Peter de Regalado

Peter de Regalado (Spanish: Pedro Regalado; Latin: Petrus Regalatus) was a Franciscan friar of the Observant reform in fifteenth-century Castile. He was born in 1390 in Valladolid, then a major city of the Crown of Castile. Surviving accounts describe him as coming from a family of some local standing and as having lost his father in childhood, after which he was raised by his mother in a conventionally devout household. In adolescence he entered the Order of Friars Minor in his native city and attached himself to the Observants, who sought a stricter living of the Franciscan Rule than was then usual among the Conventuals. The Observant movement was gathering force in the Iberian kingdoms during his lifetime, and his whole career unfolded within that current of reform rather than in the older Conventual houses.

From Valladolid he was sent to the rural convent of Nuestra Señora de La Aguilera, near Aranda de Duero in what is now the province of Burgos. That house remained the centre of his religious life. He was noted there for austerity of diet and sleep, long prayer, and a preference for solitude, yet he also accepted offices of government. He served as guardian of La Aguilera and later as guardian of the convent of El Abrojo, close to Valladolid, and is remembered as a promoter of Observant discipline in Castilian Franciscan houses. He was a priest. Later vitae credit him with miracles, prophecy, and bilocation, and they stress his charity toward the poor; such claims belong to the conventional language of late-medieval and baroque hagiography and cannot be independently verified in detail, but they shaped the cult that grew up around him after his death.

He died at La Aguilera on 30 March 1456 and was buried at the convent. The tomb attracted pilgrims from Castile, and later reports that the body remained incorrupt encouraged devotion in Valladolid and in the district around La Aguilera through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Formal recognition came only in the baroque period: Pope Innocent XI beatified him in 1684, and Pope Benedict XIV canonized him on 29 June 1746. The Roman Martyrology assigns his feast to 13 May, distinct from the anniversary of his death. He is venerated as a patron of the city of Valladolid. The former Observant house at La Aguilera now bears his name, and he stands as one of the better-known Spanish Observant Franciscans of the generation before the reforms associated with the Catholic Monarchs and Cardinal Cisneros.