Elizabeth of Portugal

Daughter of king Peter III of Aragon and great-niece of Elizabeth of Hungary, whose name she bore, born in 1271, she married Denis I of Portugal at twelve. The reign was prosperous, the husband unfaithful: she raised his natural children with her own. Her reputation rests on two mediations. In 1323, when her son Afonso raised an army against his father, she rode out and placed herself between the two forces drawn up at Alvalade, obtaining their reconciliation; she did it again in 1336, ill, to separate her son, by then king, from her Castilian son-in-law, and died at Estremoz on returning from that last ride. Widowed in 1325, she had taken the habit of the Franciscan third order and lived near the monastery of Santa Clara at Coimbra, which she had founded. The legend of the roses, in which bread she was carrying to the poor turns to flowers under the king's gaze, was transferred to her from her great-aunt. Canonised in 1625, she is commemorated on 4 July.