Quiteria

Saint Quiteria was a virgin martyr of the fifth century (our calendar gives 477), venerated in Hispania and Gaul, above all on the border between France and Spain, in Navarre. Little is certain about her beyond her name, the place and cause of her death and the existence of her cult. She is commemorated on 22 May and is one of the patron saints of Toledo.

According to the legend she was born at Bracara, now Braga in Portugal, to Lucius Catilius Severus, Roman governor of Gallaecia and Lusitania, and his wife Calcia. Her father wanted her to marry and renounce Christianity. Quiteria fled, but her father's men found her at Aire-⁠sur-⁠l'Adour in Gascony, and she was beheaded on the spot. Her sister Liberata suffered the same fate in the forest of Montus and lies in a fourteenth-⁠century sarcophagus in the fortified church of Saint-⁠Jean-⁠Baptiste at Mazères. Portuguese tradition makes her the leader of the nine sisters born at one birth, children whom their mother ordered drowned but whom the servant spared and who were raised as Christians.