St. Elizabeth of Hungary 1207-1231

A Report of Her Life - Taken from Alban Butler's
Lives of the Saints

Elizabeth was born in Pressburg (Bratislava) to Andrew II of Hungary and his wife Gertrude of Andechs-Meran in the summer of 1207. As the princess of Hungary, she was promised in marriage to Louis (Ludwig), the son of Landgrave Herman of Thuringia. At the age of four she was brought from Hungary to the Thuringian Court at the castle of Wartburg, near Eisenach, where she was raised with her future husband.

As she grew up she underwent much unkindness from some members of the court who did not appreciate her goodness. However Louis became more and more enamored with her. When he had visited a city he would always bring back a present for her, a bag or gloves or a coral rosary. When it was time for him to be back, she would run out to meet him and he would take her lovingly on his arm and give her what he had brought. In 1221 Louis being now 21 and landgrave in his father’s place, and Elizabeth 14, their marriage was solemnized in spite of attempts to persuade him to send her back to Hungary as an unsuitable bride. He declared that he would rather cast away a mountain of gold then give her up. She we are told was “perfect in body, handsome, of a dark complexion; serious in her ways, modest, of kindly speech, fervent in prayer and most generous to the poor, always full of goodness and divine love”. He was modest, wise, patient, and truthful, trusted by his men and loved by his people. Their wedded life lasted only six years but their years together were filled with happiness. They had three children, Herman, who was born in 1222 and died when he was nineteen, Sophia, who became duchess of Brabant, and Gertrude (named Blessed) of Aldenburg.

Louis, unlike some husbands of saints, put no obstacles in the way of his wife’s charity, her simple and mortified life, and her long prayers. “My lady,” said one her ladies-in-waiting, “would get up at night to pray, and my lord would implore her to spare herself and come back to rest, all the while holding her hand in his for fear she should come to some harm. She would tell her maids to wake her gently when he was asleep – and sometimes when they thought him sleeping he was only pretending.”

Elizabeth’s material acts of charity were so great that they sometimes provoked adverse criticism. In 1225 that part of Germany was severely visited by a famine and she exhausted her own treasury and distributed her whole store of corn amongst those who felt the calamity heaviest. Louis was then away, and at his return the officers of his household complained to him of her profusion to the poor. But Louis, without examining into the matter, asked if she had alienated any of his dominions. They answered, “no”. “As for charities,” said he, “they will bring upon us divine blessings. We shall not want so long as we let her relieve the poor as she does.”

The castle of Wartburg was built on a steep rock, which the infirm and weak were not able to climb (the path was called the kneesmasher). St. Elizabeth therefore built a hospital at the foot of the rock for their reception, where she often fed them with her own hands, made their beds, and attended them even in the heat of summer when the place was insupportable. Helpless children, especially orphans were provided at her expense. She was the foundress of another hospital in which 28 persons were constantly assisted, and she fed nine hundred daily at her gate, besides numbers in different parts of the dominions, so that the revenue in her hands was truly the patrimony of the distressed. But Elizabeth’s charity was tempered with discretion; and instead of encouraging idleness, she employed them in ways suitable to their strength and ability. There is a story about St. Elizabeth, well known when in the very bed she shared with her husband, she laid a miserable leper. The indignant landgrave rushed into the room and dragged off the bedclothes. “But,” in the noble words of a historian, “at that instant Almighty God opened the eyes of his soul, and instead of a leper he saw the figure of Christ crucified stretched upon the bed.”

At this time strenuous efforts were being made to launch another crusade, and Louis of Thuringia took the cross. On St. John the Baptist’s Day in 1227, Louis parted from St. Elizabeth and went to join the Emperor Frederick II in Apulia; on September 11 he was dead of the plague at Otranto. The news did not reach Germany until October, just after the birth of Elizabeth second daughter. Her mother-in-law broke the news to her, speaking of “what had befallen” her husband and the “dispensation of God.” Elizabeth misunderstood. “Since he is a prisoner”, she said, “with the help of God and our friends he shall be set free.” When she was told he was not a prisoner, but dead, she cried, “The world is dead to me, and all that was joyous in the world,” and ran to and fro about the castle deeply distressed.

After her husband’s death, according to the testimony of one of her ladies in waiting, Isentrude, St. Elizabeth’s brother-in-law Henry, who was regent for her infant son, drove her and her children and two attendants from the Wartburg castle during that same winter that he might seize power himself. There are shocking particulars of the hardship and contempt which she suffered until she was fetched away from Eisenach by her aunt, Matilda, Abess of Kitzingen. From Kitzingen she visited her uncle, Eckembert, Bishop of Bamberg, who put his castle of Pottenstein at her disposal to which she went with her son Herman and the baby leaving the little Sophia with the nuns of Kitzingen. Eckembert had ambitious plans to another marriage for Elizabeth, but she refused to listen to them. Before his departure on the crusade, Louis and her had exchanged promises never to marry again. Early in 1228 the body of Louis was brought home and solemnly buried in the abbey church at Reinhardsbrunn. Provision was made for Elizabeth by her relatives and on Good Friday in the church of the Franciscan Friars at Eisenach she formally renounced the world, later taking the unbleached gown and cord which was the habit of the third order of St. Francis.

