Tesauro Beccaria

Tesauro Beccaria was a thirteenth-century Italian monk of the Vallombrosan Congregation, a reform branch of the Benedictine Order founded by Saint John Gualbert. He belonged to the Beccaria, a noble family of Pavia in Lombardy. Little is recorded of his childhood or of the year of his birth. He entered the Vallombrosan houses and rose to the rank of abbot, appearing in the sources as a leading figure of the order and as abbot connected with Vallombrosa in Tuscany.

In the mid-thirteenth century Florence was divided by the struggle between Guelphs, who supported the papacy, and Ghibellines, who supported the Hohenstaufen imperial cause. Pope Alexander IV sent Tesauro to the city in an attempt to restore peace. Accounts describe him as a papal representative charged with mediation. After the Guelphs gained control in 1258 and expelled the Ghibellines, Tesauro was accused of having favored the Ghibelline party and of corresponding with King Manfred of Sicily.

The Florentine authorities had him seized. On 4 September 1258 he was put to death by hanging in Florence. Later Catholic tradition regarded the execution as a martyrdom, holding that he died for his loyalty to the Church and for his peace-making role rather than as a political offender. He came to be venerated as Blessed Tesauro Beccaria. His feast is kept on 4 September, the day of his death. Evidence for a formal papal beatification or canonization is limited; the cult seems to rest on medieval local and monastic veneration.

The episode belongs to the factional violence of the Italian communes and to the wider conflict between papacy and empire. Tesauro remains a relatively obscure figure outside the history of the Vallombrosans and of thirteenth-century Florence. Details of his burial place, of any relics, and of the earliest liturgical texts in his honor are not firmly established in the accessible historical record.