ELIZABETH OF THURINGIA, Saint. - Principal patroness of the Franciscan Third Order, and of Catholic charitable works.
I. LIFE
Born in 1207 to Andrew II of Hungary and Gertrude of Andechs-Merano, betrothed by her parents to Louis IV of Thuringia as early as 1211, she was brought to Eisenach, to the castle of Wartburg. In 1221 she married Louis, by whom she had three children. She was under the strict spiritual discipline of the secular priest
Conrad of Marburg, who later became a Franciscan tertiary. At a very young age she was left a widow by the death of Louis (12 Sept. 1227), which occurred in southern Italy while he was traveling, in the retinue of Frederick II, as a crusader to the Holy Land. During her husband's absence, because of a great famine that occurred in the country, she supported many hundreds of the poor with public means, even against the will of the nobles, also personally serving the sick of Eisenach. It is established today, against the hypotheses of Wenck and Michael, that Elizabeth, having been left a widow, was violently driven from the castle of Wartburg in the winter of 1227. Having gone that night to the Franciscan convent of Eisenach, she begged the friars to sing the Te Deum for her tribulation. She wandered for some time in great want and begging; she was received and helped by the abbess of Kitzingen, her relative, and by her uncle Egbert, bishop of Bamberg, who thought of marrying her again. When the crusading knights returned with the bones of Louis, her circumstances changed somewhat, especially with the appointment, by Gregory IX, of Conrad as her "defender." But already Elizabeth, devoting herself to an ascetic life, in 1228 solemnly renounced the world in the church of the Friars Minor of Eisenach. She put on, at the hands of Conrad, the gray habit of a tertiary, and with the goods that were assigned to her for the support of her widowhood, she built the hospital of Marburg, whose chapel she dedicated to St. Francis, who had just been canonized. She died, at the age of 24, worn out in strength especially by her constant service to the poor, the sick, and the lepers, on 16 Nov. 1231. It is related that St. Francis himself sent her one of his cloaks, which is said to be preserved in the parish of Oberwalluf near Mainz. She was buried in the cathedral of Marburg.
II. CULT
The miracles that took place immediately after her death led to the promotion of the canonization process, which concluded on May 27, 1235 with the proclamation as a saint, made by Gregory IX at Perugia. Frederick II was present at the translation, with a great retinue of princes, and he later wrote a letter about the event to the general of the Franciscan Order, Brother Elias (Acta Imperii inedita, ed. E. Winckelmann, I, Innsbruck 1880, p. 299 ff.). The cathedral of Marburg was a destination of pilgrimages until, at the time of the Protestant Reformation, Philip of Hesse scattered E.'s relics, which today are partly preserved in Vienna. The head preserved at Besançon is of doubtful authenticity (cf. Rev. d'hist. franciscaine, 2 [1923], p. 273). Numerous religious congregations, especially Franciscan tertiary ones, are named after her. The Conferences of St. E. were first founded at Trier in 1840 (W. Liese, Gesch. d. Caritas, Freiburg 1922; the letter of Pius XI for the centenary of her death in AAS, 23 [1931], pp. 525-27). Feast on Nov. 19.
III. ICONOGRAPHY
The iconographic representations of St. E. are very numerous throughout Europe (cf. S. Elsner, in Franziskanische Studien, 18 [1931], pp. 205-231). The saint is depicted distributing bread with a poor man at her side, or, after the fifteenth century, hiding a bunch of roses in her lap, with reference to a miracle of having transformed into roses the bread that she did not want it to be known she was bringing to the poor (cf. L. Lemmens, Zum Rosenwunder, in Katholik, 24 [1902], 381-82). A sign of the rapid spread of the cult of St. E. in Italy is the fourteenth-century pictorial cycle in the church of S. Maria Donna Regina in Naples. - See plate XX.
