St Valentine

Just who was St Valentine? And what has he got to do with the custom of sending Valentine’s cards on 14th February? The second question is easier to answer than the first, that answer being “absolutely nothing”! The first question, however, is a completely different matter.

One problem with the story of Valentine is that there appear to have been two of them! Both seem to have been martyred during the second half of the 3rd century, and both were buried alongside the Via Flaminia, the road that led over the mountains between Rome and Rimini on the coast of the Adriatic Sea. Rome’s Flaminian Gate (later called the Porto del Popolo) has also been known as the Gate of St Valentine, after a church of St Valentine was built nearby in the 4th century.

The two Valentines were a Roman priest and a Bishop of Interamna (modern-day Terni, about 65 miles northeast of Rome).

But how likely is it that there were really two men with the same name and similar stories? It is far more probable that different stories were told about the same person, and that the differences were enough to persuade some people that there were two martyrs named Valentine.

And what were those stories? The answer to that question is “absolutely nothing than can be relied upon”. Stories of saints seem to have become interchangeable, and there is no certainty that a tale of a miraculous cure (for example) that has been assigned to Saint A could not just as easily have been performed by Saint B – or simply be pure invention on the part of a story-teller who wanted to pass off a random piece of animal bone as a holy relic and needed a convincing story to make his case.

In the case of Valentine, it appears that his stories are interchangeable with those applied to four saints - Marius and Martha and their sons Audifax and Abachum – who may or may not have been Persians who went to Rome to attend to the burial of bodies of martyrs and ended up being martyred themselves. The legends attached to this quartet are highly dubious, and are no less so when assigned to Valentine.

So there really is nothing to associate Valentine with lovers or falling in love. He was assigned the feast day of 14th February, and there was a tradition that this was the day on which birds began to pair up – on the assumption that the average sparrow or pigeon keeps a calendar. Given that this was an appropriate day for young people to start thinking about choosing a partner, the name of St Valentine became attached to the business of sending cards and flowers to one’s intended or partner.

The obscure Roman martyr – whoever he was – was entirely innocent of the whole business!

© John Welford