Patrick

Patricius

Lived

c. 385–c. 461

Era

The fathers

Where

Ireland

Tradition

The apostolic communities

The mission to Ireland, described by the missionary

A Romano-British teenager carried off by Irish raiders and held six years as a slave herding sheep, who escaped, was ordained, and went back to the country that had enslaved him as a missionary bishop.

Why it matters

Two short works of his survive, the Confession and a letter excommunicating a British warlord whose troops had killed and enslaved his converts — the earliest writing from Ireland and among the earliest documents anywhere to condemn slave-raiding outright, by a man who had been taken. The Ireland he left produced the monasteries that kept Latin learning through the following centuries and sent missionaries back into Britain and the continent.

All the figures, from the apostolic age to the present, or the timeline they stand in.