There are a number of saints called Valentine that are honored on this day. Most likely candidate is a St. Valentine of Rome. He was said to have died mid-February A.D. 270. He was imprisoned for performing weddings for soldiers who were forbidden from marriage.
Or for ministering to Christians who were persecuted under the Roman Empire.
Or both.
Or two different people.
Even more likely…
St. Valentine’s Day was given as a way to Christianize the Middle Ages Pagan fertility festivals held all over Europe as the winter ended. Those festivals such as the Roman festival of Lupercalia.
So there is that.
Lupercalia was a very ancient pastoral festival, observed on February 13 through 15, to avert evil spirits and purify the city, releasing health and fertility. Lupercalia subsumed Februa, an earlier-origin spring cleansing ritual held on the same date, which gives the month of February (Februarius) its name.
In Roman mythology, Lupercus is a god sometimes identified as the Roman equivalent of the Greek god Pan. Lupercus is the god of shepherds. His festival, celebrated on the anniversary of the founding of his temple on February 15, was called the Lupercalia. His priests wore goatskins.
Historians mention an image of a god whom the Greeks call Pan and the Romans Lupercus, nude save for the girdle of goatskin, which stood in the Lupercal, the cave where Romulus and Remus were suckled by a she-wolf. There, in mid-February a goat and a dog were sacrificed, and salt mealcakes prepared by the Vestal Virgins were burnt.
The Lupercalia festival was partly in honor of Lupa, the she-wolf who suckled the infant orphans, Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, explaining the name of the festival, Lupercalia, or "Wolf Festival."
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