These days, Saint Valentine’s Day is one of the most widely celebrated and highly commercialized holidays. Many use this day to celebrate their romantic relationships, spark something new, or do something unrelated to romance — and throughout it all is Valentine’s name. It’s really all about the saint, even though the holiday itself is hardly a religious one. Despite this, the average person knows next to nothing about who Saint Valentine really was. The reason for this? Historians don’t know too much about him either, or at least not much for sure.

So, what do we know? Well, there’s a lot of speculation, as there is with all ancient history. For instance, many have made attempts to connect Valentine’s Day to the pagan festival of Lupercalia, which was all about fertility and celebration. This festival was celebrated in ancient Rome, and was supposedly later replaced by Pope Gelasius I with the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary, also known as Candlemas. Candlemas has the date Feb. 2, even though it was ostensibly the replacement of Lupercalia, which was celebrated on Feb. 14 or 15. This has led some to believe that Pope Gelasius I instead replaced Lupercalia with a day commemorating the martyrdom of Saint Valentine, which happened on Feb. 14, though there isn’t much evidence besides the similar dates to support this. Saint Valentine was martyred more than a hundred years before all of this. Confused? Me too.

It gets worse — according to some historical accounts, there were two people named Valentine who were martyred in the same year, in the same place. One was a Roman priest who was martyred for his unwillingness to worship pagan idols, and the other was a bishop from the town of Terni. They were both martyred on the Via Flaminia, an ancient Roman road. Given all these similarities, many believe that the two Valentines were one and the same. Whether Valentine was really one or two people, in popular history, his story is told as if he were just one person, and only one Valentine has a day named after him.

What Valentine had to do with love is generally pretty nebulous, but there are a few tentative explanations. In one telling of the story, the reason that Valentine was martyred was because of his continued willingness to wed young Roman couples, even after an Imperial ban on marriage among the soldiering classes. In another story, Valentine fell in love with the daughter of a Roman judge after curing her blindness as proof of his faith. While in prison, he sent her a note that supposedly started with “from your Valentine.” However, both of these stories are pretty much just speculation, with little proof to support them. 

In the end, the only thing we’re sure of is that Saint Valentine was a religious man in the third century who was martyred on Feb. 14. Although it’s unclear exactly when the tradition of Saint Valentine’s Day started, it’s at least 500 years old. And, whoever he was, we still remember Saint Valentine 1700 years after his death as a symbol of connection and love.

Article by William Reynolds