Saint Martin figured in our story of Sainte Foy (Weeks 40 through 43) as one of the patrons of the five major churches built expressly to accommodate pilgrims; the basilica in Tours was named after him. It was completely destroyed during the French Revolution, and if you go to Tours today, you will find a neo-Byzantine basilica built in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Martin’s prominence in Tours and his basilica are the results of more un-saintly hanky-panky amongst the usual suspects in a fifth-century drama that took place in Poitiers near the site of his death.
Martin was born in 316 in the Hungary of the Roman Empire (Pannonia), the son of an upper-middle class couple and of a father who held a high post in the Roman army. Martin was named for the god of war, Mars, with the idea that he would follow his father’s brilliant military career, but he was destined to disappoint in this regard. At the age of ten he was already keen on the Christian religion, and in an attempt to squelch this interest his father conscripted him into the army three years before the normal age of seventeen. Martin did not rebel: he served in the army for twenty-six years, spending most of his time in Gaul and racking up saintly deeds along the way. One of his famous gestures was the donation of his fur-lined soldier’s cape to a poor man, a cape which later became one of the celebrated relics bought by Charlemagne. At the end of his military career, age 40, Martin wanted to enter the priesthood, and so he traveled to Poitiers to absorb the vibes of a well-known bishop there, Hilaire. Four years later, Martin had created his first hermitage/monastery, and by 371 he was bishop of Tours, which is located about 100 km north of Poitiers, or one hour’s drive according to Google maps. Martin died in 397 at the ripe age of 81 near Poitiers, and because he was already famous as a miracle-worker, his body became a precious commodity. Saint-makers from Tours and Poitiers were on the scene, and spent an entire day and part of a night arguing about who would get his remains. Tallies were made of where his miracles had occurred. The men from Tours reasoned that his utility in death outweighed his accomplishments in life. Even though Martin had brought more people back from the dead in Poitiers than in Tours, he was needed more than ever in Tours for just that reason; so that he could continue his work. Through another one of those conveniently divine interventions, the guards from Poitiers fell asleep during the night and those from Tours spirited his coffin off to the north. Just as with the miraculously befuddled monks of Agen who chased after the thieves from Conques, the posse from Poitiers never quite knew what hit them. Et voilà; Martin has eversince been associated with Tours.
Martin’s accomplishments of interest for this essay include primarily his passion for replacing sacred pagan sites with Christian hermitages or sanctuaries. In this he played an active role in encouraging the economy of small settlements which followed in the wake of his fame…he was an early urbanist, if you will. I’m not sure I approve of his passion for supplanting Gallo-Roman sanctuaries with Christian churches, but one could argue that at least the sites retained an identity associated with divinity and transformation. It’s not like they became shopping centers…howevermuch I believe our shopping centers are now our sanctuaries.
Most of Martin’s settlements were around Tours and Poitiers, but his fame spread throughout France via various events over the centuries. The Merovingians carried his name with them as they moved through France in the fifth through the eighth centuries, just as Christianity was getting up a head of steam and churches were popping up like mushrooms. Later, Charlemagne boosted Martin’s image by publicizing his ownership of Martin’s cape and naming it as an example of the sacred objects now required as props for oaths between lords and vassals. After Charlemagne, Martin’s renown faded a little, then was re-ignited in the early-fourteenth century by King Charles IV, who got the pope’s permission to cut Martin’s head from his body and create a separate reliquary that could be used in procession and display. In 1444, the French court moved to Tours, and their patronage further enhanced the saint’s popularity. As a result of these various events, there are hundreds of chapels and churches in France dedicated to Saint Martin, and among them, four within a ten-kilometer radius of where I live. It’s said that Martin is better known in France as a saint than many of the apostles.
Of the four churches in my vicinity, three of them are located on high ground, and one is in the valley near the Cérou River. It’s likely that all of them were located on the sites of earlier Gallo-Roman sanctuaries, or perhaps Celtic burial grounds, although there is proof of this for only one discussed here. This region is thick with monuments from the Copper and Bronze Ages; menhirs and dolmen can be seen everywhere. They are in fact more visible today because so many of the structures built during the Roman occupation were then re-used for building projects of later generations. The Romans and the Gauls had done the heavy lifting; the large stones they amassed and used to erect their walls made it a no-brainer for the Visigoths and later groups moving into the area. What had once been perhaps part of a Celtic oppidum and then a Roman sanctuary now became an early Christian church. Roman villa layouts, too, were well-suited to the needs of subsequent squatters. Arranged in wings around courtyards, they were easily transformed into multiple individual dwellings, and the apsidal shapes of the bath complexes were ideally configured for Christian chapels.
