Sancta Hedwigis, Vidua — for her feast on the sixteenth day of October, III classis
Quæ autem vere vidua est, et desolata, speret in Deum, et instet obsecrationibus et orationibus nocte ac die. “But she that is a widow indeed and desolate, let her trust in God, and continue in supplications and prayers night and day.” — 1 Timothy 5:5
I. The house of Andechs
She was born about the year 1174 in the castle of Andechs, on its hill above the Ammersee in Bavaria, a daughter of Berthold, Count of Andechs, who would shortly take the grand title of Duke of Merania, and of Agnes of the house of Wettin. It was one of the great families of the Empire, with lands stretching from Bavaria to the Adriatic, and in Hedwig’s generation it rose higher than it had ever risen and then fell further.
Her brothers and sisters make a strange litany. Ekbert became bishop of Bamberg, and Berthold patriarch of Aquileia. Her sister Gertrude became Queen of Hungary, wife of Andrew II, and the mother of St. Elizabeth. Her sister Agnes became the wife of Philip Augustus, King of France, while the king’s lawful wife, Ingeborg of Denmark, was still living; for that union Innocent III laid all France under interdict in the year 1200, and Agnes died in disgrace soon after. In 1208 two of her brothers, Bishop Ekbert and Henry, Margrave of Istria, were accused of complicity in the murder of the German king Philip of Swabia at Bamberg, were placed under the ban of the Empire, and lost much of what the family held. In 1213 her sister Gertrude was murdered by Hungarian nobles.
Hedwig’s sanctity did not grow in a quiet garden. She was the daughter of a house that knew every glory and every scandal the thirteenth century could offer: crowns, mitres, interdicts, assassinations. She knew from childhood what the world gives and what it costs, and Solomon’s sentence was written over her family before it was ever written over her life: Fallax gratia, et vana est pulchritudo.
II. A bride of twelve
As a small child she was sent to be educated by the Benedictine nuns of Kitzingen in Franconia, where she learned her letters, her psalter and the Latin of the Office, and where the habit of the cloister was formed in her long before she had any thought of entering one.
She was not left there long. At about twelve years of age, as the custom of great houses then allowed, she was married to Henry, son of Bolesław the Tall, Duke of Silesia, of the Piast dynasty of Poland. Henry was about eighteen. In 1201 he succeeded his father as duke, and Hedwig, a Bavarian girl not yet thirty, became the first lady of a frontier land on the eastern edge of Latin Christendom.
The marriage was arranged, as such marriages were, for land and alliance. It became, by the grace of God and the patience of both, a holy one. She bore him seven children: three sons, Bolesław, Konrad and Henry, and daughters Agnes, Sophia and Gertrude, with another who died young. Of all of them only one, Gertrude, would survive her.
III. The Duchess of Silesia
The Legenda maior of her life, written within living memory of her canonization from the testimony gathered for it, presents her in these years as the valiant woman of the last chapter of Proverbs, and it is hard to read it otherwise.
She governed a great household and kept it in order. She rose before the others to pray. She was attentive to the duke’s affairs and, by every account, wise in them. And her hand was open. She fed the poor at her own table and served them herself; she washed the feet of the sick and kissed their sores; she visited prisoners and paid the debts of those imprisoned for them; she gave dowries to poor girls so they would not be forced into sin; she kept a household of widows and poor women who lived from her charity. The tradition credits her and her husband with hospitals, including a house of the Holy Spirit at Wrocław and a refuge for leprous women.
Her great work, and the place she loved above all others, was the abbey of Trzebnica (Trebnitz), north of Wrocław. In 1202 Duke Henry founded it at her urging as a house of Cistercian nuns, brought from Bamberg, and endowed it with great lands. It became the first convent of women in Silesia, a school for the daughters of the nobility, a refuge for widows, and the centre of her prayer. Her daughter Gertrude entered it and became its abbess.
