St. Pulcheria the Empress

Pulcheria was born in 399, the eldest daughter of the Emperor Arcadius. While still a girl of fifteen she took into her own hands the care of her younger brother Theodosius, heir to the throne, and the governance of the palace. With her two sisters she dedicated her virginity to God, and turned the imperial court into something near a monastery, ordered by prayer, fasting, and works of mercy.

For decades she was the steadying hand of the Eastern empire. She built churches to the Mother of God in the capital, among them the great shrines that housed the holy robe and girdle of the Theotokos, and she was a firm friend of the Orthodox confession through the rise and fall of Nestorius, whose teaching against the title Theotokos she opposed from the first.

When Theodosius died in 450, the bishops and the army looked to Pulcheria. She chose the soldier Marcian as Emperor and consented to a marriage that preserved her vow, and the two together resolved to heal the Church wounded by the Robber Council of Ephesus.

She lived to see the Fourth Ecumenical Council gathered at Chalcedon in 451, and was present with Marcian when the Definition of the faith was set forth. By the tradition of the Church it was Pulcheria who, seeking the relics of the Mother of God, received from Juvenal of Jerusalem the account of the Dormition and the empty tomb.

She reposed in the summer of 453, leaving her possessions to the poor. The Church keeps her memory on the tenth of September, and together with Marcian on the seventeenth of February, honouring the virgin empress who guarded the faith of the councils.