On November 17 the Church honors St. Elizabeth of Hungary (1207-1231), the princess who became a Franciscan tertiary and spent her short life caring for the poor and the sick. Born in 1207, the daughter of King Andrew II of Hungary, she was betrothed at four and married at fourteen to Ludwig, Landgrave of Thuringia. After Ludwig's death in 1227, she left the Wartburg court and settled at Marburg, where she built a hospital and devoted herself to nursing the sick, joining the Third Order of St. Francis. She died on November 17, 1231, at the age of twenty-four, and was canonized by Gregory IX in 1235 — only four years after her death.
The St. Elizabeth's Church (Elisabethkirche) at Marburg, built 1235-1283, was one of the first purely Gothic churches in Germany and was built over her tomb to receive the flood of pilgrims who came after her canonization. Landgrave Philip of Hesse had her relics removed from the church in 1539. Most passed eventually to Vienna's Elisabethinen church, with an arm reliquary kept at Sayn Castle near Koblenz. The church remains a pilgrimage site. The Wartburg Castle in Eisenach, where she lived at court — and where Martin Luther would later translate the New Testament — is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. She is patron of widows, of hospitals, and of the Franciscan Third Order.
