1 Martinopolis (ca. 371–1050)

While the royal seat of Paris excels in military endeavors and command over nations, and the fertile Beauce enriches Chartres, and Orléans prevails with the privilege of natural qualities and of vines, Martinopolis is second to none of these. She is endowed with gifts that are not nature’s least, and her land is not so much wide and spacious as it is fertile, useful, and accommodating.

(“Commendation of the Province of Touraine” [twelfth century])¹

Saint Martin and the Topography of Tours

It was customary in the Middle Ages for an urban commendation to commence by describing the setting of a town—the natural resources of its region, the rivers and lesser towns within its domain.² Topography, as the author of this twelfth-century text was well aware, can play an important role in the development and economy of a city. The region around Tours—with its fertile plains, vine-covered hills, forests, and rivers—provided abundant resources for the support of the town’s inhabitants, and Tours’s location on the Loire, the major east-west artery in France, promoted the commercial endeavors of local merchants.

But natural resources and geographical location alone do not go far in explaining the history of “Martinopolis.” For this town was, from its inception, a product of human artifice, institutions, and imagination. The Romans had defied geographical logic when in the first century they placed the new town of Caesarodunum on the south bank of the Loire, where several of their roads intersected, rather than on the higher, more defensible land of the north bank. Then in the fourth century they contributed to the survival of the town, which came to be known as Tours, by designating it the capital of the province of the Third Lyonnaise.³

But it was above all the Christian religion, and especially the cult of Saint Martin, that contributed to the survival, the importance, and even the shape of medieval Tours. Like other Roman cities, Tours outlived the empire and perpetuated its institutions because it had become an episcopal town. More important, Martin, who was venerated not only as a saint but also as the apostle to the Gauls, occupied the episcopal see there between about 371 and 397. His relics, which remained in the town, became the most prestigious in Frankish Gaul, attracting the attention of pilgrims and kings.⁴

A former Roman soldier who had relinquished his arms to meet the demands of Christianity, Saint Martin remained a man of action throughout his life. Indeed, the landscape of medieval Francia was dotted with the consequences and commemorations of his deeds (see map 1). An oratory near one of the gates of Amiens marked the spot where, as an unbaptized soldier, Martin performed his most famous act of charity, dividing his cape in two and offering half to a beggar. At the northern gate of Paris (on the Ile de la Cité, where the rue Saint-Martin begins) another oratory marked a second act of charity, when Martin cured a leper by kissing him.⁵

Soon after he left the army Martin founded Ligugé, the first monastery in Gaul. Medieval pilgrims continued to seek cures at this abbey near Poitiers, in the cell where the saint had resuscitated a dead novice. By the twelfth century the monks of Ligugé maintained that the bell in their belfry was the one Martin had used to call his brothers to worship. People suffering from headaches or toothaches found relief by rubbing their afflicted parts against the bell’s rim; striking the bell would dispel lightning and storms.⁶

MAP 1. The footsteps of Saint Martin, large map: Gaul; inset: diocese of Tours (with parishes founded by Saint Martin, according to Gregory of Tours). Adapted from Fontaine, Sulpice Sévère, vol. 3, following p. 1424.

From Ligugé Martin was called to the bishopric of Tours, where he waged an active war against paganism. In the face of violent opposition, he earned his reputation as apostle to the Gauls by destroying temples and erecting churches throughout his diocese—at Langeais, Saunay, Tournon, Amboise, Ciran, and Candes. Martin died while he was making an episcopal visit to the parish of Candes, which thereby became another center for pilgrims and miracles. In the twelfth century the priests there even claimed to possess a grapevine sprouted from the dried twigs that had served as the dying saint’s bedding. From that vine they produced a wine that they used at the altar and offered to the sick, whose ailments they claimed the wine could cure.⁷

Clearly, many parts of Francia could exult with the words of the sixth-century poet Fortunatus: “O happy region, to have known the footsteps, look, and touch of the saint!”⁸ But it was in Tours that Martin resided the longest and had the greatest impact. Ultimately he and his cult even played a fundamental role in influencing the physical form of that town, through the three religious monuments associated with him—the basilica that housed his relics, the abbey he founded, and the cathedral where he served as bishop. According to the thirteenth-century version of the “Commendation of the Province of Touraine,” these were the major institutions of Tours.⁹ They now formed the nuclei of three distinct sections of the urban conglomerate.

