Confessor Martin

Martin, known in East and West as Martin the Confessor, was a seventh-century bishop of Rome. Surviving sources identify him as a native of Todi in Umbria, on the Italian peninsula, but they give no verified year of birth and almost no detail of his childhood or family. He entered the Roman clergy, became a deacon, and served as papal apocrisiarius (representative) at the imperial court in Constantinople. That posting acquainted him with the Christological disputes then dividing the Eastern Empire, especially the imperial promotion of Monothelitism—the teaching that Christ possessed only one will.

He was elected bishop of Rome in 649, succeeding Theodore I, and did not wait for the customary imperial confirmation of the election. Soon afterward he summoned a synod at the Lateran Basilica. The Lateran Council of 649, attended by more than a hundred bishops, condemned Monothelitism together with the imperial documents known as the Ecthesis of Heraclius and the Typos of Constans II. Martin promulgated the council’s decrees and circulated them throughout the Church, thereby placing the Roman see in open opposition to the religious policy of Constantinople.

Emperor Constans II treated the council as an act of political defiance. In 653 the exarch of Ravenna arrested Martin in the Lateran complex. After confinement in Rome he was taken by sea to Constantinople, publicly humiliated, and tried on charges of treason rather than heresy. Deposed and condemned, he was first imprisoned and then, in 654, exiled to the remote Byzantine outpost of Cherson in the Crimea.

Contemporary letters written from exile describe hunger, cold, illness, and neglect. Martin died there on 16 September 655. Because he suffered persecution and death for his defense of the doctrine of two wills in Christ, he is commemorated as both martyr and confessor; he is the last pope whom the Catholic Church honors as a martyr. His stand was later vindicated by the Third Council of Constantinople (680–681). He is remembered on 13 April in the Roman calendar and on corresponding dates in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Little else of a personal nature—family, possible earlier marriage, or precise burial arrangements after the initial interment at Cherson—is securely attested.