| Saints & Angels

This is the saint I am chosing as my conformation saint/name, and, although you wouldn't know it from this short and laking biography, she chose not to marry the man she had been promised to for years, instead making the choice to marry a man three times her age at thirty-six, because her ministers thought it best for the county. According to the church, she gave this unhappy marriage as a sacrifice to God, but historians are not so sure, given the fact that she was only eleven or twelve-years-old when she became engaged to Jagiello, Prince of Lithuania, and so uniting their countries, a pact that would last for 400 years.
She would be married to Jagiello, who took the baptismal name of Wladyslw, until her untimely death at age twenty-eight, less then a mouth after giving birth to a firstborn, the princess Elizabeth, who also died in infancy. Before her death though, she worked for the poor and with the poor, giving them food and changing laws to their help their well being.
Still today she is well-known and well loved in Poland, where the name of Jedwiga, Polish for Hedwig or Hedvig, is still a common name for girls and women.

Bela | 10/13/2008