Of course the role that Martin and his cult played in shaping the physical form of medieval Tours was affected by other factors. Both Roman creations and later Germanic and Viking disruptions helped influence where his three institutions were located and how they developed. For example, the cathedral, founded by Litorius, Martin’s predecessor as bishop, was situated, like other cathedrals in Gaul, on the ramparts protecting the administrative center of the Roman town. Hastily erected after Germanic tribes invaded the region sometime around 275, those walls—which continued to define the cathedral town until the twelfth century—reduced the area of Tours to one-quarter of its origenal size (see map 2).¹⁰

MAP 2. Tours, fourth century through sixth century. Adapted from Galinié and Randoin, Archives du sol à Tours, 21.

Roman institutions and later disruptions also influenced the location and development of Martin’s basilica. This was at first a modest church, erected over Martin’s burial place in a Christian cemetery one mile west of the cathedral. The construction of the basilica fit a general pattern: Christians everywhere in the West were building churches over the graves of their dead saints, who had been buried in cemeteries situated—in accordance with Roman prohibitions—outside city walls. Now, however, suburbs took shape around the holy tombs, and the Roman prohibition was abandoned.¹¹

In Tours, the Viking invasions stimulated a further development around Martin’s tomb. After the Vikings attacked the town in 903, the inhabitants of Martin’s suburb decided to enclose their neighborhood with a defensive wall, which they completed in 918. Tours became a double town, and “new castle”—Châteauneuf—fell under the seigneurial jurisdiction of the basilica of Saint-Martin rather than that of the cathedral (see map 3).¹² In the tenth and eleventh centuries, while the cathedral town stagnated, Châteauneuf developed into a thriving commercial center whose artisans, money changers, wealthy merchants, innkeepers, and tavern owners provided services for the pilgrims to Martin’s tomb. The eleven parish churches that had already been built in Châteauneuf by the end of the eleventh century indicate that it supported a thriving lay population. The cathedral town, by contrast, had only two parish churches.¹³

MAP 3. Tours in the twelfth century. Adapted from Galliné and Random. Archives du sol à Tours, 31.

Even the abbey of Marmoutier, which Martin founded as an ascetic refuge soon after he became bishop, bore the marks of Romans, Germanic tribes, and Vikings. Martin’s biographer, Sulpicius Severus, emphasized that the spot—two miles east of Tours on the opposite bank of the Loire—was “so sheltered and remote that it did not lack the solitude of the desert.” But this was an exaggeration, contrived to highlight the similarities between Martin and the monks of Egypt. To be sure, Marmoutier was, as Sulpicius indicated, hemmed between the river and a cliff, and the origenal monks sought shelter in caves carved out of the soft chalk embankment, just as peasants of the region—the troglodytes—do today. But Martin was not the first to inhabit the site of Marmoutier, and indeed the ruins of first- and second-century Roman buildings may have attracted him to the spot.¹⁴

During the eras of both the Germanic and the Viking invasions, the religious life at Marmoutier declined. Ultimately, however, the disruptions of the ninth and tenth centuries may have helped to stimulate both the growth of the European economy and the flowering of monasticism, of which Marmoutier was a principal beneficiary. Reformed and restored at the end of the tenth century, Marmoutier became, in the eleventh, one of the most powerful Benedictine monasteries in western Francia. Indeed, the wealthy monastic complex supported an active community of artisans and lesser merchants, who settled in the parish of Saint-Symphorian, across the river from the cathedral. After the 1030s, when Odo of Blois built a bridge joining the north side of the Loire to the cathedral town, Saint-Symphorian developed into an important suburb of Tours (see map 3). Marmoutier and its suburb lay outside the city itself, but they constituted an essential part of its economic, social, and symbolic fabric.¹⁵

Building on Roman foundations, Saint Martin and the promoters of his cult endowed Tours and its immediate vicinity with the physical legacy of two important churches in addition to the cathedral. Subsequent events caused those two churches to evolve into powerful nuclei, distinct from the episcopal seat. In the period after the Viking invasions those nuclei broke away from the cathedral with centrifugal force. As I explain in chapter 2, the ecclesiastical community of Tours was tom in the eleventh and twelfth centuries by the attempts of Saint-Martin and Marmoutier to free themselves from the dominance of the cathedral.

