Saint Elizabeth of Hungary

Religious

Feast Day

November 17

Life

1207–1231

Canonized

1235

Order

Third Order of Saint Francis (Secular Franciscan)

Born

Sarospatak or Pressburg, Kingdom of Hungary

Elizabeth was born in 1207, the daughter of King Andrew II of Hungary and Queen Gertrude of Merania. At age four she was betrothed to Ludwig, son and heir of the Landgrave of Thuringia, and sent to be raised at the Wartburg castle. They married in 1221 when she was fourteen and he was twenty, and contemporary witnesses agreed it was a love-match marked by genuine piety on both sides. They had three children. Elizabeth, deeply influenced by the early Franciscan friars who came to Thuringia in her lifetime, took up a life of prayer, austerity, and personal service to the poor, founding a hospital at the foot of the Wartburg where she nursed the sick herself.

Ludwig died of fever in 1227 at Otranto en route to the Sixth Crusade, before Elizabeth's twenty-first birthday. Driven from the Wartburg by her brother-in-law (whether forcibly or by mutual agreement is disputed), she made formal profession as a tertiary in the Franciscan Third Order in 1228, secured a settlement of her dower, and used it to found a Franciscan hospital at Marburg, where she lived as a nurse and laundress under the spiritual direction of Master Conrad of Marburg. She died at Marburg on November 17, 1231, at age twenty-four, exhausted by penance and labor. Pope Gregory IX canonized her on May 27, 1235, in one of the swiftest canonizations on record.