Manuel, Sabel and Ismael

Three brothers of Persia

The three were brothers, of an illustrious family of Persia, in the generation when the Church beyond the Roman frontier was living under the long persecution of the Sasanian house and its Magian priesthood. Their father is remembered as a pagan and a servant of the fire; their mother as a Christian, who — the account is careful about this — had them baptised and instructed in Christ without their father's knowledge, and put them in the charge of a priest for their education. It is one of the small, credible details of the passion: in the Persian empire of the fourth century a Christian mother in a Zoroastrian noble house could keep faith only in secret, and did.

Grown, the brothers followed their father into the service of the crown, and rose in it. They were, by the passion's account, at once soldiers and men of affairs, and they held their faith openly enough for it to be known and yet not so as to bar them from office — which was possible in the intervals between the great persecutions.

The embassy to Julian

The king of the Persians — whom the Greek text names Alamundaros (Ἀλαμούνδαρος) — sent them into the Roman empire as his ambassadors, to conclude a treaty of peace. They came into Bithynia, to Chalcedon on the Asian shore opposite Constantinople, where the emperor Julian was then keeping a great pagan festival, and were received at first with the honour due to envoys.

The rupture came at the sacrifices. Julian, who had staked his reign on the restoration of the old worship, invited — then required — the Persian ambassadors to take part in the rites of the festival with him; and the three refused. The emperor took the refusal as a public affront and, in a breach of the law of nations that the passion dwells on, broke off the negotiations and put the ambassadors in chains as though they were common criminals.

Interrogated, the brothers gave an answer of great political shrewdness and no compromise at all: they had been sent by their king to treat of peace between two empires, not to dispute about gods; the worship of God was a matter in which no king and no emperor had authority over them; and if the emperor wished to discuss religion, he might, but they would not sacrifice. Julian answered that men who dishonoured his gods could not be trusted with his peace — and ordered them tortured.

The passion

The tortures recorded are those of the Persian and Roman repertoire together, and the passion gives them in detail: the brothers were hung up and their limbs nailed to trees; iron spikes were driven into their heads; sharpened reeds and splinters were forced beneath the nails of their hands and feet. Through all of it, the account says, they prayed and gave thanks as men who felt nothing — which is the hagiographer's way of saying that the torture achieved nothing, neither apostasy nor a word of complaint.

Julian at last gave the sentence of beheading, and — because the bodies of martyrs had already become a power in the empire he was trying to un-Christianise — ordered the corpses burned, so that there should be no relics and no shrine.

The earthquake, and the recovery of the relics

At this point the passion turns to wonder. As the fire was prepared, an earthquake shook the place, the ground opened, and the bodies of the three were taken down into it. For two days the Christians of Chalcedon prayed at the spot; on the third the earth gave them back, whole and giving off a sweet fragrance. Many of the pagans who had watched the execution and the sign that followed it were baptised. The faithful took up the relics and buried them with honour, and the tomb became a place of healing.

The historical residue under the wonder is simple and likely enough: an execution at Chalcedon, an attempt to destroy the bodies, and a Christian community that recovered and enshrined them — which is precisely what the later cultus presupposes.

The war, and the death of Julian

The sequel belongs as much to the history of the reign as to the passion. When the Persian king learned that his ambassadors had been seized under safe-conduct and put to death, he regarded it — rightly, by any reckoning of the period — as an act of war, and mobilised. Julian marched east; and in the Persian campaign of 363, on the retreat from Ctesiphon, he was struck by a spear from an unknown hand and died of the wound.

The Church read that death as judgement, and attached to it the vision given to St Basil the Great: praying before an icon of the Mother of God with the figure of the martyr Mercurius armed beside her, Basil saw the figure of Mercurius absent from the icon and, returning, saw it back in place with the spear bloodied. The tradition thus binds three commemorations together — Manuel, Sabel and Ismael; Mercurius; and the deliverance of the Church from Julian — and treats the death of the persecutor as the direct answer to the blood of the three envoys.

Veneration at Constantinople

The relics were carried across the strait to Constantinople. In 395, the tradition records, the emperor Theodosius the Great built a church in their honour in the capital; the brothers' names remained attached to a quarter and a foundation of the city thereafter, and their memory was kept there with a public procession. From Constantinople the feast passed into the Greek and Slavonic books, and it is universal on June 17.