Martin of Tours (Latin: Martinus Turonensis; 316/336 – 8 November 397) was the third bishop of Tours. He is the patron saint of many communities and organizations across Europe, including of the former French Third Republic. A native of Savaria, Pannonia, he converted to Christianity at a young age. He served in the Roman cavalry in Gaul, but left military service prior to 361, when he became a disciple of Hilary of Poitiers, establishing the monastery at Ligugé. He was consecrated as Bishop of Caesarodunum (Tours) in 371. As bishop, he was active in the suppression of the remnants of Gallo-Roman religion.
The contemporary hagiographer Sulpicius Severus wrote a Life of St. Martin. He is best known for the account of his using his sword to cut his cloak in two, to give half to a beggar clad only in rags in winter. His shrine in Tours became an often-frequented stop for pilgrims on the road to Santiago de Compostela in Spain.
Sulpicius Severus, a contemporary Christian writer who knew Martin personally, wrote a hagiography of the early life of the saint. It contains descriptions of supernatural events, such as interactions with the devil and various miracles: Martin casts out demons, heals a paralytic, and raises the dead. Other miracles are: turning back the flames from a house while Martin was burning down the Roman temple it adjoined; deflecting the path of a felled sacred pine; the healing power of a letter written by Martin.
Martin was born in AD 316 or 336 in Savaria, in the Diocese of Pannonia (now Szombathely, Hungary). His father was a senior officer (tribune) in the Roman military. His father was then allowed veteran status and was given land on which to retire at Ticinum (now Pavia), in northern Italy, where Martin grew up.
At the age of 10, he attended the Christian church against the wishes of his parents and became a catechumen. Christianity had been made a legal religion in the Roman Empire in 313. It had many more adherents in the Eastern Empire, whence it had sprung, and was concentrated in cities, brought along the trade routes by converted Jews and Greeks (the term "pagan" literally means "country-dweller"). Christianity was far from accepted among the higher echelons of society; among members of the army the worship of Mithras would have been stronger. Although the conversion of the Emperor Constantine and the subsequent programme of church-building gave a greater impetus to the spread of the religion, it was still a minority faith.
As the son of a veteran officer, Martin at 15 was required to join a cavalry ala. At the age of 18 (around 334 or 354), he was stationed at Ambianensium civitas or Samarobriva in Gaul (now Amiens, France). It is likely that he joined the Equites catafractarii Ambianenses, a heavy cavalry unit listed in the Notitia Dignitatum. As the unit was stationed at Milan and is also recorded at Trier, it is likely to have been part of the elite cavalry bodyguard of the Emperor, which accompanied him on his travels around the Empire.
Martin's biographer, Sulpicius Severus, provided no dates in his chronology, so although he indicated that Martin served in the military "for nearly two years after his baptism", it is difficult for historians to pin down the exact date of Martin's exit from military service. Still, historian Andre Mertens has concluded that "[h]e [Martin] served under the Roman emperor Constantine II (ruled 337–340) and afterwards under Julian (ruled 361–363)".
Regardless of the difficulties in chronology, Sulpicius reports that just before a battle in the Gallic provinces at Borbetomagus (now Worms, Germany), Martin determined that his switch of allegiance to a new commanding officer (away from the pagan Julian and to Christ), along with his reluctance to receive a salary from Julian just as he was about to retire, prohibited his taking the money and continuing to submit to the emperor's commands, telling him, "I am the soldier of Christ: it is not lawful for me to fight." He was charged with cowardice and jailed, but in response to the charge, he volunteered to go unarmed to the front of the troops. His superiors planned to take him up on the offer, but before they could, the invaders sued for peace, the battle never occurred, and Martin was released from military service.
Martin declared his vocation, and made his way to the city of Caesarodunum (now Tours), where he became a disciple of Hilary of Poitiers' Christian orthodoxy. He opposed the Arianism of the Imperial Court. When Hilary was forced into exile from Pictavium (now Poitiers), Martin returned to Italy. According to Sulpicius, he converted an Alpine brigand on the way, and confronted the Devil himself. Having heard in a dream a summons to revisit his home, Martin crossed the Alps, and from Milan went over to Pannonia. There he converted his mother and some other persons; his father he could not win over. While in Illyricum he took sides against the Arians with so much zeal that he was publicly whipped and forced to leave. Returning from Illyria, he was confronted by Auxentius of Milan, the Arian Archbishop of Milan, who expelled him from the city. According to the early sources, Martin decided to seek shelter on the island then called Gallinaria, now Isola d'Albenga, in the Ligurian Sea, where he lived the solitary life of a hermit. Not entirely alone, since the chronicles indicate that he would have been in the company of a priest, a man of great virtues, and for a period with Hilary of Poitiers, on this island, where the wild hens lived. Martin lived on a diet of herbs and wild roots.
With the return of Hilary to his see in 361, Martin joined him and established a hermitage at what is now the town of Ligugé south of Poitiers, and soon attracted converts and followers. The crypt under the parish church (not the current Abbey Chapel) reveals traces of a Roman villa, probably part of the bath complex, which had been abandoned before Martin established himself there. The monastery became a centre for the evangelisation of the country districts around Poitiers, and later developed into Ligugé Abbey, belonging to the Order of St. Benedict and claiming to be the oldest monastery known in western Europe.
In 371, Martin succeeded Litorius, the second bishop of Tours. He impressed the city with his demeanour. He was enticed to Tours from Ligugé by a ruse – he was urged to come to minister to someone sick – and was brought to the church, where he reluctantly allowed himself to be consecrated bishop. According to one version, he was so unwilling to be made bishop that he hid in a barn full of geese, but their cackling at his intrusion gave him away to the crowd; that may account for complaints by a few that his appearance was too disheveled to be commensurate with a bishopric, but the critics were hugely outnumbered.
As bishop, Martin set to enthusiastically ordering the destruction of pagan temples, altars and sculptures:
[W]hen in a certain village he had demolished a very ancient temple, and had set about cutting down a pine-tree, which stood close to the temple, the chief priest of that place, and a crowd of other heathens began to oppose him; and these people, though, under the influence of the Lord, they had been quiet while the temple was being overthrown, could not patiently allow the tree to be cut down.
Sulpicius writes that Martin withdrew from the city to live in Marmoutier (Majus Monasterium), a rural monastery which he founded a short distance upstream from Tours on the opposite shore of the river Loire. Martin introduced a rudimentary parish system in his diocese. Once a year, the bishop visited each of his parishes, traveling on foot, or by donkey or boat. He continued to set up monastic communities, and extended the influence of his episcopate from Touraine to such distant points as Chartres, Paris, Autun, and Vienne.
In one instance, the pagans agreed to fell their sacred pine tree, if Martin would stand directly in its path. He did so, and it miraculously missed him. Sulpicius, a classically educated aristocrat, related this anecdote with dramatic details, as a set piece. Sulpicius could not have failed to know the incident the Roman poet Horace recalls in several Odes of his own narrow escape from a falling tree.