Adrian was born about the year 278 and grew to manhood in Nicomedia of Bithynia, the great eastern capital where the emperors held court. He was a pagan, an officer of the Herculian Guard, and by the tradition of his acts he held the charge of the praetorium — a young man of twenty‑eight, well placed, with everything the world can give still before him. His wife Natalia, whom he loved, was secretly a Christian, and had told him nothing of it, for the edicts of Diocletian and Maximian were being enforced with fury and the prisons of Nicomedia were filling.
It was in the course of his duty that grace found him. A company of Christians — the accounts name twenty‑three — had been hunted out of the cave where they had taken refuge, and were being scourged and broken before his eyes. They did not curse; they sang. Adrian, unable to understand men who could go to death with joy, asked them what reward they looked for from their God that could be worth such agony. They answered him with the words of the Apostle: "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man, what God hath prepared for them that love him." That answer conquered him. He turned to the notary who was writing down the names of the condemned and told him to add his own name to the list. He was seized at once, bound, and thrown into prison a confessor of Christ, though he had not yet been baptized.
When word reached Natalia that her husband had been chained, she wept, believing he had committed some crime. Told that he was taken for the name of Christ, she put on festal garments and ran to the prison, kissed his chains, praised his choice, and begged him to stand firm in what awaited him. The tradition preserves a second and sterner scene: when Adrian was allowed to leave the prison briefly to bring her word of his coming trial, she barred the door against him, thinking he had denied the faith, and cried through it, "He that shall deny me before men, I will also deny him before my Father who is in heaven." Only when he told her why he had come did she fling the door open, embrace him, and resolve to go with him to the tribunal.
Brought before the emperor, Adrian confessed Christ so boldly that he was beaten until, according to his acts, his bowels started from his body, and he had to be carried back to the cell because he could no longer walk. The emperor forbade anyone to tend the prisoners. Natalia cut off her hair and put on a man's clothing, and in that disguise slipped into the prison again and again to wash the wounds of her husband and of his companions, and to pray with them. When it was discovered that his order had been defeated, the emperor commanded that the legs of the martyrs be crushed upon an anvil and that Adrian's hand be struck off. He was the first to be brought forward. Natalia herself is said to have laid his hand and foot upon the anvil, lest he falter, and he died in her arms on 4 March 306.
The bodies were to be burned, but tradition relates that as the executioners kindled the pile a violent storm broke, the rain quenched the flames, and lightning struck down those who had lit the fire. Natalia rescued from the ashes the severed hand of her husband and kept it as her treasure. Christians carried the relics of the martyrs across the water to Argyropolis, near Byzantium, where they were buried with honour, and Natalia lived a while beside the tomb. Pursued afterwards by a tribune who wished to marry her, she fled by sea to Constantinople; the old accounts say that Adrian appeared to her in that voyage and preserved her ship through a storm. At the grave of the martyrs, having seen her husband in a dream calling her to join him in everlasting peace, she gave up her spirit, and was laid to rest among them.
Some scholars have noted that more than one martyr named Adrian is remembered at Nicomedia, and have questioned details of the passion; but the veneration is old and certain. He was honoured at Byzantium by the seventh century, and in that same century Pope Honorius I turned the ancient Curia of the Roman Senate — the very hall where the empire had decreed the death of Christians — into the church of Sant'Adriano al Foro, which is why the Roman Church keeps his memory on 8 September, the day of that dedication, rather than on 4 March, the day of his death. The Roman Martyrology records: "At Rome, the commemoration of Saint Adrian, martyr, who suffered martyrdom at Nicomedia in Bithynia, in present‑day Turkey, and in whose honour Pope Honorius I transformed the Curia of the Roman Senate into a church." The Eastern Churches keep him with Saint Natalia and their twenty‑three companions on 26 August and also on 8 September and 4 March. In 1110 relics of Adrian and Natalia were translated from Constantinople to the abbey of Grammont — Geraardsbergen in Belgium — where they are still venerated; other relics are honoured at Würzburg, and his story was spread throughout the West by the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine.
From the twelfth century his cult flourished in France and the Low Countries, and for many ages he was the chief military saint of northern Europe, second only to Saint George, greatly loved in Flanders, Germany and northern France. Artists show him armed as a soldier, with a sword and with the anvil on which his limbs were broken at his feet. He is honoured as patron of soldiers and veterans, of guards and prison keepers, of arms merchants, smiths, butchers, brewers and messengers, and of the cities of Lisbon and Geraardsbergen; he is invoked against plague and epidemic, against epilepsy, against sudden and unprovided death, and by those who suffer in body. His special glory is that he was won to Christ not by argument but by the sight of Christians suffering well, and that he and Natalia turned marriage itself into a school of martyrdom, each strengthening the other to the end.
May Saint Adrian obtain for us the courage to confess Christ openly where it costs something, and let us today, like Natalia, strengthen someone near us in the faith rather than urge them toward comfort.
