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6 Surprising Facts About St. Valentine! Who Was St. Valentine, And Why Do We Celebrate Him On February 14? Get The Facts About This Enigmatic Character.

— By Elizabeth Hanes | February 14, 2024

Fototeca Gilardi/Getty Images

1. The St. Valentine who inspired the holiday may have been two different men.

Officially recognized by the Roman Catholic Church, St. Valentine is known to be a real person who died around A.D. 270. However, his true identity was questioned as early as A.D. 496 by Pope Gelasius I, who referred to the martyr and his acts as “being known only to God.” One account from the 1400s describes Valentine as a temple priest who was beheaded near Rome by the emperor Claudius II for helping Christian couples wed.

A different account claims Valentine was the Bishop of Terni, also martyred by Claudius II on the outskirts of Rome. Because of the similarities of these accounts, it’s thought they may refer to the same person. Enough confusion surrounds the true identity of St. Valentine that the Catholic Church discontinued liturgical veneration of him in 1969, though his name remains on its list of officially recognized saints.

2. In all, there are about a dozen St. Valentines, plus a pope.

The saint we celebrate on Valentine’s Day is known officially as St. Valentine of Rome in order to differentiate him from the dozen or so other Valentines on the list. Because “Valentinus”—from the Latin word for worthy, strong or powerful—was a popular moniker between the second and eighth centuries A.D., several martyrs over the centuries have carried this name. The official Roman Catholic roster of saints shows about a dozen who were named Valentine or some variation thereof.

The most recently beatified Valentine is St. Valentine Berrio-Ochoa, a Spaniard of the Dominican order who traveled to Vietnam, where he served as bishop until his beheading in 1861. Pope John Paul II canonized Berrio-Ochoa in 1988. There was even a Pope Valentine, though little is known about him except that he served a mere 40 days around A.D. 827.

3. Valentine is the patron saint of beekeepers and epilepsy, among many other things.

Saints are certainly expected to keep busy in the afterlife. Their holy duties include interceding in earthly affairs and entertaining petitions from living souls. In this respect, St. Valentine has wide-ranging spiritual responsibilities. People call on him to watch over the lives of lovers, of course, but also for interventions regarding beekeeping and epilepsy, as well as the plague, fainting and traveling. As you might expect, he’s also the patron saint of engaged couples and happy marriages.

4. You can find Valentine’s skull in Rome.

The flower-adorned skull of St. Valentine is on display in the Basilica of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, Rome. In the early 1800s, the excavation of a catacomb near Rome yielded skeletal remains and other relics now associated with St. Valentine. As is customary, these bits and pieces of the late saint’s body have subsequently been distributed to reliquaries around the world. You’ll find other bits of St. Valentine’s skeleton on display in the Czech Republic, Ireland, Scotland, England and France.

5. English poet Geoffrey Chaucer may have invented Valentine’s Day.

The medieval English poet Geoffrey Chaucer often took liberties with history, placing his poetic characters into fictitious historical contexts that he represented as real. No record exists of romantic celebrations on Valentine’s Day prior to a poem Chaucer wrote around 1375.

In his work “Parliament of Foules,” he links a tradition of courtly love with the celebration of St. Valentine’s feast day–an association that didn’t exist until after his poem received widespread attention. The poem refers to February 14 as the day birds (and humans) come together to find a mate. When Chaucer wrote, “For this was sent on Seynt Valentyne’s day / Whan every foul cometh ther to choose his mate,” he may have invented the holiday we know today.

6. You can celebrate Valentine’s Day several times a year.

Because of the abundance of St. Valentines on the Roman Catholic roster, you can choose to celebrate the saint multiple times each year. Besides February 14, you might decide to celebrate St. Valentine of Viterbo on November 3. Or maybe you want to get a jump on the traditional Valentine celebration by feting St. Valentine of Raetia on January 7. Women might choose to honor the only female St. Valentine (Valentina), a virgin martyred in Palestine on July 25, A.D. 308. The Eastern Orthodox Church officially celebrates St. Valentine twice, once as an elder of the church on July 6 and once as a martyr on July 30.

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Who Was the Real St. Valentine?

There were multiple St. Valentines (including decapitated ones), but it was a medieval poet who first established the holiday's romantic tradition

On February 14, when we share chocolates, special dinners or doily cards with our loved ones, we do it in the name of Saint Valentine. But who was this saint of romance?