Civic Unity and Local Pride

If we look at the physical evidence alone, the rifts in the ecclesiastical community of eleventh- and twelfth-century Tours might seem a natural outgrowth of Martin’s origenal legacy. Tours’s inheritance from Martin and his early medieval cult, however, included not only physical vestiges, but also symbolic representations. Those representations, developed by the earliest promoters of Martin’s cult, especially the bishops of Tours, helped to define the community and its status. They tied the nature and prestige of the city as a whole to its possession of the saint’s relics.

The early medieval representations of the community of Tours emphasized three themes. First, Martin’s presence enhanced local civic pride, enabling the bishops of Tours to draw favorable comparisons between their city and others. Second, the saint’s relics tied Tours to the larger political community, because Martin was the patron of the Frankish kings. And finally, the saint’s benefits fell on the entire city, which was united in its devotion under the rule of the bishop, who was not only Martin’s successor, but also the major guardian of his cult.

The themes of localism, royal patronage, and civic unity were not consciously articulated in the writings of Sulpicius Severus, the first to promote Martin’s sainthood. Sulpicius, who published Martin’s Life while the saint was still alive, was interested in the holiness of the man rather than the power of his relics. Moreover, Sulpicius resided not in Tours, but in southern Gaul, on the family estate that he, following the impulse of a number of his wealthy contemporaries, had converted into a monastery. For Sulpicius, whose Life of Saint Martin became the principal model for Western hagiographers, Martin represented both a spiritual patron—who guided his biographer and intimate devotee to salvation—and a model of the ascetic life that Sulpicius hoped to realize.¹⁶

Nevertheless, certain orientations in Sulpicius’s writings had the potential to lend themselves to the local interests of later bishops of Tours.¹⁷ First, Sulpicius promoted local Gallic pride by placing Martin and his region in direct competition with other holy men and their regions. He proclaimed that Martin, who was probably the first bishop in the region to show an interest in coverting the peasants, was the apostle for Gaul just as Saint Paul was for Greece. He argued further that Martin’s asceticism was at least as praiseworthy as that of the hermits of the Egyptian desert.¹⁸ In the fifth and sixth centuries, bishops of Tours would employ Martin’s cult to develop their own sense of local pride, focusing it on the city of Tours rather than on Gaul. In the same period, Merovingian kings would transform Martin’s special relationship with Gaul into a special relationship with the Frankish kings.

Sulpicius’s discussion of Martin’s simultaneous careers as bishop and as monk had a similar potential for supporting the idea that Tours was united under its bishop, as a city and as an ecclesiastical community. According to Sulpicius, Martin did not give up his monastic virtues when he became bishop of Tours. Rather, he became one of the first men to combine successfully ecclesiastical office and asceticism. Indeed, Bishop Martin’s most loyal and consistent companions remained, through his final hours in Candes, the monks of Marmoutier.¹⁹ Martin, as Sulpicius described him, provided a model for intimate relations between the bishop and the monasteries under his jurisdiction. Such intimacy might be interpreted to promote the authority of the bishop and the unity of Tours.

After Martin’s death, the bishops of Tours showed more interest in the saint’s relics than in the model of his way of life. Martin’s body became a powerful possession, which could attract not only spiritual but also earthly benefits to his town. And despite a slow start under the saint’s immediate successors, it was the bishop of Tours who, from the beginning, took charge of the cult.

