October 16

ST HEDWIG, WIDOW (A.D. 1243)

HEDWIG (Jadwiga) was a daughter of Berthold, Count of Andechs, and was born at Andechs in Bavaria about the year 1174; through her sister Gertrude she was aunt to St Elizabeth of Hungary. She was placed when very young in the monastery of Kitzingen in Franconia, and taken thence when twelve years old to marry Henry, Duke of Silesia, who was then eighteen. They had seven children, of whom only one, Gertrude, survived her mother, and she became abbess of Trebnitz. Her husband succeeded to his father's dukedom in 1202, and he at once at Hedwig's persuasion founded the great monastery of Cistercian nuns at Trebnitz, three miles from Breslau. To construct the building it is said that all malefactors in Silesia, instead of other punishments, were condemned to work at it. This was the first convent of women in Silesia,[1] and the first of a large number of monastic establishments by the foundation of which the duke and duchess both aided the religious life of their people and spread a Germanic culture over their territories. Among them were houses of Augustinian canons, Cistercian monks, Dominican and Franciscan friars. Henry established the hospital of the Holy Ghost in Breslau and Hedwig one for female lepers at Neumarkt, in which they took a close personal interest. After the birth of her last child in 1209 Hedwig engaged her husband to agree to a mutual vow of continence, from which time they lived to a considerable extent in different places. Her husband, we are told, for the thirty years that he lived afterwards, never wore gold, silver or purple, and never shaved his beard, from which he was named Henry the Bearded.

Their children were the occasions of a good deal of trouble for them. For example, in 1212 Duke Henry made a partition of his estates between his sons Henry and Conrad, but on terms dissatisfying to them. The two brothers with their factions came to an open rupture, and, notwithstanding their mother's efforts to reconcile them, a battle was fought, in which Henry routed his younger brother's army. This was one of those crosses by which the duchess learned more bitterly to deplore the miseries and blindness of the world, and more perfectly to disengage her heart from its slavery. After 1209 she made her principal residence near Trebnitz monastery, often retiring into that austere house, where she slept in the dormitory and complied with all the exercises of the community. She wore the same cloak and tunic summer and winter, and underneath them a hair-shift, with sleeves of white serge that it might not be seen. With going to church barefoot over ice and snow her feet were often blistered and chilblained, but she carried shoes under her arm, to put on if she met anyone. An abbot once gave her a new pair, insisting that she should wear them, which she promised to do. When he met her some time after she was still unshod, and he asked what had become of them. Hedwig produced them from under her cloak, brand-new. "I always wear them there", she said.

In 1227 Duke Henry and Duke Ladislaus of Sandomir met to plan defence against Swatopluk of Pomerania. They were unexpectedly attacked by Swatopluk, and Henry was surprised in his bath, barely escaping with his life. St Hedwig hurried to nurse him, but he was soon in the field again, fighting with Conrad of Masovia for the territories of Ladislaus, who had been killed. Henry was successful and established himself at Cracow, but he was again surprised, this time while at Mass, and was carried off by Conrad to Plock. The faithful Hedwig followed, and induced the two dukes to come to terms, her two grand-daughters being promised in marriage to Conrad's sons. Thus the intervention of Henry's forces was rendered unnecessary, to the great joy of St Hedwig, who could never hear of bloodshed without doing all in her power to prevent it. In 1238 her husband died, and was succeeded by his son Henry, called "the Good". When the news was brought, the nuns at Trebnitz shed many tears. Hedwig was the only person with dry eyes, and comforted the rest: "Would you oppose the will of God? Our lives are His. Our will is whatever He is pleased to ordain, whether our own death or that of our friends." From that time she put on the religious habit at Trebnitz, but she did not take the corresponding vows, in order that she might be free to administer her own property in her own way for the relief of the suffering. Hedwig once got to know a poor old woman who could not say the Lord's Prayer, and was very slow at learning it. Hedwig went on patiently teaching her for ten weeks, and even had her into her own room to sleep, so that at every spare moment they could go through it together, until the woman could both repeat and understand it.

In 1240 the Mongol Tartars swept through the Ukraine and Poland. Duke Henry II led his army against them and a battle was fought near Wahlstadt, in which, it is said, the Tartars used a sort of poison-gas, for "a thick and nauseating smoke, issuing from long copper tubes shaped like serpents, stupefied the Polish forces". Henry was killed, and his death was known to St Hedwig three days before the news was brought to her. "I have lost my son", she told her companion Dermudis. "He has gone from me like a bird in flight, and I shall never see him again in this life." When the messenger arrived, it was she, the old woman, who comforted the younger ones, Henry's wife Anne and his sister Gertrude. The example of her faith and hope was honoured by God with the gift of miracles. A nun who was blind recovered her sight by the blessing of the saint with the sign of the cross, and her biographer gives an account of several other miraculous cures wrought by her and of several predictions, especially of her own death. In her last sickness she insisted on being anointed before any others could be persuaded that she was in danger. She died in October 1243, and was buried at Trebnitz. St Hedwig was canonized in 1267, and her feast added to the general Western calendar in 1706.

There is a Latin life or legend of St Hedwig which seems to have been compiled towards the close of the thirteenth century by an unknown writer who claims to have based his narrative in the main upon memoirs provided by a Cistercian, Engelbert of Leubus. There is a shorter as well as a longer form of the story, which is printed in the Acta Sanctorum, October, vol. viii, as well as elsewhere. A manuscript copy written in 1353 and preserved at Schlackenwert is of great interest on account of the miniatures with which it is decorated; they have often been reproduced, as for example in the book of H. Riesch, Die hl. Hedwig (1926). There are several lives in German, e.g. by F. H. Görlich (1854), F. Becker (1872), E. Promnitz (1926), K. and F. Metzger (1927), and a few in French, notably that by G. Bazin (1886). See also G. Morin in the Revue Bénédictine, vol. vii (1890), pp. 465-469; and H. Quillus, Königen Hedwig von Polen (1938). There is a popular American account of St Hedwig, with a fancy title, The Glowing Lily, by E. Markowa (1946).

[1] It was suppressed and secularized in 1810, and the estate came to Prince Blücher after Waterloo.

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(Butler's Lives of the Saints, Christian Classics, 1995) wmaster@hcbc.hu