It is worth noticing that she did all this as a duchess, not in spite of being one. She did not regard her rank as an obstacle to holiness to be escaped as quickly as possible; she regarded it as a stewardship to be rendered. She hath considered a field, and bought it: with the fruit of her hands she hath planted a vineyard.
IV. The vow and the beard
About the year 1209, after the birth of their last child, Hedwig and Henry together took a vow of perpetual continence before Lawrence, bishop of Wrocław, and kept it for the remaining thirty years of their marriage. They lived thereafter in separate dwellings and met, the Legenda says, only in public and in the presence of others, so that the vow should be guarded from suspicion as well as from failure.
The tradition adds that Henry from that time let his beard grow, as the lay brothers of the Cistercians did, and that this is why history knows him as Henry the Bearded. Whether the beard was the reason or merely a happy coincidence, the vow itself is well attested, and so is its mutuality: it was not a saintly wife escaping a worldly husband, but a husband and wife who chose together to give their remaining years to God, while he went on governing and fighting and she went on giving.
V. Sorrow upon sorrow
The trials of her life came less from outside than from her own house, and they came early.
Her eldest son, Bolesław, died young. Her sons Henry and Konrad, rivals for their father’s inheritance, fell into open war with one another, and about the year 1213 their forces met in battle, with Henry victorious. Konrad died soon afterward, by a fall from his horse while hunting. The same year brought the murder of her sister the queen in Hungary; the years before had brought the ruin of her brothers. She saw, as few mothers are made to see, how the ambitions of a house can set brother against brother.
What the sources record of her response is not complaint but prayer and alms. She wept, she prayed, she continued to give. And she did not cease to love the son who had made war on his brother; she was, to the end of her life, closest to Henry, who in his turn honoured and loved her more than any other.
VI. The captive duke
In 1229 Duke Henry the Bearded was drawn into the bitter quarrels of the Piast princes over the senior throne of Kraków. Konrad, Duke of Masovia, fell upon him by surprise, seized him, and carried him off a prisoner to Płock.
Her son Henry gathered an army to free his father by force. Hedwig would not have it. She went herself to Konrad of Masovia, a woman past fifty, without soldiers, and spoke with him; and the Legenda records that the man who had not been moved by threats was moved by her, and released his prisoner without the blood that had been prepared to be shed. The heart of her husband trusteth in her. It was the act of a peacemaker, and it bore fruit beyond its moment: Henry the Bearded went on to become Duke of Kraków in 1232 and to rule the greater part of Poland in his last years.
VII. Barefoot through the Silesian winter
Her penances were severe, and they must be told honestly, because they are both the most striking and the most easily misread part of her life.
She fasted almost continually, abstaining from meat and for long periods from everything but bread and water. She wore a hair shirt beneath her ducal dress. She slept little, and on boards. Most famously, she went barefoot in every season, through snow and over frozen ground, until her feet were cracked and bloody, and she would go into the churches and stand on the stone floor where the priests had stood, as though following their footsteps.
Her confessor, concerned for her health, commanded her to wear shoes. She obeyed. She carried them in her hand. The Legenda tells the story with evident pleasure, and the painters have loved it ever since: in nearly every image of St. Hedwig she holds a pair of shoes, usually under her arm. It is a joke, and it is meant to be one, but it is also a lesson. She obeyed the letter of the command so as not to disobey, and she did not pretend to herself that she had given up what she had given up.
The same source tells that her husband, troubled at her drinking nothing but water, once took her cup from her hands to taste it, and found it was wine. The story belongs to the tradition of her cult and is offered as such; but it says something true about how her household saw her. They did not find her severity bitter.
St. Thomas teaches that the measure of exterior penance is not its quantity but its order: bodily mortification is good insofar as it serves charity and is ruled by discretion, and it is to be moderated by obedience (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 147). The Church has never proposed Hedwig’s penances to everyone for literal imitation. She proposes the love that made them sweet to her, and the obedience that set their limit. Hedwig herself, the Legenda notes, was gentle with others’ weakness and hard only with her own.
