Today, May 4, is the feast of Saint Florian. According to legend, he was killed during the Diocletian persecution, and his main cult centre was at Linz in Austria. His relics, however, were said to be kept at Rome, and from there they were allegedly translated to Krakow in 1183/84. In the later Middle Ages, Florian was predominantly venerated in Austria and Poland, due to the centres of Linz and Krakow.
It was believed that his wonderworking speciality - or his patronage par excellence, as it were - was protection against fire. The belief in Florian's firefighting abilities is clearly demonstrated by this late-fifteenth-century statue from Vienna, where the saint is pouring water onto a towered building which seems to be on fire. As this statue was originally placed on the facade of a house nearby the Church of Saint Stephen, Vienna's cathedral, it is likely that several onlookers would interpret the building at Florian's feet as the cathedral which he was facing.
Florian's armour marks him as a soldier saint, which was quite common for male saints of the Diocletian persecutions. Tales of Christian soldiers in the imperial army who were martyred for their faith were popular, and the sheer size of the Roman army - at least as that size was imagined in later centuries - provided a near-endless possibility for new stories to be told. Just as the Diocletian persecutions became a time in which it was logical to place unknown saints or saints of an uncertain date, so the occupation of a Roman soldier became a logical marker of male saints killed in this period.
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