Feast Day: April 13 (General Roman Calendar) · November 12 (former Roman date)
Canonized: Ancient veneration — honored as a martyr since the generation after his death, before the formal process of canonization existed
Order / Vocation: Pope (Bishop of Rome, 649–655) · Martyr
Patron of: No formal patronage has been assigned; honored as the last pope venerated as a martyr
"Not my will, but yours, be done." — Jesus in Gethsemane (Luke 22:42), the verse at the center of the quarrel that cost Martin his life
The Pope They Carried Out on a Stretcher
In June of the year 653, the Pope of Rome was ill in bed.
He had been sick for a long time, and he was lying in the Lateran basilica, the cathedral of Rome, when the emperor's officer walked in with soldiers. The officer informed the clergy that Martin had been deposed. He was to be taken to Constantinople. Another man would be chosen to replace him.
Martin did not resist. He was in no condition to. Within days he was carried out of the city on a stretcher, accompanied by only a handful of attendants, and put on a ship. He would never see Rome again.
What had he done? He had refused to be quiet. The emperor had issued a decree forbidding the Church to speak about one of the most important questions in the Christian faith: whether Jesus Christ, in becoming man, truly had a human will. The decree did not tell people what to believe. It told them to stop talking. Martin was asked to sign it, or at least to keep still, and he would not.
This is the saint for anyone who has been told that peace requires silence. He is for the person who has been abandoned by the very people they served, and who still did not give in. He is also, honestly, for the sick, the frightened and the worn out. Martin was not a young hero. He was an ailing man who had been given one choice that mattered, and he made it.
Rome Under a Distant Emperor
Martin was born in Todi, a hill town in central Italy, the son of a man named Fabricius. Beyond that, we know almost nothing of his childhood. The record picks him up when he is already a cleric in Rome, already a trusted man, already on his way to the center of things.
The Rome of his day was not the Rome of the Caesars. It was a diminished city, part of an empire ruled from Constantinople by an emperor who rarely thought about it, and watched over by an imperial governor in Ravenna, the exarch. The popes of this era were chosen by the clergy and people of Rome, but they expected the emperor to approve the choice. The Church was independent in what it taught, but it lived under the political power of a distant ruler who liked to be obeyed.
And the empire was in trouble. In the decades before Martin's election, the Muslim conquests had swept through Syria, Palestine and Egypt, ripping some of the richest provinces away from Constantinople. Emperors desperately wanted unity at home. The Church in the East had been divided for two centuries over the teaching of the Council of Chalcedon, and many of the people in the lost provinces had never accepted it.
Out of this anxiety came a theological compromise. If the Church could agree that Christ had only one will, the argument went, perhaps the divided communities could come back together. The teaching is called Monothelitism, from the Greek for "one will." The emperor Heraclius backed it in 638 in a statement of faith known as the Ecthesis. His grandson Constans II, the ruling emperor in Martin's time, went further in 648 with a decree called the Typos, which forbade anyone to discuss whether Christ had one will or two.
It looked like a way to keep the peace. It was, in fact, a way to change the faith while claiming to protect it.
A Cleric Who Learned the Court from the Inside
Martin's early career was spent in the service of the Roman Church, and he came to the notice of Pope Theodore I. The pope sent him to Constantinople as his apocrisiarius, the Church's ambassador to the imperial court. It was a demanding assignment. Martin was sent to arrange the deposition of the patriarch Pyrrhus, a leading supporter of the one-will teaching.
That posting gave him something most of his predecessors never had: a close look at how the imperial court operated. He knew how the emperor's advisers thought, what they wanted and what they were willing to do to get it. He knew the theology, too. The one-will teaching was not the work of crude politicians. It had been shaped by learned churchmen, and it was dressed in the language of peace.
He knew, in other words, exactly what he was up against. He took no illusions with him back to Rome.
By then, he was also an older man whose health was not good. The Catholic Encyclopedia records that he suffered from "bodily ailments" during the journey that would come later, and his own letters speak of illness. This is part of the human truth of his story. When the test came, it did not find a robust man in his prime.
An Election Without Permission
When Pope Theodore died in 649, the clergy and people of Rome chose Martin to succeed him. It was July 21. And Martin did something that was just short of open defiance. He was consecrated without waiting for the emperor's approval.
That was a significant act. The custom of seeking imperial confirmation had been in place for a long time, and skipping it was a signal. Rome was not going to take orders from Constantinople about who would lead it.
Martin followed this with something bolder. In October 649, he called a council at the Lateran, the pope's own cathedral, and one hundred and five bishops came. Over five sessions in that month, they did what the emperor had forbidden. They discussed the question, and they answered it.
The council taught that Jesus Christ, one person with two natures, truly God and truly man, has two wills: a divine will and a human will, perfectly in harmony. The reason is not abstract. If Christ had no human will, then his humanity was incomplete, and what he did not take on in himself he could not heal in us. And the verse the council had in front of it was the one from Gethsemane, where Jesus, in agony, prays that the Father's will, not his own, be done. If there is only one will, whose will is that prayer between?
The council issued twenty canons. It condemned the Ecthesis and the Typos. And it passed a formal condemnation on the patriarchs who had pushed the one-will teaching. A monk named Maximus, whom the Church later honored as Maximus the Confessor, was in Rome in those years, and his theology helped shape the council's work.
