"[6] On the death of his parents in his twentieth year he distributed all his worldly goods among the poor, entered the Franciscan Third Order, and set out as a mendicant pilgrim for Rome,[c] although his father on his deathbed had designated him governor of Montpellier.

Coming into Italy during an epidemic of plague, he was very diligent in tending the sick in the public hospitals at Acquapendente, Cesena, Rimini, Novara,[7] and Rome, and is said to have effected many miraculous cures by prayer and the sign of the cross and the touch of his hand.

At Rome, according to the Golden Legend, he preserved the "cardinal of Angleria in Lombardy"[d] by making the mark of the cross on his forehead, which miraculously remained.

[5] Count Gottardo Pallastrelli, following his hunting dog that carried the bread, discovered Roch and brought him home to recover.

On his way back to return incognito to Montpellier, he was arrested at Voghera as a spy (by orders of his own uncle) and thrown into prison, where he languished five years and died on 16 August 1327, without revealing his name.

After his death, according to the Golden Legend;anon an angel brought from heaven a table divinely written with letters of gold into the prison, which he laid under the head of S. Rocke.

[12] The story that when the Council of Constance was threatened with plague in 1414, public processions and prayers for the intercession of Roch were ordered, and the outbreak ceased, is provided by Francesco Diedo, the Venetian governor of Brescia, in his Vita Sancti Rochi, 1478.

In 1590 the Venetian ambassador at Rome reported back to the Serenissima that he had been repeatedly urged to present the witnesses and documentation of the life and miracles of San Rocco, already deeply entrenched in the Venetian life, because Pope Sixtus V "is strong in his opinion either to canonize him or else to remove him from the ranks of the saints;" the ambassador had warned a cardinal of the general scandal that would result if the widely venerated San Rocco were impugned as an impostor.

[16] His successor, Pope Gregory XIV (1590–1591), added Roch of Montpellier, who had already been memorialized in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass for two centuries, to the Catholic Church Martyrology, thereby fixing August 16 as his universal feast day.

He is usually represented in the garb of a pilgrim, often lifting his tunic to demonstrate the plague sore, or bubo, in his thigh, and accompanied by a dog carrying a loaf in its mouth.

[18][19][20] Following the Black Death, especially the Italian plague epidemic of 1477–79, new images of Christian martyrs and saints appeared and Roch gained new fame and popularity.

Plague texts dating from ancient and classical times, as well as Christian, scientific and folk beliefs, all contributed to this emerging visual tradition.

[22] Rather than a society depressed and resigned to repeated epidemics, these votives represent people taking positive steps to regain control over their environment.

Rather than depression or resignation, people "possessed a confidence that put even an apocalyptic disaster of the magnitude of the Black Death into perspective of God's secure and benevolent plan for humankind.

In the 1992 science fiction novel Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, a medieval priest who tends to plague victims is named Father Roche.