Adrian (Latin Hadrianus) was a young Roman officer of the praetorian guard at Nicomedia (the eastern imperial capital from which Diocletian launched the Great Persecution) in the year 306 AD. He was a pagan. His wife Natalia was a secret Christian.
Per the foundational Greek Acts of Sts. Adrian and Natalia, Adrian was the registrar (notarius) of the trials of Christians at Nicomedia. After registering the details of one extended interrogation in which a group of 23 Christian witnesses had endured prolonged tortures without yielding, Adrian himself was so moved that he asked the prisoners: 'What reward do you expect from your God for such sufferings?' They answered him: 'Eye has not seen, nor ear heard...what God has prepared for those who love him' (1 Corinthians 2:9). Adrian — at the conclusion of the interrogation, before the assembled tribunal — declared himself a Christian and asked to be added to the list of the condemned. He was immediately imprisoned.
When Natalia learned of her husband's confession, she rushed to the prison overjoyed (according to the Acts, she had been praying for years for Adrian's conversion). She supported him through the period of imprisonment. At his execution — on March 4, 306 — Adrian's hands and feet were severed before he was beheaded. After the executioners had burnt the bodies of all the Christian victims in a great pyre and a sudden storm extinguished the pyre, Natalia gathered the principal relics of her husband, including in particular his severed right hand (which she preserved in her own home as a personal relic). She fled with the relics to Argyropolis near Byzantium, where she lived as a widow until her own death around 311. The cult of Adrian and Natalia together was particularly intense in the early medieval period; the great Flemish abbey of Sint-Adriaansabdij at Geraardsbergen received the main body relics in 1110 and was for the rest of the medieval period the principal Flemish-Catholic pilgrimage shrine north of the Pyrenees outside Compostela.