Saint Elizabeth of Portugal

Queen and Franciscan Tertiary
(1271–1336)

Saint Elizabeth of Portugal, named after her great-aunt Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, was born in 1271 as the daughter of Peter III of Aragon. From her earliest childhood she showed a gravity and piety unusual in one of her age and station, spending long hours in prayer, fasting on the days prescribed by the Church, and already showing the spirit of charity and peacemaking that would characterise her whole life. At the age of twelve she was given in marriage to Denis, King of Portugal.

The marriage was a difficult one in some respects, for Denis, though a capable ruler and a man of culture who founded the University of Lisbon, was unfaithful and had several illegitimate children whom Elizabeth, with remarkable generosity, cared for alongside her own children. Her patience in this situation was the foundation of her holiness, practised not in the cloister but in the full glare of a royal court, amid the jealousies and intrigues that surrounded every medieval throne.

As queen she was celebrated throughout Portugal for her charity to the poor. She established hospitals, shelters for wayfarers, orphanages, and homes for fallen women. She visited the sick personally, washed the feet of the poor, and distributed alms with a generosity that sometimes alarmed her advisors. The famous miracle of the roses is told of her as it is told of her great-aunt: roses or money, one version has it, when her husband intercepted her on her way to the poor and she was afraid of his anger, and what she carried was miraculously transformed.

She was also a remarkable peacemaker. On several occasions she personally intervened to prevent wars, both within Portugal and between Portugal and the neighbouring kingdoms of Castile and Aragon. She rode between armed camps, negotiated truces, and by sheer force of moral authority prevented conflicts that would have cost thousands of lives. This work of peacemaking she regarded as among the highest duties of a Christian queen.

After her husband's death in 1325, she entered the Third Order of Saint Francis and withdrew to the monastery she had founded at Coimbra, living there in simplicity and prayer until her death on July 4, 1336. She was canonised by Pope Urban VIII in 1625. Her feast is observed on July 4th.