VIII. Legnica, 1241
Henry the Bearded died on the nineteenth of March, 1238, at Krosno, and was buried at Trzebnica. Their son Henry, called the Pious, succeeded him. Hedwig was now a widow in name as she had long been in practice, and she withdrew altogether to Trzebnica.
Three years later the Mongols came. In the spring of 1241 the armies of the Golden Horde, having burned Kraków, poured into Silesia. Duke Henry the Pious gathered the knights of Silesia and Greater Poland, with Templars and Hospitallers and German knights beside them, and met the invaders near Legnica on the ninth of April, 1241. The Christian army was destroyed, and the duke was killed. Later chroniclers record that his head was carried on a lance before the walls of Legnica and that his body was identified by his widow, Anna of Bohemia, only by a peculiarity of his foot.
The Legenda records that Hedwig knew of his death before the messengers came, having seen it in prayer, and that she told her companion Adelheid that she had lost her son. When the news was confirmed and the women around her wept, she did not. She raised her eyes and gave thanks: that God had given her such a son, who had loved and honoured her all his life and never caused her grief; and that, if He willed, she would gladly have kept him on earth, but since it had pleased God that he should shed his blood for Christ, she rejoiced that he was joined to his Creator in heaven, and commended his soul to Him.
Of her seven children, only Gertrude, the abbess, now remained.
IX. Trzebnica, 1243
She spent her last years among the nuns of Trzebnica. She wore their habit, kept their silence, followed their hours, and took the lowest tasks of the house. Yet she never made their vows. The reason the sources give is exact and characteristic: had she professed religious poverty, she would have lost the right to dispose of her goods, and she wished to keep that right to the end in order to go on giving them to the poor. She chose to be the servant of the convent and the almoner of the duchy at once.
She carried with her everywhere a small image of the Blessed Virgin, which she held in her hands at prayer and with which she blessed the sick, and the tradition records many cures attributed to her touch.
She died at Trzebnica on the fifteenth of October, 1243, in her sixty-ninth or seventieth year, and was buried in the abbey church beside her husband. When her body was later raised for veneration, the tradition says, the little image of Our Lady was found still clasped in her fingers.
X. Glorification
Her cult began at her grave at once. The process of canonization was conducted in the 1260s, gathering the testimony of her chaplain, her companions and those who claimed cures, and on the twenty-sixth of March, 1267, Pope Clement IV canonized her at Viterbo. The next year her relics were solemnly translated in the abbey church of Trzebnica, where they rest today in the chapel that bears her name.
From that testimony came the Legenda maior de beata Hedwigi, the principal source for her life. A century later, in 1353, a richly illuminated copy was made for Duke Ludwig of Brieg, one of her descendants; that manuscript, the Hedwig Codex, survives, and its pictures of the barefoot duchess with her shoes in her hand, feeding the poor and kneeling before the Crucified, have shaped her image ever since.
She is the patroness of Silesia, and in a sense of two peoples. Born a Bavarian, married a Piast, she is claimed by Germans and Poles alike, and in the bitter centuries when those nations were enemies, each sometimes tried to make her its own. When Frederick the Great permitted a church for the Catholics of Berlin in the eighteenth century, it was dedicated to her, and it is the cathedral of that city still. In the twentieth century, after the expulsions and the redrawn borders that followed the Second World War, she was invoked on both sides as a patroness of reconciliation. The woman who walked unarmed into the camp of Konrad of Masovia to stop a war between kinsmen was well chosen for the office.
The 1962 Missal keeps her feast on the sixteenth of October, the day after her death, with the Mass Cognovi of the Common of Holy Women neither Virgins nor Martyrs, and a Collect proper to her which asks that, as she passed with her whole heart from the pomp of the world to the humble following of the Cross, so we may learn to tread underfoot the perishing delights of the world and overcome all adversity in the embrace of the Cross.