Search the internet, and you can find plenty of stories about him—or them. One Saint Valentine was supposedly a Roman priest who performed secret weddings against the wishes of the authorities in the third century. Imprisoned in the home of a noble, he healed his captor’s blind daughter, causing the whole household to convert to Christianity and sealing his fate. Before being tortured and decapitated on February 14, he sent the girl a note signed “Your Valentine.”

Some accounts say another saint named Valentine during the same period was the Bishop of Terni, also credited with secret weddings and martyrdom via beheading on February 14.

Unfortunately for anyone hoping for a tidy, romantic backstory to the holiday, scholars who have studied its origins say there’s very little basis for these accounts. In fact, Valentine’s Day only became associated with love in the late Middle Ages, thanks to the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer.

“The two stories that everybody talks about, the bishop and the priest, they’re so similar that it makes me suspicious,” says Bruce Forbes, a professor of religious studies at Morningside College in Iowa.

Multiple Martyred Saint Valentines

Valentine was a popular name in ancient Rome, and there are at least 50 stories of different saints by that name. But Forbes said the earliest surviving accounts of the two February 14 Valentines, written starting in the 500s, have a whole lot in common. Both were said to have healed a child while imprisoned, leading to a household-wide religious conversion, and they were executed on the same day of the year and buried along the same highway.

The historical evidence is so sketchy that it’s not clear whether the story started with one saint who then became two or if biographers of one man borrowed details from the other—or if either ever existed at all.

Perhaps more disappointing for the romantics among us, the early accounts of the two Valentines are typical martyrdom stories, stressing the saints’ miracles and gruesome deaths—but containing not a word about romance.

“They’re both mythical to begin with, and the connection with love is even more mythical,” says Henry Kelly, a scholar of medieval and renaissance literature and history at UCLA.

Tracing Valentine's Day to Lupercalia

English Poet Geoffrey Chaucer. Historical Picture Archive/Corbis/Getty Images

Saint Valentine’s Day has also been associated with a Christian effort to replace the older holiday of Lupercalia, which Romans celebrated on February 15. Some modern stories paint Lupercalia as a particularly sexy holiday, when women wrote their names on clay tablets which men then drew from a jar, pairing up random couples.

But, again, early accounts don’t support this. The closest parallel between Lupercalia and modern Valentine’s Day traditions seems to be that the Roman festival involved two nearly naked young men slapping everyone around them with pieces of goat skin. According to the ancient writer Plutarch, some young married women believed that being hit with the skins promoted conception and easy childbirth.

Whatever minor romantic connotations might have been part of Lupercalia, they didn’t translate to the new Christian holiday.

“It just drives me crazy that the Roman story keeps circulating and circulating,” Forbes says. “The bottom line for me is until Chaucer we have no evidence of people doing something special and romantic on February 14.”

A Chaucer Poem Links Romance to Valentine

So how did Chaucer create the Valentine’s Day we know today? In the 1370s or 1380s, he wrote a poem called "Parliament of Fowls" that contains this line: “For this was on Saint Valentine’s Day, when every bird comes there to choose his mate.”

This was a moment in Europe when a particular set of romantic ideas took shape. Chaucer and other writers of his time celebrated romance between knights and noble ladies who could never marry—often because she was married already—creating tropes of yearning and tragic obstacles that still drive our romantic comedies today.

By the 1400s, nobles inspired by Chaucer had begun writing poems known as “valentines” to their love interests. It was only at this point that stories began to appear linking Saint Valentine to romance.

But there’s one final twist in the myth of Saint Valentine. When Chaucer wrote of the day when every bird chooses a mate, Kelly argues that he was thinking not of February 14, but of May 3, a day celebrating one of the many other Saint Valentines. After all, England is still awfully cold in mid-February.

In Kelly’s view, Chaucer was looking for a way to celebrate King Richard II’s betrothal to Anne of Bohemia on that day and found that was the feast day for Valentine of Genoa. (He could have chosen the Feast of the Holy Cross, but that wouldn’t have sounded as nice in the poem.) But, since his contemporaries were more familiar with the Feb. 14 Saint Valentine’s Day, that was the date that became attached to the new holiday of romance.

In some ways, that may be a good thing.

“February is the worst month in cold climates,” Kelly says. “It’s great to have something to look forward to.”

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Lupercalia

Lupercalia was an ancient pagan festival held each year in Rome on February 15. Although Valentine’s Day shares its name with a martyred Christian saint, some historians believe the holiday is actually an offshoot of Lupercalia. Unlike Valentine’s Day, however, Lupercalia was a bloody, violent and sexually charged celebration awash with animal sacrifice, random matchmaking and coupling in the hopes of warding off evil spirits and infertility.