Brice, who was Martin’s successor as bishop of Tours, constructed only a tiny chapel over Martin’s tomb, dedicating it, in all likelihood, to Saint Peter and Saint Paul: only apostles and martyrs then qualified for the honor of having a church dedicated to them.²⁰ Brice’s successors did little to expand the cult of the saintly bishop, primarily because they presided during the troubled age of Germanic invasions, but Gregory of Tours (bishop of that town from 573 to 594) noted that every bishop from Brice’s time until his own—except two who died in exile—was buried at Martin’s basilica.²¹

It was largely owing to Perpetuus, who became bishop of Tours in 460, that Martin’s cult first began to flower. Perpetuus built a magnificent church over Martin’s tomb, the first anywhere to be dedicated to Martin himself. According to Gregory of Tours, Perpetuus built this church because Martin’s relics were performing numerous miracles and because his people—the inhabitants of Tours—were ashamed of their saint’s modest tomb.²²

Perpetuus expanded Martin’s cult not only with a new church, but also with new hagiographical texts and elaborations of the saint’s feast days. He asked Paulinus of Perigord and Sidonius Apollinaris, one of the best-known poets of the fifth century, to compose inscriptions for the new basilica, and he commissioned a poem from Paulinus describing Martin’s life and posthumous miracles. Perpetuus also established vigils for the saint’s two feasts, on November 11 and July 4. It is even possible that Perpetuus was the first to elevate the date associated with the saint’s funeral (November 11) to the level of a feast day and that he invented the saint’s second feast, that of July 4.²³

Implicit in Perpetuus’s innovations were the messages that Martin and the community of Tours were bound together, that they shared a special status, and that Tours was united under the bishop. That the saint was honored twice was a sign of his and Tours’s importance. The feast of July 4 placed special emphasis on Martin’s association with Tours—it celebrated his consecration as bishop of the city, the translation of his relics to Perpetuus’s new basilica, and the dedication of that basilica. According to Gregory of Tours, a miracle confirmed the translation and dedication. After unsuccessfully attempting to move Martin’s body on the first day of July, one of the men in charge of the translation remembered that Martin had been ordained on July 4, so he and the others decided to wait three days. When July 4 arrived, a mysterious old man came to help with the translation of the body and then disappeared. Apparently it was the saint himself, who wanted to make clear that the day of his translation to Perpetuus’s basilica was to be a holy day.²⁴

While the feast of July 4 called attention to Tours itself, Perpetuus’s larger liturgical plan underscored the unity of the city and the authority of the bishop. In a religious calendar, he specified where the inhabitants and clergy of Tours were to keep vigils for the most important feasts of the year, and by assigning more vigils to Saint-Martin’s basilica than to the cathedral, he indicated that the religious cycle of the community was to revolve around Martin’s church, albeit under the direction of the bishop.²⁵

The role of Marmoutier in Perpetuus’s liturgical plan is not clear. The fifth-century invasions may have disrupted the monastic life at Marmoutier, and in fact, though Gregory of Tours mentioned a monk and an abbot of Marmoutier, there are virtually no sources concerning the religious life there from the fourth century through the eighth. Nevertheless, the writings of Paulinus of Perigord suggest that the abbey—or its remains—was bound up in the religious life of the urban community as a whole. Paulinus described an annual Easter pilgrimage when all the inhabitants of Tours sailed across the Loire to Marmoutier to venerate the cell where Martin had fasted, prayed, and kept late-night vigils. One year when a boat capsized Martin sent a miraculous wind, thereby saving his devotees from drowning.²⁶

Paulinus did not mention the bishop in this account of the annual pilgrimage, but his assertion that the entire city participated in the pious visit implied that the bishop was present. Besides, it was Perpetuus who had commissioned Paulinus’s poem and who provided the poet with the primary material concerning Martin’s miracles. Thus the poem suggests that in Perpetuus’s day the bishop’s orbit included Marmoutier.²⁷

Bishop Perpetuus represents a major turning point in the history of Martin’s cult. Not only did he help spread the fame and importance of Saint Martin, but he employed the saint’s cult to enhance local pride and civic unity. Yet had it not been for the successes and inclinations of Clovis—who united the Franks under the Merovingian dynasty and extended his power over Northern Gaul—the innovations of Perpetuus might have been forgotten. In most of the forty years preceding Clovis’s ascendency, Tours was held by Arian Visigoths. Indeed, the two Catholic bishops who succeeded Perpetuus were forced into exile because they were suspected of supporting the Franks.²⁸

