Would The Real St Valentine Please Stand Up?
Right in the middle of icy February sits a day that's associated with warmth, love and romance. It's a chance for you to tell a loved one just how much they mean to you, or make the first tentative steps to initiating a new romance. St Valentine's Day is one of the biggest commercial days in the retail and catering calendar - restaurants are booked up weeks in advance, while candy stores and florists are laying in mountains of chocolate and roses for the romantically inclined. Everywhere we look there are hearts and flowers, but who was the real St Valentine, and why do we commemorate him so faithfully every year?
Nobody really knows...
The simple answer is that nobody is really sure who the real St Valentine was, and it appears that there are several possibilities. The name 'Valentine' comes from the Latin valens, meaning strong, worthy or powerful. It was a popular name during ancient times, and there could be as many as 14 candidates for the title of St Valentine as we know him.
The most likely of these is an anonymous figure buried at Via Flaminia, just north of Rome in Italy. The St Valentine we all know does not appear in the Catholic church's earliest list of Roman martyrs (the first 'Saints'), but the first recorded feast of St Valentine was celebrated by Pope Gelasius I in 496AD. Even at this early point in history, nothing was really known about this mysterious saint. Speculation as to his identity ranged from a martyr in a Roman province of Africa, a bishop of Interamna (now modern-day Terni) and a priest in Rome.
The first appearance of the St Valentine we know today is in the Nuremberg Chronicle in 1493. Here it was revealed that he was thought to be a Roman priest martyred during the reign of Claudius II, and the first association with romance is born. It is thought that the reason for his martyrdom was because he had helped Christian couples to marry and aided in the escape of those being persecuted for their beliefs.
The real truth is that nobody really knows who St Valentine really was, but the mystery surrounding his life certainly adds an element of romance that is entirely in keeping with the sentiments of his feast day.