St Elizabeth of Hungary

Elizabeth was the daughter of the king of Hungary and was sent while still a child to the court of Thuringia, where she would later marry Louis. Their marriage was remembered as unusually warm and faithful, and that domestic happiness is an important part of her story, not an accidental preface to later holiness. Even as a princess and young mother she was already caring for the poor, feeding the hungry, and founding works of mercy. Famine, political strain, and then the death of Louis during the crusading movement brought her into a much harder life.

Widowed while still young, pushed aside by court politics, and subjected to a form of spiritual direction that could be severe, she accepted humiliation without losing either practical intelligence or tenderness. At Marburg she devoted herself more directly to the sick and poor, serving in the hospital she founded and giving away what she could for Christ's sake. She died in 1231 at only twenty-four, but left behind one of the most luminous examples of royal sanctity transformed into radical charity.