Harper's Young People, July 25, 1882

Perched on a hill near Eisenach, the medieval Wartburg Castle looms over the German landscape, its stone walls echoing centuries of history. In 1521 it sheltered Martin Luther as he labored on a new German Bible, a moment that still draws visitors to the preserved study where he worked. The fortress itself was founded in the eleventh century by Count Lewis, who built it from soil carried up a steep slope after a chance encounter with a fleeing deer.

Long before Luther’s stay, the Wartburg cradled the story of Saint Elizabeth of Thuringia, a Hungarian princess whose brief life shone with compassion. Betrothed as a child to Count Lewis’s son, she grew up amid the castle’s halls and soon earned a reputation for feeding the hungry during a devastating famine, handing out fresh bread with her own hands. After her husband’s death, widowed and impoverished, she persisted in caring for the poor, a devotion that later inspired poets and secured her canonization.