Saint Angelina of Serbia

Saint Angelina of Serbia, known in Serbian devotion as Prepodobna majka Angelina (Venerable Mother Angelina) and also as Angelina Branković, was a noblewoman of Albanian birth who became despotess consort of Serbia and, in later life, an Orthodox nun. She was a daughter of the Albanian lord Gjergj Arianiti, a leading opponent of Ottoman expansion in the western Balkans in the fifteenth century, and of Maria Muzaka of the Muzaka family. Through her sister Andronika (Donika) Arianiti, wife of Gjergj Kastrioti Skanderbeg, she was tied to the principal Christian resistance houses of Albania. In the mid-fifteenth century she married Stefan Branković, a son of Serbian Despot Đurađ Branković and Eirene Kantakouzene. Stefan had been blinded in 1441 while an Ottoman hostage, a mutilation that shaped his later life and his liturgical epithet as Stefan the Blind.

After the Ottoman capture of Smederevo in 1459, which ended the medieval Serbian Despotate, Angelina and Stefan lived as exiles. They spent time in her father’s Albanian lands and then in northern Italy, where they were established at Belgrado in Friuli. There they raised two sons, Đorđe and Jovan, who would later bear the Branković name and the titular Serbian despotate. Stefan died in 1476 in Italy. As a widow, Angelina became the guardian of her children’s dynastic and religious identity. In the 1480s King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary recognized the Branković claim and granted the family estates in Srem (Syrmia), with a residence at Kupinovo on the Sava. Angelina thus returned to the South Slavic lands as the mother of a restored but Hungarian-vassal Serbian Despotate on the military frontier.

Đorđe held the title of despot and later took monastic vows under the name Maxim; he became Metropolitan of Belgrade and Srem and is himself venerated as a saint. Jovan succeeded as despot and ruled until his death in 1502; he too was later numbered among the saints. Angelina outlived her husband and both sons. She took the monastic habit and is remembered as a founder and patron of monastic houses. With Maxim she is associated with the establishment of Krušedol Monastery on Fruška Gora in the early sixteenth century. Krušedol became the burial church of the Srem branch of the Brankovići and a major spiritual centre for Orthodox Serbs under Hungarian, and later Ottoman, rule. Tradition describes her widowhood as one of fasting, almsgiving, and care for churches, in keeping with the Orthodox ideal of the pious princess who ends her life in the monastery.

Angelina died on 30 July 1520 and was buried at Krušedol. The Serbian Orthodox Church venerates her together with Saint Stefan the Blind, Saint Maxim, and Saint Jovan of Serbia. Their relics, long kept at Krušedol Monastery, became an object of pilgrimage. She is commemorated on 30 July, the day of her repose, and on 10 December in the synaxis of the holy Brankovići. She remains one of the most honoured women of the Serbian Orthodox calendar, a figure who links Albanian and Serbian late-medieval aristocracy with the monastic revival on Fruška Gora.