400 Martyrs Slain by the Lombards in Sicily

The Four Hundred Martyrs Slain by the Lombards are a company of Christians put to death during the Lombard incursions of sixth-century Italy for refusing to take part in idolatrous worship. The Orthodox synaxarion places their martyrdom in Sicily and dates it to the year 579, and commemorates them collectively on March 2. As a collective commemoration, the company is honoured as a body rather than by individual lives, though the synaxarion preserves the names of the presbyter Sanctulus and the hermit Hospicius among those who perished.

The earliest written witness to the event is St. Gregory the Dialogist (Gregory the Great, Bishop of Rome, commemorated March 12), who relates it in his Dialogues. According to that account, the Lombards held nearly four hundred captives and demanded that they reverence the head of a goat that had been offered in sacrifice to demons, carrying it about with blasphemous chants; the greater part of the captives refused to bow to the creature, and their captors, in great rage, put them to the sword. Gregory reports that the event was recounted to him by witnesses and had taken place about fifteen years before his writing.

Orthodox sources connect this commemoration with a related group of about forty husbandmen who, in the same period, were commanded to eat meat that had been sacrificed to idols and were beheaded when they refused. Both companies are remembered as having chosen death over participation in pagan rites during the disorder that accompanied the Lombard conquest of much of the Italian peninsula.