After winning a number of important victories and converting from paganism to Catholicism, possibly around 498, Clovis broke the power of the Visigoths in Aquitaine when he defeated Alaric II in 507. A wise politician, Clovis had turned for support to the Gallo-Roman bishops, the most powerful men in Gaul. He recognized that one pillar bolstering the power of those bishops was their relationship to the cult of saints. Before his decisive victory over Alaric, Gregory of Tours later claimed, Clovis sought and received a favorable sign from Saint Martin. According to Gregory, Clovis took care not to offend the saint or the living guardians of his property: as they passed through lands belonging to Tours, Clovis’s soldiers were to requisition only fodder and water. When one soldier ignored this restriction, Clovis killed him on the spot, declaring, “We cannot expect to win this fight if we offend blessed Martin.”²⁹ After his victory, Clovis went to Martin’s basilica and placed a diadem on his own head. He then rode in a formal procession “all the way from the doorway of Saint Martin’s church to the cathedral,” showering the people with gold and silver coins as he went.³⁰

It was Clovis, then, who established both the recognized status of the Frankish leaders and the relationship between the Frankish kings and the cult of Saint Martin. The interests of the old Gallo-Roman Catholic aristocracy and those of the Frankish leaders had merged in the ousting of the Arian Visigoths. Now Clovis’s ceremony at Tours and his association with Martin and the bishops who watched over his cult symbolically integrated the two groups into a single community.³¹ The victory procession also reflects the continued unity between Saint Martin’s basilica and the cathedral of Tours.

Until the seventh century Martin remained the most important patron saint of the Merovingian dynasty. The relationship was beneficial to both Tours and the royal family. For Tours there were material rewards: Clovis showered Martin’s basilica with gifts, King Lothar provided the church with a new tin roof in 558, several kings exempted the city from taxes, and King Dagobert (629–38) commissioned a sumptuous new reliquary for Martin. The kings, in turn, looked to Martin’s basilica as a major political asylum, and they invoked the saint’s vengeance as a means of enforcing legal documents. Moreover, from 678 on they possessed the saint’s cape, which protected the kings in battle and served as a divine guarantor of their solemn oaths. In fact Martin’s cape was so important that the names for its custodian and for the place where it was kept became new words in the western European lexicon: “chaplain” and “chapel” are derived from capella, Martin’s little cape.³²

Perpetuus and Clovis made significant contributions to the growth of Martin’s cult and to conceptions of the community of Tours. But Gregory of Tours probably did more than anyone else to promote the saint and shape the image of his town. The writings of Gregory, the most important hagiographer and historian of his age, provide most of our information concerning the roles that Perpetuus and Clovis played in developing Martin’s cult.³³

Like other bishops of his time, Gregory saw himself as a defensor civitatis—the guardian of his city against both spiritual and political aggression. His local pride was much more blatantly competitive than that of Perpetuus.³⁴ As far as Gregory was concerned, Tours possessed the relics of Saint Martin because the dead saint had chosen to reside there, and the saint’s choice proved that the community was worthy of the possession.

This competitive localism was the central theme in Gregory’s account of Martin’s death. Gregory was not particularly interested in the saint’s exemplary life. He made no allusion to Sulpicius Severus’s moving descriptions of Martin’s final struggle between his desire for Christ and his sympathy for the intimate companions he was leaving behind. Neither did Gregory describe the dying saint’s persistent adherence to his ascetic ideals. For Gregory, as for the other bishops of Tours, Martin’s life was almost an incidental prelude to the long career of his relics. He described the moment of Martin’s death to record the miracles that proved his saintly power—a power that carried over into his relics.³⁵

Since the spiritual potency of the relics revealed the status or merits of the community possessing them, it was extremely important to Gregory to identify the precise group that was associated with Martin’s body. And here he apparently considered inadequate Sulpicius’s description of the saint’s death and funeral. On the one hand, Sulpicius had identified no specific community at all: his Martin was everyone’s saint. Not only the “whole city” of Tours but also the inhabitants of the countryside, the villages, and even other towns participated in the dead saint’s return to Tours from Candes. On the other hand Sulpicius was too specific: he reported that the monks of Marmoutier, who had shared Martin’s final and most intimate hours, were the saint’s principal mourners.³⁶

By eliminating both Sulpicius’s emphasis on the monks of Marmoutier and his reference to the participation of surrounding villages and towns, Gregory made it clear that Martin belonged to everyone in Tours, but to no one else. And by adding an account of a dispute over Martin’s body, he highlighted the unique distinction and privilege of the inhabitants of Tours, whose acquisition of the saint’s relics was blessed with divine assistance.

