Martyrs Manuel, Sabel, and Ishmael

Manuel, Sabel, and Ishmael were three brothers of Persian noble birth, the sons of a pagan father and a Christian mother who had raised them in the secret faith. They were sent as ambassadors from the Persian king to the court of the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate in 362 to negotiate a peace treaty between the two empires. Their mission found Julian at Chalcedon, on the Asian shore opposite Constantinople, in the midst of one of his great pagan festivals.

At a sacrificial banquet held in their honor, the three brothers refused to share in the meat that had been offered to the gods. Julian, recognizing in them Christians and seeing in their refusal a deliberate insult to his religious policy, ordered them detained. When all attempts to compel them to sacrifice failed, he had them beheaded outside the city — committing the ambassadors of a foreign power to violent death in violation of the protocols of his own diplomacy. The act would shortly help to provoke the Persian war in which Julian himself would die.

The Christians of Chalcedon retrieved the bodies and gave them honored burial. A church was raised over the place, which became a regular site of pilgrimage in the years that followed. Their feast falls on June 17.