placed an immense patrimony under the couple's eventual control.

Melania and Pinianus had two children, a daughter and a son, both of whom died in infancy. After these losses, and following the death of her father, Melania persuaded her husband to live in continence and to embrace a life of Christian renunciation. They began to sell their vast holdings and to distribute the proceeds to the poor, to churches, and to monastic houses. The magnitude of the sales alarmed the Roman aristocracy and drew imperial attention, because sudden liquidation of such estates threatened social and economic order in Italy. With the help of Serena, wife of the general Stilicho, they obtained leave to proceed. They manumitted large numbers of slaves and left Rome around 408, not long before Alaric's Visigoths sacked the city in 410. After a stay in Sicily they settled for some seven years in Roman North Africa, where they founded monasteries and were in contact with Augustine of Hippo, Alypius of Thagaste, and other African bishops.

From Africa the couple traveled to Egypt to visit the desert monastic communities, then continued to Jerusalem, arriving around 417. On the Mount of Olives Melania established a monastery for women, which she governed, and later a companion monastery for men. Pinianus died in the early 430s. Melania remained in Jerusalem as an ascetic, teacher of Scripture, and host to pilgrims. In 436 she went to Constantinople, where she played a part in the conversion of her uncle Volusianus, a prominent pagan senator then on an imperial embassy, shortly before his death. She returned to the Holy Land and spent her last years in the monastery she had founded on the Mount of Olives.

Melania died in Jerusalem on 31 December 439 and was buried at her monastery. Her life was written soon afterward by Gerontius, a priest who had served as her chaplain; the Vita survives in Greek and Latin forms and is a principal source for late antique aristocratic piety, large-scale Christian almsgiving, and the growth of monasticism in Palestine. She is venerated as a saint in the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Eastern Catholic Churches. Her feast is kept on 31 December. She was never the subject of a later papal canonization process, her cult arising from ancient local veneration in Jerusalem and in the wider church.