martyrdom · 305 · Alexandria
The story is magnificent and late. A girl of eighteen, learned enough to defeat fifty philosophers in argument and convert them; the emperor Maxentius offering marriage; the spiked wheel that flew apart at her touch and killed the onlookers; the beheading, and angels carrying her body to Sinai. There is no trace of any of it before about the ninth century in the East and the eleventh in the West, and the monastery on Sinai, founded by Justinian in the sixth century, was not called by her name until long after that. What may lie underneath is a passage in Eusebius, who reports that a Christian noblewoman of Alexandria, whom he does not name, refused the emperor Maximinus and was punished with exile rather than death — some scholars think the legend grew from her, and others that it is a Christianised memory of Hypatia, killed by a mob at Alexandria a century later, with the roles exactly reversed. Rome drew the conclusion in 1969 and removed her from the universal calendar for want of any evidence she existed, restoring her in 2002 as an optional memorial. This dataset grades her legendary and keeps her, which is the same judgement: the cult is a fact of history even where the person is not.
How much of this is history?
Essentially none of it, and the church that venerated her most has said so.