Late antiquity (5th century)
Feast: December 31
The richest woman in the Roman Empire who liquidated an estate spanning three continents to build monasteries and free slaves.
Melania and her husband Pinian owned property in Italy, North Africa, Spain, and Britain. Their annual income reportedly exceeded the Roman imperial treasury's. They were married at fourteen and seventeen, and after the deaths of their two children, they decided to give it all away. The Roman Senate tried to stop them — the sale of estates that large threatened the economy. Melania persisted. She freed eight thousand slaves. She sold properties across the Mediterranean, donated to churches, monasteries, and the poor, and eventually moved to Jerusalem around 417 AD. There she built a convent on the Mount of Olives, where she lived with ninety nuns, copying manuscripts and studying Scripture. Pinian lived in a nearby monastery until his death. Melania's biographer, the priest Gerontius, describes a woman of fierce discipline: she ate once a day, slept on sackcloth, and read the Bible three or four times through each year. When the Empress Eudocia visited Jerusalem, Melania talked her through a theological crisis. She died on the Mount of Olives in 439, on the feast of St. Stephen. She had entered the world as the wealthiest woman alive and left it owning nothing but a wooden cross and a hair shirt.