Cyprian of Carthage

A wealthy and celebrated teacher of rhetoric, Cyprian converted around the age of thirty-five, sold his gardens for the poor and was bishop of Carthage two years later — his own deacon Pontius, who wrote his life, refuses to say anything of his pagan years. His office was a succession of crises: the persecution of Decius, which left thousands of Christians who had sacrificed and now asked to return; a plague in which he organised relief for pagans as well as his own; finally a conflict with Pope Stephen over the validity of baptism given by heretics, in which he stood up to Rome without breaking with it. His treatise On the Unity of the Catholic Church is the first great text on the question. Arrested under Valerian, he was beheaded on 14 September 258 before a crowd that had followed him to the place of execution, and which, the acts say, spread linen to catch his blood.