— By History.Com Editors | January 30, 2024

Heritage Art/Heritage Images Via Getty Images

No one knows the exact origin of Lupercalia, but it has been traced back as far as the 6th century B.C.

According to Roman legend, the ancient King Amulius ordered Romulus and Remus—his twin nephews and founders of Rome—to be thrown into the Tiber River to drown in retribution for their mother’s broken vow of celibacy.

A servant took pity on them, however, and placed them inside a basket on the river instead. The river-god carried the basket and the brothers downriver to a wild fig tree where it became caught in the branches. The brothers were then rescued and cared for by a she-wolf in a den at the base of Palatine Hill where Rome was founded.

The twins were later adopted by a shepherd and his wife and learned their father’s trade. After killing the uncle who��d ordered their death, they found the cave den of the she-wolf who’d nurtured them and named it Lupercal.

It’s thought Lupercalia took place to honor the she-wolf and please the Roman fertility god Lupercus.

Ritual Sacrifice

Lupercalia rituals took place in a few places: Lupercal cave, on Palatine Hill and within the Roman open-air, public meeting place called the Comitium. The festival began at Lupercal cave with the sacrifice of one or more male goats—a representation of sexuality—and a dog.

The sacrifices were performed by Luperci, a group of Roman priests. Afterwards, the foreheads of two naked Luperci were smeared with the animals’ blood using the bloody, sacrificial knife. The blood was then removed with a piece of milk-soaked wool as the Luperci laughed.

Feast of Lupercal

In Ancient Rome, feasting began after the ritual sacrifice. When the feast of Lupercal was over, the Luperci cut strips, also called thongs or februa, of goat hide from the newly sacrificed goats.

They then ran naked—or nearly naked—around Palantine, whipping any woman within striking distance with the thongs.

During Lupercalia, the men randomly chose a woman’s name from a jar to be coupled with them for the duration of the festival. Often, the couple stayed together until the following year’s festival. Many fell in love and married.

Over time, nakedness during Lupercalia lost popularity. The festival became more chaste, if still undignified, and women were whipped on their hands by fully clothed men.

In Plutarch’s Life of Julius Caesar, Caesar famously refuses a golden crown presented to him by Mark Antony during the feast of Lupercalia.

Saint Valentine

There are several legends surrounding the life of Saint Valentine. The most common is that on one February 14 during the 3rd century A.D., a man named Valentine was executed by the Roman Emperor Claudius II after being imprisoned for assisting persecuted Christians and secretly marrying Christian couples in love.

As the story goes, during Valentine’s imprisonment he tried converting Claudius to Christianity. Claudius became enraged and ordered Valentine to reject his faith or be killed. He refused to forsake his faith, so Valentine was beheaded.

Legend also tells of another story that happened during Valentine’s imprisonment after he tutored a girl named Julia, the blind daughter of his jailer. The legend states God restored Julia’s sight after she and Valentine prayed together. On the eve of his execution, Valentine supposedly penned a note to Julia and signed it, “From your Valentine.”

Some historians believe more than one man named Valentine was executed by Claudius II. Despite the ambiguity surrounding Valentine and his life, the Catholic Church declared him a saint and listed him in Roman Martyrology as being martyred on February 14.

Origins of Valentine’s Day

Thanks to Saint Valentine’s reputation as a “patron of lovers,” he became synonymous with romance. In the late 5th century A.D., Pope Gelasius I eliminated the pagan celebration of Lupercalia and declared February 14 a day to celebrate the martyrdom of Saint Valentine instead, although it’s highly unlikely he intended the day to commemorate love and passion. In fact, some modern biblical scholars warn Christians not to celebrate Valentine’s Day at all since it’s thought to be based on pagan rituals.

It’s true Valentine’s Day uses some of Lupercalia’s symbols, intentionally or not, such as the color red which represented a blood sacrifice during Lupercalia and the color white which signified the milk used to wipe the blood clean and represents new life and procreation.

Is Valentine's Day based off of Lupercalia? Like many ancient traditions, there’s a lot of haziness surrounding the origins and rituals of Lupercalia and how they influenced the Valentine’s Day holiday. Lupercalia is no longer a mainstream, public celebration for obvious reasons, but some non-Christians still recognize the ancient event on February 14 (instead of Valentine’s Day) and celebrate in private.

— Sources: 1. History of Valentine’s Day. Society for the Confluence of Festivals in India. 2. St. Valentine. Catholic Online. 3. The Dark Origins of Valentine’s Day. National Public Radio.

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