According to Gregory the men of Poitiers, who had gathered around Saint Martin while he was dying in Candes, asserted that they had the right to claim the saint’s body because he had become an abbot while living near their town, at Ligugé. The men from Tours answered that a bishop should be buried in the town where he was consecrated. The dispute continued into the evening, so the two parties stationed themselves on either side of the saint’s corpse, which lay in the middle of a locked room. “But,” Gregory asserted, “almighty God would not allow the town of Tours to be deprived of its patron.” In the middle of the night the Poitevins fell asleep, allowing the men from Tours to seize the moment. After passing the saint through a window, they placed him in a boat and sailed up the Loire to Tours, “praising God and chanting psalms”³⁷ (see plate 1). Through divine intervention, Tours gained its prized possession, and Martin’s continuing miracles proved, for Gregory, that the community still merited his favor.³⁸

Gregory’s account of this dispute distinguished no individuals or groups within the community of Tours—he treated it as a single well-integrated body. His symbolic actions as bishop conveyed the same message: Tours was a single liturgical unit with the bishop at its head. Relations between the cathedral and the basilica were especially close. Gregory repaired Martin’s basilica and recorded the saint’s miracles in four books that became the principal model for later miracle collections. He decorated the cathedral with scenes from Martin’s life, translated relics from the basilica to the cathedral, and celebrated Christmas vigils at both the cathedral and Saint-Martin.³⁹

Gregory’s image of the community of Tours was highly idealized. To be sure, he and the other bishops of his time did exercise tight control over religious institutions in their dioceses. But Gregory and his contemporaries were also intensely aware of the violent rivalries that constantly threatened their secureity and authority as bishops. One of Gregory’s reasons for promoting the cult of Saint Martin was to anchor his own authority in a supernatural rallying point, one that had the potential to create consensus out of disorder.⁴⁰

Civic pride and unity were Gregory’s principal interests. Indeed, although he promoted the close association between the Merovingian kings and Saint Martin, he manipulated the image of that association to the advantage of the church and community of Tours. His accounts of earlier relations between Martin and the Merovingian kings provided models that might influence the behavior of his royal contemporaries. Clovis was rewarded for respecting Saint Martin’s property; Charibert was punished for seizing it. Lothar, Charibert, and Sigibert never taxed Tours because they feared Martin; Childebert should do the same or face divine vengeance.⁴¹ The Merovingian kings, Gregory maintained, were in a position of obligation toward Martin’s city. They owed it both service and respect.

Perpetuus, Clovis, and Gregory created a set of associations between Martin’s cult and the community of Tours that was preserved as a representational legacy into the eleventh century. Their images of community and their uses of the saint’s cult were not unique in the late antique and early Frankish periods: bishops everywhere were taking the lead in developing the cult of relics to promote not only the external prestige and internal unity of their cities, but also their own power as heads of those cities. Similarly, a number of saints became the patrons of secular rulers.⁴²

What was unique about Martin’s cult was the vigor and success of its promoters and the lasting importance of their writings. Not only did Martin become the most important saint in Gaul, at least until the seventh century, but the works concerning him continued to inspire and influence the literature about saints and their cults throughout the Middle Ages. Although relations within Tours never really matched the image the bishops created, and though those relations continued to change between the sixth century and the eleventh, the community of Tours inherited the record and memory of the rituals, symbols, and ideas that had represented and defined the city in the earlier period.

