Now known as the holiday of romantic love, Valentine’s Day did not begin with flowers or flirtation. It began with a Christian beaten and executed by the Roman state.

According to early tradition, Valentine died because he insisted on blessing love when the empire found it inconvenient. His death was violent, and at the time, it did not generate much attention. 

Unbeknownst to Valentine, his execution would later become attached hearts and roses through a holiday now widely observed throughout North America, Europe, Latin America, parts of Asia and increasingly in Africa. The reason for this stark contrast is the way that the early church remembered its martyrs. 

The man behind Valentine’s Day is now known as Saint Valentine—but in the third century, his name was Valentinus, a common Latin name meaning “strong” or “worthy.” And there was more than one of him.

Early Christian martyrologies record at least three different men named Valentinus who were executed for their faith during the third century. One served as a priest in Rome. Another was a bishop in Interamna, a town north of Rome in what is now Terni, Italy. A third appears briefly in North African martyr lists, preserved only as a name and a date.

These were not competing versions of a single figure. They were three separate men who lived under the same imperial pressures and were killed during the same period of persecution. What bound them together was similarities in their stories.

In an era when Christians were often executed quickly and records were sparse, the church preserved memory through oral testimony rather than written documentation. Stories were carried by congregations, repeated in worship and attached to feast days. Over generations, the accounts of priests, bishops and believers named Valentinus merged into a single remembered figure whose defining act was faithfulness under threat.

Valentine became a name that stood for all of them.

The Valentine most closely associated with February 14 emerges from Roman tradition. He is remembered as a Christian priest ministering during the reign of Claudius II Gothicus, who ruled briefly from 268 to 270 AD. Claudius governed an empire under strain. Military losses, political instability and external threats made unity a constant concern in the land.

Third-century Rome depended on public loyalty. Civic life revolved around shared rituals like sacrifices to the gods, oaths to the emperor and visible participation in state religion. These acts functioned as declarations of political unity. If a person were to refuse them, they were marked as suspect.

Christians refused. They would not sacrifice to Roman pagan gods or swear divine allegiance to the emperor. Their worship was private, and they followed the authority of God, which to them was an authority much higher than the state. To Roman officials, this behavior signaled defiance.

Persecution did not always stem from theological hostility. It often grew out of fear, namely the fear that a refusal to participate in Roman rituals would threaten social order.

Further, marriage sat directly at the intersection of private life and public order. Roman law treated it as a civic institution tied to inheritance, citizenship and stability. Christian marriage, by contrast, centered on covenant before God. 

Later Christian tradition describes Claudius as hostile to marriage among soldiers. Some accounts claim he discouraged or banned it, believing unmarried men made more obedient fighters. Historians debate whether such a decree existed as formal law. Roman military policy varied, and marriage restrictions shifted by rank and era. What early Christians remembered was a world where the state treated love as expendable.

Valentine refused to do the same.

As a priest, he continued to bless marriages for Christian couples, including soldiers and their betrothed, quietly and without state recognition. In doing so, he affirmed a vision of love that operated independently of Roman authority. That act challenged who exactly held power over human commitment.

Eventually, Valentine was discovered and arrested. Some traditions place him under house arrest; others describe imprisonment in Rome. Later legends recount his friendship with his jailer and the healing of the jailer’s blind daughter—a story recorded centuries later, with a theme reflective of how the church understood holiness, which was mercy practiced even under immense pressure.

The accounts agree on how he died.

Valentine was beaten with clubs and executed around February 14, sometime near the year 269. He was buried along the Via Flaminia, where other martyrs were laid to rest. Rome considered the matter closed.

The church did not.

For centuries, Valentine’s memory remained local, preserved near his burial site and in scattered liturgical calendars. His name survived even as the details of his life were skewed with time. The wider revival of his feast came later, as Christianity reshaped the Roman calendar.

February had long been dominated by Lupercalia, a pagan fertility festival marked by purification rites and public excess. Rather than ousting that tradition outright, church leaders chose to redirect the date.

In 496 AD, Pope Gelasius I formally established February 14 as a feast honoring Saint Valentine. 

Centuries later, medieval writers layered new meaning onto the feast. By the fourteenth century, poets such as Geoffrey Chaucer associated St. Valentine’s Day with courtship and the mating of birds, drawing on seasonal imagery rather than martyrdom. From there, the holiday evolved through literature, custom, and eventually commerce.

The martyr receded. The date remained.

Valentine was remembered because of his incredible faithfulness to God in the face of pressure. His name has endured the test of time because it became symbolic of a Christian conviction: that love recognized by God answers to a higher authority than the state.

The empire that executed Valentine collapsed. The calendar was entirely restructured. His story shifted shape. But the message remained the same.

 

Feature photo: Matija Bradaška, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons