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Valentine's Day began as a feast to celebrate the decapitation of a third-century Christian martyr.

So how did we get from a beheading to betrothing? Here's Greg Hangler.

Today, very little is known about the origins of Valentine's Day, nor the holiday's namesake. What we do know

comes from an order of Belgian monks who spent three centuries collecting evidence for the lives

of saints from manuscript archives around the world. They were called Bolandists, after Jean Boland,

a Jesuit scholar who in 1643 began publishing the massive 68 volumes

titled The Lives of the Saints. Since then, successive generations of monks continued the work

until the last volume was published in 1940.

The monks dug up every scrap of information about every saint on the liturgical calendar

and printed the text arranged according to the Saints' Feast Day.

The volume encompassing February 14th contains the story of St. Valentine.

In the 3rd century, the Roman Empire was being invaded by the Goths. At the same time, smallpox broke out killing up to 5,000 people a day,

which greatly depleted the number of soldiers in the Roman army,

by far the most powerful military in the world.

Believing that men fought better if they were not married, the ambitious Emperor Claudius

the second banned marriage in the military.

Also, to quell internal rivalries over the previous emperor's assassination, Claudius had the Senate deify him, along with the Roman

gods and compelled citizens to worship him. Those who refused to worship the Roman gods were

considered unpatriotic enemies of the state and were killed. St. Valentine was a priest in central Italy.

He risked the emperor's wrath by secretly marrying Christian soldiers to their young brides.

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