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On September 10 in the year 257, nine enslaved bishops, including two named Felix, were worked to death in a marble quarry. This was in Northern Africa, in the Roman province known as Numidia. It’s said they received a letter of support from Saint Cyprian, himself in exile and beheaded a year later, and that’s about all I was able to find out.
Exactly 1,365 years later and about 6,500 miles away, 50 Christians were martyred in Nagasaki, under the harsh rule of Tokugawa Hidetada. The group included a Spanish priest whose voyage to Japan had taken him six years, during which time he survived numerous shipwrecks and fights with pirates, as well as a number of Japanese converts who had already endured four years in outdoor prisons like bird cages before they were burned alive.
Do you think they all met, later?