Deacon Marinus

Deacon Marinus, venerated as Saint Marinus, is the traditional founder of the mountain community from which the Republic of San Marino takes its name and is that state's principal patron saint. The story of his life is preserved in medieval hagiographical tradition rather than in contemporary fourth-century documents, and historians therefore treat the details as legendary, even while acknowledging an early cult attached to Monte Titano. According to the received account he was born on the island of Arba, known today as Rab, in Dalmatia on the eastern Adriatic, in present-day Croatia, and worked as a stonemason. During the persecution of Christians under the emperor Diocletian he left his homeland, crossed the Adriatic, and settled in the Roman city of Ariminum, modern Rimini, where he was employed on the walls and other masonry. Bishop Gaudentius of Rimini ordained him to the diaconate.

While serving as a deacon in Rimini, Marinus attracted both followers and hostility. Later legend relates that a woman from Dalmatia appeared in the city and claimed to be his wife. Rejecting the claim and seeking to safeguard his vocation, he withdrew from Rimini into the interior and took up the life of a hermit on Monte Titano, a steep isolated mountain visible from the coast. A fellow Dalmatian stonemason named Leo is sometimes associated with him in the same tradition and is said to have settled at nearby Montefeltro. On Titano, Marinus built a chapel dedicated to Saint Peter and gathered a small community of Christians. Sanmarinese civic tradition regards this settlement as the origin of the republic and commemorates 3 September 301 as a foundation day, a date that cannot be verified from independent late-antique evidence.

Subsequent legend places his death in the winter of 366 and records as his last words the Latin sentence Relinquo vos liberos ab utroque homine, I leave you free from both men, a phrase interpreted in local tradition as a grant of liberty from both imperial and episcopal domination. His relics are venerated in the Basilica di San Marino on Monte Titano. They were the object of a reported rediscovery in the late sixteenth century and remain central to the religious life of the republic. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on 3 September as a deacon born on the island of Arbe, ordained by Gaudentius of Rimini, who sought solitude and founded a monastery on Mount Titano from which the republic that bears his name later arose.

No contemporary inscription or chronicle confirms the years of his birth or death, and even the historical individuality of the hermit-deacon must be inferred cautiously from the later cult. What is historically well attested is the medieval and modern veneration of Saint Marinus as deacon and founder, the dedication of San Marino's principal church to him, and the place of his feast on 3 September in both the liturgical calendar and the national life of the republic. His story belongs to the type of founding hagiography that explains the origin of a free mountain community by the flight of a Dalmatian craftsman-cleric from persecution and from a false accusation of marriage, and by his eremitical life on Titano.