Confessor Martin

Martin the Confessor, known in the West as Pope Martin I, was a native of Todi in Umbria in central Italy. The year of his birth is not recorded in surviving sources. He served the Roman church as a cleric of notable learning before his election. In 649, after the death of Pope Theodore I, he was chosen and consecrated bishop of Rome. His pontificate unfolded amid the Monothelite controversy, the dispute over whether Christ possessed one will or two, which had troubled the imperial church since the reign of Heraclius.

In October 649 Martin convened a synod in the Lateran basilica. More than one hundred bishops, chiefly from Italy and the Latin West, attended. The council condemned Monothelitism and rejected the imperial documents that had tried to impose silence on the question—the Ecthesis of Heraclius and the Typos of Constans II. Martin confirmed the decrees, had them circulated, and thereby came into open conflict with Emperor Constans II, who treated the council as both theological insubordination and political defiance. The emperor ordered the exarch of Ravenna to arrest the pope and to obtain subscription to the Typos.

After an earlier failed attempt, the exarch Theodore Calliopas seized Martin at the Lateran in June 653. Already in poor health, the pope was taken by sea to Constantinople, imprisoned for months, publicly stripped of his episcopal insignia, and condemned on political charges of treason. In 654 he was banished to Chersonesus, a remote Byzantine outpost in the Crimea. Isolated, poorly housed, and suffering from illness and the effects of earlier maltreatment, he died there on 16 September 655. Letters written from exile describe his physical decline. Because he perished from the hardships inflicted for his defense of the doctrine of two wills in Christ, the Church has honored him as a confessor rather than as a martyr executed by the sword.

Veneration began soon after his death in both East and West. Eastern churches commemorate him as Martin the Confessor on 14 April, with a further observance on 20 September for the translation of relics. In the medieval Latin calendar his feast was kept on 12 November; the modern Roman calendar observes it on 13 April. He is the last pope whom the Catholic Church venerates as a martyr in the broader sense of one who bore witness unto death. He was buried at Chersonesus; later tradition records the transfer of relics to Rome, associated with the church of Santi Silvestro e Martino ai Monti.