Feast Day: March 30 Beatified: March 3, 1677 — Pope Innocent XI Order / Vocation: Lay confessor — Duke of Savoy (1465–1472); married; ten children Patron of: Those who suffer from epilepsy · The poor and destitute · Rulers · The House of Savoy
"These are my packs and my hunting dogs. It is with the help of these poor people that I chase after virtue and hunt for the kingdom of heaven." — Blessed Amadeus IX, pointing to the poor being fed on his terrace, to an ambassador who had spoken of his sovereign's fine hunting dogs
The Duke Who Depleted His Treasury in Alms
There is a story about Amadeus IX of Savoy that his contemporaries preserved with a slightly rueful admiration. He had been distributing alms so extensively — so systematically, so continuously, so without calculation — that his officials eventually concluded the ducal treasury was in danger. They began quietly setting aside funds before the duke could reach them, hiding money from a man who would give it away faster than they could account for it.
He found out. He was not angry. He told them to continue governing well.
It is characteristic of him that the story has no dramatic confrontation. He was not a man of dramatic confrontations. He was a man who wore a hair shirt under his ducal robes, who heard Mass and prayed the Psalms daily with a regularity that made it clear these were not public performances, who fasted rigorously in a court where fasting was distinctly unfashionable, who distributed bread and money to the poor with his own hands, who built hospitals, who patched broken marriages instead of exploiting them for political leverage, who bore a lifelong illness without self-pity, and who died at thirty-seven having been a duke for seven years and spent all seven of them trying to live as a Christian in a position that made Christian living maximally inconvenient.
He is the patron of those with epilepsy not because he was cured of it but because he bore it as a correction — he used that word himself, the medieval spiritual vocabulary of providential suffering — a correction to the inevitable flattery that surrounds a man of his position. Every seizure reminded him that he was not, whatever the court said, the center of the universe.
Born in Thonon, Betrothed as an Infant, Grandson of an Antipope
He was born on February 1, 1435, in Thonon-les-Bains on the southern shore of Lake Geneva — the first of eighteen children born to Louis I, Duke of Savoy, and Anne de Lusignan, whose father had been King of Cyprus. The family was among the most connected in Europe, occupying the Alpine territories that controlled the mountain passes between France and Italy and consequently attracting the attention of every major power on both sides. Savoy was not a large duchy. It was a strategically indispensable one, and the House of Savoy had survived for centuries by navigating the competing claims of France and the Holy Roman Empire with a combination of martial competence and diplomatic flexibility.
He was betrothed as an infant to Yolande of Valois — the daughter of King Charles VII of France, the sister of the future Louis XI — a match that embedded the duchy within French political orbit. They married in 1451, when Amadeus was sixteen. He succeeded his father as duke in 1465. By then the epilepsy that had been with him since adolescence was well established. It would not leave him.
His grandfather had been the antipope Felix V — the last antipope in the Church's history, who abdicated in 1449 after a decade of schism, submitted to the legitimate pope Nicholas V, was received with honor, and died in good standing with the Church in 1451. Amadeus grew up knowing that his family had produced both the last antipope and, now, himself. The contrast was not lost on him.
The Duke at the Terrace
When an ambassador arrived at the ducal court and spoke with the slightly self-congratulatory tone that ambassadors use when they are trying to establish their sovereign's magnificence, he mentioned the king's fine packs of hunting dogs. Amadeus listened. Then he walked the ambassador to the terrace that looked out over the courtyard, where his servants were distributing bread and food to the long lines of the poor who came daily to the ducal residence. He pointed:
These are my packs and my hunting dogs. It is with the help of these poor people that I chase after virtue and hunt for the kingdom of heaven.
The story survives because it was the kind of thing he actually said, in the actual conditions of his court, in front of witnesses who repeated it. It was not a prepared remark. It was the instinctive expression of a man whose interior geography had been so thoroughly rearranged by his faith that charity and virtue were his real categories, and hunting and magnificence were other people's concerns.
He did not neglect governance for charity. The ducal treasury was managed with genuine competence; he inherited debts from his father's administration and discharged them systematically. He sought diplomatic solutions to the regional conflicts involving France, Milan, and the Swiss cantons rather than military ones. He administered the duchy's justice with the seriousness of a man who understood that justice for the poor was not a supplement to governance but its primary test.
He distributed ducal revenues to the poor. He wore a hair shirt. He fasted. He patronized the Franciscans and endowed other religious houses. He built hospitals. He received the sacraments with a frequency that contemporaries noted as exceptional for a man of his rank. He bore the seizures — the loss of consciousness, the loss of dignity, the total vulnerability of a man who falls in public — with patience.
He resigned formal control to his wife Yolande around 1469 as his health deteriorated. She was fully competent; he had chosen well or been chosen well for. He was imprisoned briefly during a subsequent political dispute and freed through the intervention of his brother-in-law, Louis XI of France. He died on March 30, 1472, in Vercelli, at the age of thirty-seven.
Miracles at his tomb were reported immediately. A painting of him dating from 1474 in the Dominican church in Turin became a center of reported healings. His daughter Louise was widowed young, gave away her wealth, and entered the Poor Clares; she too was beatified. Pope Innocent XI beatified him formally on March 3, 1677. His feast is kept on the anniversary of his death, March 30.
Prayer to Blessed Amadeus IX
O God, who in Blessed Amadeus gave a duke the grace to understand that the poor at the gate were his hunting dogs and his kingdom of heaven, and who sustained him through epilepsy and imprisonment and the full inconvenience of holy living in a position of power, grant through his intercession that those who govern may govern for the least, and that those who suffer chronic illness may find in it, as he found in it, a correction more useful than any prosperity. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Blessed Amadeus IX of Savoy, pray for us.
| Born | February 1, 1435 — Thonon-les-Bains, Savoy (present-day France) |
| Died | March 30, 1472 — Vercelli, Italy — natural death; aged 37 |
| Feast Day | March 30 |
| Order / Vocation | Lay confessor — Duke of Savoy (1465–1472); married to Yolande of Valois; ten children |
| Beatified | March 3, 1677 — Pope Innocent XI |
| Body | Vercelli, Italy |
| Patron of | Those with epilepsy · The poor · Rulers · The House of Savoy |
| Known as | Amadeus the Happy (Amedeo il Beato) · Apostle of the Poor |
| Connected blesseds | Blessed Louise of Savoy (daughter — Poor Clare) |
| Their words | "These are my packs and my hunting dogs. It is with the help of these poor people that I chase after virtue and hunt for the kingdom of heaven." |
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