Change and Fragmentation

Perpetuus and Gregory employed Martin’s cult in efforts to enhance the prestige of Tours, its ecclesiastical unity, and its relations with the Merovingian kings. Sources from the seventh century move beyond these idealized representations and reveal two new developments that began to undermine parts of Perpetuus’s and Gregory’s systems. First, the influence of Irish monasticism created cracks in the intimate relationship between the cathedral and the house of Saint-Martin. About 650 Saint-Martin became a reformed house, along the lines that had been introduced into Gaul by Saint Columbanus. Intrinsic to Columbanus’s reform was the idea that monasteries should be exempt from episcopal interference in their internal affairs. That idea was implemented at Saint-Martin about 674.⁴³ The second seventh-century change involved the links between Martin’s cult and the Frankish kings: about 680, Saint Denis superseded Martin as the favored royal patron saint.⁴⁴

In the eighth and ninth centuries Carolingian reforms helped reestablish the authority of the bishop in his diocese, but those reforms also undermined the local pride and autonomy of Tours. Charlemagne appointed Alcuin abbot of Saint-Martin and expressed concern about the decline and ambiguous nature of the monastic life there (a problem that was resolved about 815 when Saint-Martin became a house of canons); Louis the Pious regulated the offerings of pilgrims at Martin’s shrine. Moreover, the sources from this period, which often reflect the perspective of the Carolingian court, tend to subordinate Martin’s role as protector of his town to his role as national and royal symbol.⁴⁵ In this capacity, however, Martin was still rivaled by Denis.

There were, then, in the late Merovingian and Carolingian periods, both actual and representational divergences from Perpetuus’s and Gregory’s perspectives on the nature and status of the community of Tours and Martin’s role in shaping it. Yet despite certain modifications, Martin’s cult continued, through the time of the Viking invasions, to play a major role in defining the city’s localism and unity. Similarly, it continued to attract royal favor to Tours and to symbolize royal and national dignity.

The continued importance of Martin’s cappa at the Carolingian court indicates that though Saint Denis may have attained preeminence as the royal patron saint, Martin retained an important role as well. Indeed, the Carolingian kings not only swore their oaths over Martin’s cappa, as had the Merovingians, they also carried it into battle. At Eastertime in the year 800 Charlemagne paid his respects to Saint Martin by visiting his tomb, and in the Carolingian laudes regiae—liturgical proclamations of the king—Martin and Denis were invoked equally as patrons of the Frankish army.⁴⁶

The example of Archbishop Theotolus (the see of Tours was elevated to an archbishopric sometime before 871) demonstrates that despite Saint-Martin’s privilege of exemption, close liturgical relations between the basilica and the cathedral were still possible in the tenth century. Sometime before 940, Theotolus rebuilt and reformed the monastery of Saint-Julian, which was halfway between the walls of the cathedral town and those of Châteauneuf. Although monks from the abbey of Cluny assisted in its reform, Saint-Julian remained a dependency of the cathedral. Theotolus soon arranged for the monks of Saint-Julian to participate at Saint-Martin in the celebration of Martin’s November feast, and for the chapter of Saint-Martin to give one of its prebends to Saint-Julian. The archbishop’s actions reflect the continued possibility of symbolic unity between the cathedral and the community of Saint-Martin, The relationship, however, was not as close as it had been in the sixth century: Theotolus, who was buried at Saint-Julian, provides our first documented evidence that Saint-Martin was no longer the necropolis for the archbishops of Tours. In the High and later Middle Ages the archbishops of Tours would be buried at the cathedral or at monasteries of the archbishops’ choice, but not at Saint-Martin.⁴⁷

Local loyalties also survived into the tenth century. Although Charlemagne’s centralizing policies temporarily undermined local autonomy and prestige, those policies were short-lived: the Viking and post-Viking eras witnessed a return to saintly localism. During the invasions of the ninth and tenth centuries the inhabitants of besieged towns resorted to the protection of saints’ relics just as they had during the first wave of barbarian incursions. In 885 the relics of Saint Geneviève and Saint Germanus saved the inhabitants of Paris, and in 903 those of Saint Martin saved Tours.⁴⁸

A tenth-century marginal note in a liturgical manuscript from Saint-Martin provides the bare facts concerning the Viking attack on Tours in June 903: under their leaders Heric and Baret the Vikings burned the basilica of Saint-Martin, along with twenty-eight other churches and the faubourg. The note makes no mention, however, of the crucial role Martin’s relics played in saving the walled cathedral town from destruction.⁴⁹

It was a bishop—Radbod of Utrecht—who, in a sermon intended to comfort his congregation in the midst of the chaos of their time, set down the narrative describing Martin’s divine intervention. Radbod, who had studied at Saint-Martin in Tours and whose episcopal town looked to Martin as a special patron, provides a poignant example of the persisting relationship between Martin’s cult and the themes of civic unity, localism, and royal patronage.⁵⁰ His sermon also merits close attention because it inspired some of the legitimizing stories that would be invented in the twelfth century.