XI. What the life teaches
That a state of life is a road, not a detour. Hedwig was sanctified as a daughter, a wife, a mother, a duchess and a widow, each in turn. She did not become holy by escaping her vocation in the world but by living each part of it fully and then giving it back to God when He asked for it. The Church sets her before married women and widows as proof that the cloister is not the only road to the summit.
That mothers carry the Cross of their children. She lost six of her seven children. She saw her sons at war with each other. She buried a husband and saw her favourite son killed by heathen invaders. What she did with that grief is the whole lesson: she gave thanks for what she had been given, and commended to God what He had taken. Dominus dedit, Dominus abstulit.
That mortification is ruled by love and obedience. Her penances were extreme, and the Church does not ask us to copy them. She asks us to copy their root, which was love, and their limit, which was obedience: she wore no shoes for the love of Christ, and carried them in her hand for the love of her confessor’s word.
That peace is a work of strength. The strongest act recorded of her is not her fasting but her walk to Płock. A woman without an army ended a war by asking. Fortitude, St. Thomas teaches, is chiefly shown in enduring and standing firm; Hedwig showed that it can also take the form of going alone, unarmed, to the enemy.
Practice
Examine. Is there a sorrow in my family, over a child, a spouse, a quarrel between those I love, that I have carried only as grievance and not yet offered to God? And is there some practice of penance I have either neglected altogether, or undertaken without the counsel of a confessor?
Do. Perform one work of mercy today in the manner of the duchess: personally, and not by proxy. Serve a meal, visit someone sick or alone, pay a debt that is not yours. And if there is a quarrel among kinsmen within your reach, take one step, as she did, toward making peace.
Pray. The Collect of the day:
Deus, qui beatam Hedwigem a sæculi pompa ad humilem tuæ Crucis sequelam toto corde transire docuisti: concede; ut eius meritis et exemplo discamus perituras mundi calcare delicias, et in amplexu tuæ Crucis omnia nobis adversantia superare.
“O God, who didst teach blessed Hedwig to pass with her whole heart from the pomp of the world to the humble following of Thy Cross: grant that by her merits and example we may learn to tread underfoot the perishable delights of the world, and in the embrace of Thy Cross to overcome all things that are adverse to us.”
Aspiration. Dominus dedit, Dominus abstulit: sit nomen Domini benedictum. “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away: blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21).
Devote. It is October, the month of the Holy Rosary. Pray the Joyful Mysteries, and at the fourth, the Presentation, remember the prophetess Anna, a widow of fourscore and four years, who departed not from the temple, serving with fastings and prayers night and day, and who was given at the end of her long widowhood to see the Child (Luke 2:36-38). Ask St. Hedwig, who held the image of His Mother to the last, to obtain for you the same perseverance.
If you wish to go deeper: the Lives of the Saints path continues with her niece St. Elizabeth of Hungary, the holy women of the house of Andechs, and the other royal widows who passed from the court to the cloister. The Church History path treats the Piast duchies of the thirteenth century, the Mongol invasion of 1241, and the long and troubled history of Silesia between Germans and Poles. The Theology and Doctrine path takes up the virtue of fortitude, the ordering of bodily penance under discretion and obedience, and the theology of the states of life: marriage, widowhood and virginity.
Sancta Hedwigis, vidua, patrona Silesiæ, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: the Legenda maior de beata Hedwigi and Legenda minor (ed. in Monumenta Poloniae Historica IV; BHL 3766 ff.); the Hedwig Codex of 1353 (J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. Ludwig XI 7); the Acta Sanctorum*, October vol. VIII; the Roman Martyrology; the Catholic Encyclopedia (1910), s.v. “St. Hedwig”; Butler’s* Lives of the Saints*; and the standard histories of the Piast duchy of Silesia and the Mongol invasion of 1241. The* Legenda and St. Thomas are given in paraphrase throughout.