The survival of these structures through the medieval period depended largely on their locations. Churches built during the Visigoth and Merovingian period were sometimes abandoned if they were not defensible during later periods of conflict, like the Albigensian Crusade of the thirteenth century or the Hundred Years’ War of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The three churches described here on high ground were all either associated with castles that could protect them (Martin of Campmar and Martin of Souel) or by a powerful abbey or priory (Martin of Sarmazes). All three are extremely simple in plan, with a single nave, a flat east end with diagonal buttresses at the corners, and two or three flanking chapels added at later dates. Their entries are usually in the long south wall. And all three have the signature clocher-mur at the west end, the thick wall that rises above the roof to advertise the presence of the building and also serves as a frame for the bells. They are a far cry from the church built to honor Saint Martin in Tours in the sixth century. Our go-to historian of the fifth and sixth centuries, Gregory of Tours, describes this church as having 52 windows, 120 columns, and 8 doors. But Martin’s country churches benefit from their simplicity, as their details, so limited in number, are rendered even more elegant in contrast to the mass of their plain stone walls.
The fourth example amongst my neighboring Martins, Saint-Martin-de-Vindrac, is exceptional in that it was the site of an archaeological dig from 1976 to 1988 by the Abbot Bessou, who, in the process of excavations related to the water supply of the village, found hints of something much more interesting. He suspected that he had a Merovingian necropolis on his hands, which turned out to be true, but he also found much more. Having established his street cred with the excavation and study of a Gallo-Roman sanctuary only a few kilometers away at Loubers, he began an organized dig at Vindrac and over the course of the next twelve years found not only his necropolis (c. 550-650) with 110 sarcophagi, some still containing their residents and everyday objects, but four Merovingian and Early Medieval chapels, fragments of Gallo-Roman structures, and everyday objects from all those periods as well.
The early medieval chapels had been inserted into the fabric of what appeared to have been an extensive Gallo-Roman structure, an illustration of the appropriation process described above. I haven’t done enough research to know when and how the church of Saint Martin here got its name (Rossignol cites the earliest record from 1299, but there could easily be evidence yet uncovered from an earlier time), but it’s tempting to think that here he was chosen as a patron by the Merovingian Christians for his reputation of messing with Gallo-Roman shrines. The medieval church we see today is from the fifteenth century, and is more significant in size than the other three “Martins,” reflecting its proximity to a vibrant center of industry and the wealthy market town of Cordes. Instead of a simple clocher-mur it has an octagonal tower as a clocher, and the apsidal end is faceted.
Voilà the facts, and now to the legends. Saint Martin is often associated with the kingfisher bird (Alcedo atthis), which is called martin-pêcheur in France (link to a beautiful slow-motion video of kingfishers below). Although the “martin” part of the name is derived from the family of martinets, it’s much more fun to think of the birds as Saint Martin, “fishing” for his prey of pagans in the fourth century. And on to an amusing coincidence. Kingfishers were used as weather vanes in the Middle Ages, their dead bodies being suspended in a protected place with silk threads so they could turn in the wind, and….
Not far from Saint-Martin Vindrac is the hamlet of Les Fargues, where a fifteenth-century stone cross, almost two meters high, also may have acted as a weather vane. Crosses of stone and metal are found everywhere in the countryside; they mark crossroads, boundaries between villages, and sites of communal memory, but very rarely are they kinetic sculptures as this one is. The Croix des Fargues is composed of two pieces of sculpted granite joined by a metal rod which allows the top part to rotate. The stone base is decorated with figures thought to be Mary Magdalene and Saint Martin, among others, and the cross itself is decorated with an image of the crucified Christ on one side and the Virgin Mary with the infant Christ on the other. Some think the mobile aspect of the cross allowed inhabitants to turn it to deflect bad weather away from their fields. The question arises: who was best at this task: Jesus or Mary? And I have no answer, or even a guess.
But I do know that bad weather is coming. It is November, after all. And I’ll close with one final legend. When Martin died in Tours in 397, he was honored with a spectacular funeral procession, and all along the way, flowers opened in bloom, so that now, blooming flowers in November are part of “the summer of Saint Martin” (l’été du Saint-Martin) and to prove to you that this November summer exists, I offer you a little bouquet of current events in my garden.
That ends my brief essay on the Martins, but stay tuned for the story of Francis Xavier and the California missions, coming soon, as Xavier’s date is December 3.
References for Weeks 44 through 48: Saint Martin: Multiplied
Websites:
Open access for the posthumous publication by Crubézy and Duchesnes of the Abbot Bessou’s work:
https://books.openedition.org/pupvd/2430#illustrations.
Slow motion kingfisher (the slow motion begins about halfway in):
Books and articles
Please note that sources listed here may be available in more recent editions.
Crubézy, Eric, and Sylvie Duchesne. Les cimetières du haut moyen âge en Languedoc. Perpignan : Presses Universitaires de Perpignan, 2015.
Farmer, Sharon. Communities of Saint Martin. Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1991.
McKinley, Allan Scott. “The first two centuries of Saint Martin of Tours,” in Early Medieval Europe 2006: 14 (2) pp 173-200. Oxford: Blackwell.
Rossignol, Elie-A. Cantons de Cordes, Vaour et Castelnau-de-Montmirail. Paris: Le Livre d’histoire, 2003 (Originally published in 1865).