Miracles after death and canonization
Very soon after the death of Elizabeth, miracles were reported that happened at her grave in the church of the hospital, especially those of healing. On the suggestion of Konrad, and by papal command, examinations were held of those who had been healed between August 1232 and January 1235. The results of those examinations was supplemented by a brief vita of the saint-to-be, and together with the testimony of Elizabeth's handmaidens and companions (bound in a booklet called the Libellus de dictis quatuor ancillarum s. Elizabeth confectus), proved sufficient reason for quick canonization. She was canonized by Pope Gregory IX on 24 May 1235.
The papal bull declaring her a saint is on display in the Schatzkammer of the Deutschordenskirche in Vienna. Her body was laid in a magnificent golden shrine—still to be seen today—in the Elisabethkirche in Marburg. Marburg became a center of the Teutonic Order, which adopted Saint Elizabeth as its secondary patroness. The Order remained in Marburg until its official dissolution by Napoleon in 1803. The Elisabethkirche is now a Protestant church, but has spaces set aside for Catholic worship.
Elizabeth's shrine became one of the main German centers of pilgrimage of the 14th century and early 15th century. During the course of the 15th century, the popularity of the cult of Saint Elizabeth slowly faded, though to some extent this was mitigated by an aristocratic devotion to St Elizabeth, since through her daughter Sophia she was an ancestor of many leading aristocratic German families.
Three hundred years after her death, one of Elizabeth's many descendants, Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse, a leader of the Protestant Reformation, raided the church in Marburg. He demanded that the Teutonic Order hand over Elizabeth's bones, in order to disperse her relics and thus put an end to the already declining pilgrimages to Marburg. Philip took away the crowned agate chalice in which her head rested, but returned it after being imprisoned by Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor.
The reliquary chalice was subsequently plundered by Swedish troops during the Thirty Years' War, and is now on display at the Swedish History Museum. Her skull and some of her bones can be seen at the convent in Vienna bearing her name. A portion of her relics were kept in the church of the Carmelites in Brussels; another in the magnificent chapel of La Roche-Guyon, and a considerable part in a precious shrine is in the electoral treasury of Hanover. Another part of her relics were taken to Bogotá, then the capital of the Spanish New Kingdom of Granada, by friar Luis Zapata de Cárdenas. The relics are today inside a chapel dedicated to the saint in the Primatial Cathedral of Bogotá.
Elizabeth of Hungary is remembered in the Church of England with a Lesser Festival on 18 November and in the Episcopal Church on 19 November.
