Saint Elzéar of Sabran
The lamb who defeated a lion
Join me today to meet a statesman, a warrior, an ambassador, and saint.
Name: Elzéar, Elzéar of Sabran
Life: 1285 - 1325 AD
Status: Saint
Feast: September 27
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It was 1325, and the bells of Paris rang to mark the passing of a great man. Elzéar of Sabran, ambassador, general, educator of princes, liberator of Rome, Count of Ariano and Baron of Ansouis, was dead.
And perhaps because Elzéar had a reputation not only for greatness but also for goodness, the mood in the streets of Paris was one of celebration. Little children ran through the streets shouting that a saint had died. One little boy got so carried away that he slipped and fell into a river. The boy was swept under and out of sight, and his desperate father asked the new saint to help. Before long a freak wave flopped the little boy out of the river, coughing but unharmed.
It had been a smart prayer, for Elzéar of Sabran had always been one to pay attention to poor people, to ordinary people. That was one of the traits that made him seem like a throwback to holy warriors of the early middle ages. But the middle ages were no longer dawning, they were coming to their end. The old, trusted institutions were failing. Once, Europe had been led by the Holy Roman Emperor, but now various nobles were squabbling over who had the right to that title. Once Europeans had looked to Rome, but now even the popes had fled Rome for the safety of Avignon, in Southern France. Medieval philosophy was degenerating into hair-splitting scholasticism. The cultural momentum was passing to poets, and painters and philologists, who would bring about a rebirth, as they saw it, of ancient culture. But somehow in this moment, Elzéar and his wife Delphine had lived an old-fashioned life of purity and faith. Where others bent to the way of the world, Elzéar and Delphine stood tall and the world had bent to them.
The strange story of Elzéar and Delphine began in Southern France. Elzéar’s father was the Baron of Ansouis, North of the city of Marseille. But he held a more important title as well. Elzéar’s father was also the Count of Ariano, today in Southcentral Italy. To the people of Ariano, he was a foreign conqueror and overlord. But there was little they could do about it. One day his first born son, Elzéar, would rule after him. Elzéar’s father made sure his son was trained in war and strategy. Elzéar also showed a great deal of interest in the Church.
Elzéar was still only a teenager when his marriage was arranged with an equally pious girl, Delphine of Glandèves. After they were married, Delphine made a request of her husband. Delphine asked Elzéar to consider living together as brother and sister. They would be celibate within their marriage.
It was a shocking request. Elzéar would have been within his rights to say no, and if Delphine insisted he could have had the marriage annulled. But he hesitated, and I have to wonder whether the family matchmakers had chosen the couple with this possibility in mind. The more he thought, the more he understood what Delphine was proposing. Probably Elzéar had considered becoming a priest. Now he was married, but this might be a way to live an almost priestly life, while still remaining part of the secular world. For the rest of their lives, Elzéar and Delphine would live together as brother and sister. Eventually both joined the Third Order of Saint Francis.
When Elzéar was in his early 20s, his father died. Now, Elzéar was Baron of Ansouis and the Count of Ariano. Elzéar had to figure out what kind of lord he was going to be. For his own household, the new Count set a number of rules. There would be Mass daily and Confession weekly. Nobles often had an entourage of flatterers, all fighting for influence. Elzéar and Delphine wanted none of that, and had fights and grudges settled immediately. And every night, after the work was done in the quiet of the evening, the household would gather for a moment of reflection.
The next question was how to deal with his lands - especially the angry peasants of Ariano. Another noble gave Elzéar some free advice. It was simple, he said. Round up a bunch of peasants and hang them. It didn’t really matter which ones you hanged. The rest would be much more cooperative after that.
Elzéar replied that this sounded very much like a lion tearing apart a lamb. That was how things usually went in nature, he admitted. But Elzéar told the other man that he had an unusual plan. In the County of Ariano, Elzéar planned to show that sometimes, the lamb could win against the lion.
The first step involved gathering information. Everyone talked about helping the poor, and the widows and the orphans. Elzéar had his men put together a list of all the poor people in his lands. Now he could budget to help all the people who needed it. No one in his lands was going to go hungry.
Of course, the Count understood that Christian generosity can easily be abused. He made a distinction between those who could not work and those who were unwilling to work, because they were troublemakers or because they were just lazy. The Count developed a system of strikes, and after a certain number, he expelled those who would not change their ways from his lands.
For those who were working, the new Count brought back holidays. The medieval calendar was full of holy days, days on which no work was done. But many landowners now kept people working anyway. Elzéar put his men back on the old schedule.
Elzéar and Delphine modelled the Christian life for the men and women in their lands, and many followed their example. Now, in the lands of Count Elzéar, people were working less, praying more, and their communities were growing stronger. The land prospered. The people of Ariano came to be loyal - sometimes almost a little too loyal - to their new Count and Countess.
And the people began to tell stories about the Count that went beyond generosity. It was said that he had entered a leper colony. His men were disgusted by the lepers, but the Count had gotten off his horse and embraced them. The lepers were moved by the gesture. It was only afterward that they realized their leprosy had also been healed.
On another occasion, in a year of poor harvests, the food that the Count had prepared for the poor ran out. A servant came to tell the Count that the store room was empty but there were still people waiting for food. Count Elzéar told the servant to go check one more time, just to be sure, and she obediently went, only to find a large pile of grain she was certain had not been there before.
Elzéar and Delphine never had children of their own. They did have a godson, though. The boy had been a sickly child, and his parents had been afraid he was about to die. But Elzéar had picked the baby up, and as he visibly improved the Count told the boy’s parents that not only would he not die, their son was destined for greatness. Elzéar and Delphine became the boy’s godparents.
Elzéar and Delphine ruled happy lands and a well-ordered household. This success was bound to get them noticed. The man who noticed them was the most powerful man in Italy’s patchwork of feudal states, Robert, who was called the Wise, King of Naples. Robert asked Elzéar and Delphine to come and stay at his court a while. It was not the kind of invitation they could refuse.
Up until this time, Elzéar and Delphine had lived modestly and quietly. Now they would have to live as courtiers. The court of King Robert was ground zero for the changes that would lead Europe into the Renaissance. The court was filled with extravagant figures, like the witty dwarf Giotto who was revolutionizing the painter’s craft. Poets like Petrarch, Dante and Bocaccio would come and go. It was a time of gold and silk and banquet tables strewn with roses. Elzéar and Delphine would be surrounded by beautiful, cynical people pursuing power and pleasure. It would be all too easy to join them.
Elzéar and Delphine discussed how to keep living as they had. They spent the days in court, but held each other to account to find time in the evenings for prayer and reflection. It wasn’t always easy. Once, when Delphine was worrying about the state of the Church, she asked her husband what they would do if the pope or the senior members of the church became corrupt. He told her that if this happened, if the pope or his cardinals or even their trusted confessor stopped believing, then it would simply be the two of them standing alone, defending the faith of their fathers.
As time passed, King Robert noticed that Elzéar and Delphine did not get carried away by the pursuit of pleasure or power. They remained who they were. Robert could use people like that, especially as Naples prepared for war.
In the North, Henry of Luxembourg had become Henry VII, the Holy Roman Emperor, and now he was determined to reassert control over Italy. This put the emperor in conflict with the pope. King Robert led the faction that supported the papacy and wanted the Holy Roman Emperor to stay out of Italy. But the emperor was massing an army and preparing to march South. Robert needed a general to lead his men against the emperor. He chose a man he trusted: Count Elzéar.
This was not an occasion where the lion would lose to the lamb. Elzéar’s army moved quickly, and caught the imperial army near Rome. Elzéar led the men into an attack, and the first charge broke the emperor’s army. As for Elzéar, he was in the middle of the fighting with his men, and took an ugly head wound from one of the Emperor’s officers. Elzéar stayed on his feet, disarmed the other man, and took him captive.
Unfortunately for the captured noble, the Count’s Italian men were by now almost fanatically loyal to Elzéar, and did not like hearing that he could have been killed. They had devised a plan to set the captured man on fire when the Count heard about the situation and intervened to save his prisoner’s life.
Emperor Henry VII was being pushed back. The war might have dragged on, but then Henry VII died unexpectedly. Once again the cause of the Holy Roman Empire was without a leader, which left King Robert as the winner by default. And that was good, because King Robert had another task for Elzéar.
Robert had defeated all of his enemies. But there was one person he could never seem to control: his son Charles. The boy had grown up in wealth and power, and it had made him impulsive and cruel. Charles was growing up spoiled, and Robert wondered if it was too late to make a man of him. He asked Count Elzéar to try.
Elzéar took the job. And soon Charles began to change, beginning to be generous, learning self-control. When Robert was travelling, Charles ruled in his place, and Elzéar became his right hand man. Elzéar used his newfound power to help the poor across Robert’s kingdom.
Every day, Count Elzéar listened to the complaints and demands of the poor and the abandoned people of the land. Even Delphine was sometimes surprised to see him respond kindly when demands were pushy or rude. She asked if it didn’t make him angry. He told her that it did. It was just that when he got angry he made himself think about Christ, who had made the stars and nevertheless put up with human beings and their disrespect, their self-deception, their malice. Considering that, Elzéar told his wife, never failed to calm him down.
Elzéar was now approaching his 40s. King Robert asked for his help again. This time Robert needed a representative to go to Paris and find a suitable bride for his son Charles. It was there, far from home, that Elzéar got sick. It became clear that he would not recover. Far away in Italy, Delphine knew her husband was dead. She was in mourning long before messengers arrived to bring her the bad news.
The people of Paris marked his passing, and it was not long before Saint Elzéar provided his first miracle. The world went on. Delphine outlived her husband by many years. She would become a counsellor to queens. And she would be remembered as Blessed Delphine in her turn.
There was one other man who carried on the legacy of Count Elzéar: his godson, the sickly child Elzéar had healed. The boy became a priest, and as Saint Elzéar had predicted, he would rise to greatness. The boy would become Pope Blessed Urban V, a reformer who tried to call the Church back to simplicity and holiness, to bring together the armies of Europe in crusade, to heal the Great Schism between the Eastern and Western Churches, and to return the centre of the Church from France to Rome.
But that is another story.
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A beautiful story, beautifully told