Saint Martin I

Saint Martin I was a pope who, against the will of the emperor, defended the truth of Christ’s full humanity and paid for it with imprisonment and exile. He is the last pope venerated as a martyr. The Church commemorates him on April 13.

He came from Todi in Umbria; the year of his birth is not known. He belonged to the Roman clergy and, under Pope Theodore I, served as his representative, or apocrisiarius, at the imperial court in Constantinople. After Theodore’s death he was elected bishop of Rome in July 649 and was consecrated without waiting for the emperor to confirm the election.

The Church was then shaken by the dispute over Monothelitism, the view that Christ had only one will, the divine will. Emperor Heraclius had supported this teaching with an edict of 638, and in 648 his grandson Constans II forbade any discussion of whether there is one will in Christ or two. Martin did not accept the silence that had been imposed. In October 649 he gathered a synod in the Lateran Basilica, attended by more than a hundred bishops, in which the monk Maximus the Confessor also took an active part. The synod professed that Christ, true God and true man, has two wills, divine and human, and rejected both imperial edicts.

The emperor answered with force. On June 17, 653, the exarch Theodore Calliopas seized the sick pope in the Lateran Basilica. Martin forbade any resistance, so that no blood would be shed. He was taken by ship to Constantinople, where, after three months in prison, he stood trial in December. He was charged with high treason and was not allowed to speak about matters of faith. Condemned to death, the pope was publicly stripped of his episcopal vestments, put in chains, and dragged through the streets of the city.

At the intercession of Paul, the dying patriarch of Constantinople, the death sentence was commuted to exile. In the spring of 655 Martin was taken to Chersonesus in the Crimea. In his surviving letters from exile he complains of hunger and illness, and of having been forgotten by his former friends. At the same time he prays for the Church of Rome and for its new shepherd, for in 654, while Martin was still alive, Pope Eugene I had been elected in Rome. He wrote that the Lord is near and that he trusted in his mercy.

He died in Chersonesus on September 16, 655, worn out by want and illness. He was buried in the church of the Mother of God near the city. According to tradition, his relics were later transferred to Rome, to the church of San Martino ai Monti.

He was venerated as a martyr in East and West long before canonization processes existed. Rome formerly commemorated him on November 12; today his memorial falls on April 13, the day on which the Greek Church also honors him. The teaching of the Lateran synod was confirmed by the Third Council of Constantinople, which met in 680 and 681. Maximus the Confessor, who died in exile in 662, suffered for the same faith.