Introduction

In the early Middle Ages the primary “community of Saint Martin” was the city of Tours. Martin’s cult gave physical shape to the medieval town, whose principal centers of settlement, religious cult, and commercial activity grew up around three churches associated with the saint. More important, however, fifth- and sixth-century bishops of Tours employed Martin’s cult to create an ideal image of the civic community. Tours, the bishops suggested, was Martin’s town, and it was united under the authority of its bishop, who guarded Martin’s cult and inherited his position.

By the beginning of the twelfth century this “community of Saint Martin” no longer existed. Although a number of earlier events chipped away at this idealized civic community, it was above all the monastic exemption movement of the eleventh and twelfth centuries that caused its complete demise. The monks of the abbey of Marmoutier and the canons of the basilica of Saint-Martin succeeded in gaining exemption from the disciplinary and liturgical dominance of their archbishops. As a result, the archbishops’ access to Martin’s cult became severely limited. New legends and liturgical observances underscored this change: Tours became, in the symbolic representations that emanated from Marmoutier and Saint-Martin, two communities. On the one hand, there was the new “community of Saint Martin,” consisting of Marmoutier, Saint-Martin, and the walled suburb of Châteauneuf. And on the other hand, there was the now isolated, and less vibrant, cathedral town.

PLATE 1. Saint Martin’s body returns to Tours. “But almighty God would not allow the town of Tours to be deprived of its patron.” So claimed Gregory of Tours when he recounted how the men of Tours stole away from the parish of Candes with Saint Martin’s body while the men of Poitiers, who thought their town had the better claim to the body of the saint, slept. For Gregory this story signified that Martin’s power belonged, in a special way, to the town of Tours.

In the top half of this twelfth-century illumination for the feast of Martin’s death (November 11), the men of Tours pass the saint’s body through a window in Candes (while the Poitevins sleep); in the bottom half the men of Tours sail back to Tours with their prize. Like Gregory of Tours, the canons of Saint-Martin, who produced this illustration, wished to demonstrate that Martin and his power belonged to a particular community. As I argue in chapter 2 and in part 3, however, their definition of the community of Saint Martin differed from Gregory’s. Tours, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS. 193 (late twelfth century), fol. 117. Photograph courtesy Tours, Bibliothèque Municipale.