Juliana of Nicomedia

Juliana of Nicomedia is venerated as a Christian virgin and martyr of the early fourth century. Tradition places her life and death at Nicomedia in Bithynia, the city that served as an imperial residence under Diocletian and was a principal theatre of the Great Persecution inaugurated in 303. The passion narratives that circulate under her name, preserved in Greek and Latin, were composed well after the events they purport to describe and are treated by modern hagiographers as largely legendary. They may nonetheless reflect the historical memory of a woman martyred at Nicomedia during that persecution, whose name entered the ancient martyrologies of both East and West.

According to these acts, Juliana was the daughter of a pagan official named Africanus and was betrothed while still young to a prominent suitor, usually called Eleusius or Evilasius, who exercised prefectural or senatorial rank. She had become a Christian and made her faith the condition of any marriage, refusing to wed a pagan. Africanus, outraged at her obstinacy, had her beaten and handed her over to her betrothed. Eleusius, acting as magistrate, attempted to compel her by threats and then by imprisonment when she would neither sacrifice to the gods nor consent to the marriage.

The imprisonment is the dramatic centre of the legend. A demon, appearing in the form of an angel, is said to have urged her to submit; Juliana recognized and overcame the spirit, in several recensions binding it and forcing it to confess its wiles. She was then subjected to a sequence of tortures—flogging, hanging by the hair, fire, and a cauldron of boiling liquid—from which the narrative claims she emerged unharmed. Condemned at last, she was beheaded. The acts report that her constancy converted a large number of onlookers, who were themselves put to death. The year customarily assigned to her martyrdom is 304, in the course of the Diocletianic persecution, although that date rests on liturgical and legendary tradition rather than on a contemporary protocol.

Juliana’s cult is well attested from the early Middle Ages. The Roman Martyrology keeps her feast on 16 February; Eastern Orthodox calendars commemorate her on 21 December. In Anglo-Saxon England her legend was recast as the Old English poem Juliana, associated with the poet Cynewulf. A Western tradition held that her relics had been translated from the East to Cumae in Campania; after Cumae’s destruction in the early thirteenth century they were taken to Naples, and fragments have been claimed by churches in other parts of Europe, particularly in the Low Countries. She has been invoked as a patron of the sick and against infectious disease. Careful historians distinguish the widespread and long-lived devotion from the unhistorical elaborations of the medieval acts, while still recognizing Juliana as one of the virgin martyrs associated with Nicomedia in the age of Diocletian.