Martin I (d. 655), pope and martyr. Born at Todi (Umbria), he became a deacon at Rome. His conspicuous intelligence and charity resulted in his being sent as apocrisiarius (‘nuncio’) to Constantinople. In 649 he was elected pope. He soon held a council at the Lateran which condemned the error of Monothelitism (which denied that Christ had a human will) together with the Typos and the edicts of Constans II, the reigning emperor, which favoured it. Martin was supported by the bishops of Africa, England, and Spain, but was arrested by Constans and taken to Constantinople. The long voyage and dysentery, he told in his letters, weakened him; he was jailed for three months, not having been allowed to wash, even in cold water, for forty‐seven days; the food he was given made him sick. Eventually he was tried on a charge of ‘treason’, while his real offence had been his refusal to accept the Typos. He was condemned unheard. Public insults, flogging, and imprisonment followed; at the intercession of the Patriarch of Constantinople his life was spared, but he was exiled to Chersonesus in the Crimea. From there he wrote of the famine and neglect be suffered; he blamed the Romans for forgetting him, while he had prayed steadily for their faith to be preserved inviolate. He died in exile on 13 April, the last pope to be venerated as a martyr.
His name was recorded in the Bobbio Missal (8th century). Feast: in the East, 20 September; in the West, 13 April has been restored as his feast since 1969.
Bibliography
Click here for a list of abbreviations used in this bibliography.
- Letters and other writings in P.L., lxxvii. 119–211 and in Jaffé–Wattenbach, Regesta Pontificum Romanorum, i (1885), 230–4
- L. Duchesne Liber Pontificalis i (1886), 336–40
- P. Peters, ‘Une vie grecque du pape S. Martin’, Anal. Boll., li (1933), 225–62
- O.D.P., pp. 73–5