An influential part was played in all these developments by Father Conrad of Marburg, who henceforth was the determining human influence in St. Elizabeth’s life. This priest had played a considerable part for some time, having succeeded the Franciscan Father Rodinger as her confessor in 1225. The Landgrave Louis, in common with Pope Gregory IX and many others, had a high opinion of Fr. Conrad, and had allowed Elizabeth to make a promise of obedience to him, saving of course, his own husbandly authority. However Father Conrad’s experience as a successful inquisitor of heretics and his domineering and severe, if not brutal, personality made him an unsuitable person to be the director of St. Elizabeth. Subjectively, it is true that Fr. Conrad, by giving to Elizabeth obstacles, which she overcame, helped her on her road to sanctity (though we cannot know that a director of more sensibility would not have led her to yet greater heights); objectively, his methods were offensive. From the Friars Minor, St. Elizabeth had acquired a love of poverty which she could put into action only to a limited extent all the time she was landgravine of Thuringia. Now her children having been provided for, she went to Marburg, but was forced to leave there and lived for a time in a cottage at Wehrda, by the side of the River Lahn. Then she built a small house just outside Marburg and attached to it a hospice for the relief of the sick, the aged and the poor, to whose service she entirely devoted herself.

In some respects Fr. Conrad acted as a prudent and necessary brake on her enthusiasm at this time; he would not allow her to beg from door to door or to divest herself definitely of all her goods or to give more than a certain amount at a time in alms or to risk infection from leprosy and other diseases. In such matters, he acted with care and wisdom. But “Master Conrad tried her constancy in many ways, striving to break her own will in all things. That he might afflict her still more he deprived her of those of her household who were particularly dear to her, including me, Isentrude, whom she loved; she sent me away in great distress and with many tears. Last of all he turned off Jutta, my companion, who had been with her from her childhood, and whom she loved with a special love. With tears and sighs the blessed Elizabeth saw her go. Master Conrad, of pious memory, did this in his zeal with good intentions, lest we should talk to her of past greatness and she be tempted to regret. Moreover, he thus took away from her any comfort she might have in us because he wished her to cling to God alone.” For her devoted waiting-women he substituted two “harsh females”, who reported to him on her words and actions when these infringed his detailed commands in the smallest degree. He punished her with slaps in the face and blows with a “long, thick rod” whose marks remained for three weeks. Elizabeth told Isentrude, “If I am so afraid of a mortal man, how awe-inspiring must the Lord and Judge of the world.”

Master Conrad’s policy of breaking rather than directing the will was not completely successful. With reference to him and his disciplinary methods St. Elizabeth compares herself to sedge in a stream during flood time: the water bears it down flat, but when the rains have gone it springs up again, straight, strong and unhurt. Once when she went off to pay a visit of which Master Conrad did not approve, he sent to fetch her back. “We are like the snail,” she observed, “which withdraws into itself when it is going to rain. So we obey and withdraw from the way we were going.” She had that good self-confidence so often seen when a sense of humor serves submission to God.

One day a Magyar noble from Hungary arrived at Marburg and asked to be directed to the residence of his sovereign’s daughter, of whose troubles he had been informed. Having arrived at the hospital, he saw Elizabeth in her plain grey gown, sitting at her spinning wheel. The gentlemen were startled and crossing himself in alarm stated, “Whoever has seen a king’s daughter spinning before?” He would have taken her back to Hungary, but Elizabeth would not go. Her children, her poor, the grave of her husband were all in Thuringia and she would stay there for the rest of her life. It was not for long. She lived with great austerity and worked continually, in her hospice, in the homes of the poor, fishing in the streams to earn a little more money to help sufferers; even when she was sick herself she would try to spin or card wool.

She had not been at Marburg two years when her health finally gave way. As she lay ill her attendant heard her singing softly. “Between me and the wall there was a little bird singing so gaily to me, and it was so sweet that I had to sing too.” At midnight before the day of her death she stirred from her quietness and said, “It is near the hour when the Lord was born and lay in the manger and by His almighty power made a new star. He came to redeem the world, and He will redeem me.” And at cock crow she said, “It is now the time when He rose from the grave and broke the doors of hell, and he will release me.” St. Elizabeth died in the evening of November 17, 1231 being then 24 years old.

For three days her body lay in state in the chapel of the hospice, where she was buried and where many miracles were seen at her intercession. Master Conrad began collecting depositions touching her sanctity, but he did not live to see her canonization, which was proclaimed in 1235, just four years after her death. In the following year her relics were moved to the church of St. Elizabeth at Marburg, built by her brother-in-law Conrad, in the presence of the Emperor Frederick II, and “so great a concourse of divers nations, peoples and tongues as in these German lands scarcely ever was gathered before or will ever be again.”