The emperor's reaction was not long in coming.
The Silence He Would Not Keep
It is worth pausing on what Martin was choosing, because it was easy to describe afterward as inevitable. It was not.
He could have said nothing. The Typos did not ask him to teach a heresy. It only asked him to stop talking. Rome could have found a way to live with it, as many churchmen did, in the name of peace and unity and the fear of a very powerful man. Martin was ill. Rome was exposed. The empire was at war with half the world. A pope who kept his head down might have had a long and comfortable reign.
But Martin saw that the decree itself was the problem. If the emperor could forbid the Church to speak on a point of faith, then the faith belonged to the emperor. The question was not only about the number of wills in Christ. It was about whether the Church was free to say what is true.
So he spoke, and he knew the price.
The Soldier Who Went Blind
The emperor sent the exarch Olympius to Italy, with orders, in effect, to force the Western bishops to accept the Typos, or to seize the pope. Olympius arrived while the council was still in session. He tried to split the bishops and failed.
Then the Roman tradition records a darker plan. The exarch is said to have sent a soldier to kill Martin while he stood at the altar in the basilica of Saint Mary Major, giving Communion. According to the account, the soldier was struck blind and could not see the pope, and Olympius, shaken, refused to take any further part. He was soon sent to fight elsewhere.
Whatever happened in that church, the attempt on the pope's life belongs in this story, and so does his survival. The next exarch was a different kind of man.
The Voyage, the Island and the Harbor
Theodore Calliopas arrived in Rome on June 15, 653. Two days later he entered the Lateran and announced that Martin was deposed as an unworthy intruder. The pope was ill and in the cathedral. He did not fight. Soldiers carried him out.
The journey that followed was a slow ordeal. He was taken by sea, stripped of comforts, and attended by almost no one. The voyage took about three months and ended at the island of Naxos, in the Aegean, where Martin was held for roughly a year. His own letters suggest that he was sick and short of food and warmth.
In 654, he was brought to Constantinople. The account tells us he was left lying on the deck of the ship in the harbor for hours, in full view, while crowds gathered. Then he was imprisoned. When he was finally brought to trial, the charge was not heresy. It was treason. The authorities accused him of conspiring against the empire, because they did not want a trial about doctrine. They wanted a trial about loyalty.
Martin was publicly stripped of his episcopal robes and put in chains. By the account of the time, the sentence was death. But the emperor commuted it. Constans did not execute the pope. He sent him to the far edge of the empire.
There was one more wound waiting. While Martin was a prisoner, the Church in Rome, under pressure, elected a new pope, Eugene, though Martin was still alive and had not resigned. Martin's own letters show that this hurt. He felt forgotten by the people he had served. But he did not curse them. In the same letters, he prayed for his successor and for the flock in Rome.
The Last Winter at Cherson
In the spring of 655, Martin arrived at Cherson, a remote outpost on the Crimean peninsula, on the northern shore of the Black Sea. It was a harsh place for a healthy man, and at that moment the town was suffering from a great famine. Martin was sick, old by the standards of the time, and worn out by a journey of two years.
His letters from exile are some of the most human documents in the history of the papacy. He writes of hunger. Bread, he says, was something spoken of but hardly seen. He writes of cold and of being cut off. He writes, with pain, of being forgotten by friends in Rome who did not send help. There is no heroic speech in them. There is a tired man, and a faithful one.
He died on September 16, 655. He had been pope for six years, one month and twenty-six days. He was buried in a church dedicated to Our Lady, at Blachernae, near Cherson, and the Church's early accounts record many miracles worked there, in his life and after his death.
The old Roman tradition kept his feast on November 12, and the Roman calendar today keeps it in April.
The Last Pope the Church Honors as a Martyr
What happened after Martin's death is the other half of his story.
About twenty-five years later, in 680 and 681, the Church gathered in a great council at Constantinople, the Sixth Ecumenical Council, and said what the Lateran council had said: that Christ has two wills, divine and human, in perfect harmony. The decree Martin had been punished for refusing to accept had been rejected by the whole Church. The teaching he died for became the Church's teaching, spoken in the same city where he had been chained.
On his canonization. There was no formal process and no pope's signature. In the early centuries, the Christian people recognized their martyrs directly. Martin was honored as a martyr because he died in exile and in chains for the faith. He is the last pope the Church venerates as a martyr. Greek Christians keep his memory too.
His relics. The earliest record has him buried at Blachernae, near Cherson. Tradition holds that part of his remains was later carried to Rome. The Church does not claim an incorrupt body or a single shrine.
On his patronage. Unlike most saints, Martin has no formally assigned patronage, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. But his story speaks for itself. It is natural for prisoners, exiles, the sick, and anyone who has been silenced or abandoned for telling the truth to turn to him.
Prayer
O God, who gave Saint Martin the strength to speak when silence would have been safer, give us the same courage. Where we are told to stay quiet about what is true, give us a clear voice. Where we are abandoned, give us trust. Through the prayers of your servant, who died in exile and hunger rather than give up the faith, keep your Church free to speak your truth, and comfort all who are imprisoned, sick or forgotten. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Saint Martin I, Pray for us.
