Saint Ursula

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Image:Coat of arms of British Virgin Islands.png Ursula ("small female bear" in Latin) is a Christian saint. Her feast day in in the Roman Catholic Church is October 21, though her feast was removed from the general calendar of saints in 1969.

Her legend, probably unhistorical, is that she was a British princess who, at the request of her father King Donaut, set sail to join her future husband, the pagan Governor Conan Meriadoc of Armorica (Brittany), along with 11,000 virginal handmaidens. However, a miraculous storm brought them over the sea in a single day to a Gaulish port, where Ursula declared that before her marriage she would undertake a pan-European pilgrimage. She headed for Rome, with her followers, and persuaded the Pope, Cyriacus (unknown in the pontifical records), and Bishop of Ravenna, Sulpicius, to join them. After setting out for Cologne, which was being besieged by Huns, all the virgins were beheaded in a dreadful massacre. The Huns' leader shot Ursula dead, supposedly in 383.

Image:Memling Shrine.jpg

Ursula and her fellow virgins were buried in Cologne where the Church of St. Ursula is dedicated to her. The Order of Ursulines, founded in 1535 by Angela Merici, and especially devoted to the education of young girls, has also helped to spread throughout the world the name and the cult of St. Ursula. St. Ursula was named the patron saint of students.

While there was a tradition of virgin martyrs in Cologne by the 5th century, this was limited to a small number between two and eleven according to different sources. The 11,000 were first mentioned in the 9th century; suggestions as to where this came from have included reading the name "Undecimillia" or "Ximillia" as a number, or reading the abbreviation "XI. M. V." as eleven thousand (in Roman numbers) virgins rather than eleven martyred virgins. Another theory however is that the number 11,000 originated in the middle ages, when bones of dubious origin were being sold as relics of Martyrs. St. Ursula and her virgins were very popular, and according to the (rather cynical) theory, people sold so many bones of the Saint and the virgins that people invented the 11,000 virgins as an explanation for the ample supply of bones (which in fact were the remains of people buried in a churchyard dating back to Roman times).

Today the story of Saint Ursula is overwhelmingly considered to be fiction, and as a result in 1969 Pope Paul VI suppressed her cult as part of a larger revision of the Catholic canon of saints.

Christopher Columbus named the Virgin Islands after her and her virgins. On 1520-10-21, Ferdinand Magellan rounded Cape Virgenes and entered the Straits of Magellan, naming the cape after Ursula's virgins. Portuguese explorer João Álvares Fagundes in 1521 named 'Eleven Thousand Virgins' what is now known as Saint-Pierre and Miquelon.

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