Martin I

Pope Martin I was a native of Todi in Umbria in central Italy, born at an unknown date in the late sixth or early seventh century. The Liber Pontificalis identifies him as Tuscan by origin and from the city of Todi. Almost nothing reliable is recorded of his family or youth. Before his election as bishop of Rome he served the Roman Church as a deacon and is reported to have acted as apocrisiarius, the papal representative, at the imperial court in Constantinople. That posting would have given him direct experience of Eastern ecclesiastical politics and of the Monothelite controversy then dividing the empire, the teaching that Christ possessed only one will.

In 649, after the death of Pope Theodore I, Martin was elected to the Roman see and consecrated without the imperial ratification that emperors of the period expected to grant. Soon afterward he summoned a synod in the Lateran Basilica in Rome, known as the Lateran Council of 649. More than a hundred bishops, drawn mainly from Italy, North Africa, and Greek-speaking communities, condemned Monothelitism and rejected the Typos of Emperor Constans II, which had attempted to forbid further debate on whether Christ had one will or two. The council affirmed two wills in Christ, divine and human, in line with the Christology associated with Maximus the Confessor and with earlier conciliar definitions. Circulation of the council’s acts placed Martin in open conflict with imperial religious policy.

The emperor responded by sending officials to Italy. According to the surviving narratives, the exarch Olympius failed to suppress the pope and later died in Sicily. In 653 the exarch Theodore Calliopas entered Rome, seized Martin in the Lateran complex, and had him taken by sea to Constantinople. There the pope was imprisoned, publicly humiliated, and tried on political as well as religious charges. He was deposed; a death sentence was commuted to exile after intervention by the patriarch of Constantinople. In 654 he was sent to the remote Byzantine city of Cherson in the Crimea. While he was still living in exile, the Roman clergy elected Eugene I as bishop of Rome; Martin is said to have acquiesced in that election.

Martin died at Cherson on 16 September 655, the date long observed in the liturgical tradition, after illness and hardship in exile. He is commonly described as the last pope honored as a martyr. Veneration of him as a saint spread in both the Latin and Greek churches. Relics associated with him were later brought to Rome and came to be housed in the church of Santi Silvestro e Martino ai Monti. In the present General Roman Calendar his feast is kept on 13 April; Eastern calendars commemorate him in April and on the anniversary of his death. His historical importance rests on his resistance to imperial Monothelitism, the Lateran synod of 649, and the sufferings that followed his arrest and exile.