The Forty-Two Martyrs of Amorion

The forty-two Martyrs of Amorion were the senior military officers of the city of Amorion in central Anatolia — one of the great fortresses of the eastern frontier of the Byzantine Empire — who were captured by the Caliph al-Mu'tasim when Amorion fell to the Arab forces in 838 after a brutal siege. The fall of Amorion was one of the great defeats of ninth-century Byzantium, and the city's senior officers were carried away as captives of the highest political importance.

For seven years they were held in confinement at the caliph's capital of Samarra in Iraq — repeatedly offered freedom and high office in the Abbasid service in exchange for conversion to Islam, repeatedly refusing. They sustained one another through the long imprisonment. The synaxarion preserves the names of the leading officers: Theodore, Constantine, Callistus, Theophilus, Bassoes, and their companions.

In 845, having exhausted the methods of persuasion, the caliph ordered the forty-two beheaded together on the bank of the Tigris. Their bodies were thrown into the river and were recovered downstream by Greek Christians who buried them with honor. The Byzantine emperor Michael III later ransomed their relics, and they were returned to Constantinople with imperial solemnity. Their joint feast falls on March 6.