No one is exactly sure who Saint Valentine was (or... were).
Some say he was a priest and physician who lived in Rome and was killed by Emperor Claudius II around 270 CE after being discovered secretly wedding lovers as a tactic to get men out of the military service. Others say he may have been a bishop in Terni, Italy. Yet others speculate that the two stories refer to the same person. As if that is not enough to confuse you, there was yet another Valentine who lived somewhere in Africa and met an unfortunate end in the month of, yes you guessed it, February.
Some say he was a priest and physician who lived in Rome and was killed by Emperor Claudius II around 270 CE after being discovered secretly wedding lovers as a tactic to get men out of the military service. Others say he may have been a bishop in Terni, Italy. Yet others speculate that the two stories refer to the same person. As if that is not enough to confuse you, there was yet another Valentine who lived somewhere in Africa and met an unfortunate end in the month of, yes you guessed it, February.
Whoever Saint Valentine was in human form , he enjoyed a wide a varied purview in the afterlife. In addition to watching over love and happy marriages, he was also the patron saint of beekeepers, fainting, travelers , and people with epilepsy.
What's more romantic than a royal marriage that took five years to negotiate? Geoffrey Chaucer needed 699 lines of poetry to romanticize and celebrate the marriage between King Richard II of England and Annie of Bohemia in 1380. The result, a poem named, "Parliament of Fowls."