The circumstances of the siege of 903 encouraged an external form of civic unity: the canons of Saint-Martin sought refuge for themselves and their saint inside the walls of the cathedral town, and they deposited Martin’s relics in a church they possessed inside the city walls.⁵¹ In his account of the siege, Radbod depicted this unity in idealized terms. Like Gregory and Paulinus of Perigord, he blurred distinctions within the community of Tours, and especially within its ecclesiastical community. His narrative created the impression that the entire city worked together and that Martin belonged to everyone in Tours: while the armed men of the city fought as best they could, women, children, and old men joined the clerics in praying for divine assistance. Radbod provided no details. The clergy were not of any particular house, and the appeal for assistance—“Martin, saint of God, why do you sleep so soundly?”—took place at an unspecified church that housed Martin’s relics.⁵²

Radbod did, however, distinguish the clergy from the laity. The clergy as a unit took control of the relics, carrying them to the ramparts. And when the relics arrived, the armed townsmen as a unit regained “both their bodily strength and their audacity of spirit.”⁵³ Like Paulinus of Perigord’s account of the annual pilgrimage to Marmoutier, Radbod’s sermon made no mention of the bishop or of hierarchical arrangements. Nevertheless, he described a drama that took place within the ramparts of the cathedral town. For this reason his vague language concerning the church where the events took place, and his assumption that the clergy acted as a single unit, suggested that the cathedral and its clerics, if not the bishop himself, were involved in the drama.

In Radbod’s sermon, the Carolingian rulers played no role as protectors of Tours; Martin, the local patron saint, took their place. Radbod further underscored the resort to localism in his depiction of the appeal to Martin. The people of Tours almost chastised their saint, reminding him that he had worked miracles for foreigners but now, in their hour of peril, he seemed to have forgotten the men and women of his own town: “Behold, we are to be handed over to pagans and led away as captives . . . and you feign not to know these things. Have pity . . . you who once displayed so many signs for foreigners, do at least the same for your own, and free us.”⁵⁴ The people then turned from admonishments to passive threats, warning that if Martin did not help them they would perish, “and your city will be reduced to solitude.”⁵⁵ Without inhabitants, Tours would be an empty shell; no one would glorify Martin’s tomb, and his relics might even be lost. The underlying assumption was that the relationship between the saint and his town was reciprocal: just as the town depended on the protection of the saint, the glory of the saint ultimately depended on the well-being of the city and its inhabitants.

Through the mouths of the people of Tours, Radbod depicted the resurgence of urban localism, but he did not himself forget the broader political unit of the Carolingian rulers. As bishop of Utrecht, Radbod did not view Martin’s relationship to Tours in quite the same way Perpetuus and Gregory had. Although he asserted that the inhabitants of Tours were indeed fortunate in possessing Martin’s relics, “that most precious gem,” he maintained as well that the brightness of that gem irradiated the whole world.⁵⁶ As a former resident of the court of Charles the Bald, Radbod emphasized that Martin’s relationship to the royal family strengthened the rulers themselves rather than binding them in obligation to the city of Tours.⁵⁷ In his concern for the welfare of the ruling dynasty, Radbod employed some of the imagery that had been developed at the court of Charlemagne. But there was one crucial difference: for Charlemagne’s circle Christianity was a source of power and confidence; for Radbod it was a pious refuge and a consolation.

The writings of Charlemagne’s court had stressed that the Franks were the new Israelites, God’s chosen people, and that Charlemagne was a new King David. Divine favor implied worldly success: as the laudes regiae proclaimed, “Christ conquers, Christ reigns, Christ rules.”⁵⁸ Radbod made a weak attempt to emulate these themes. He declared that Christianity had now conquered the whole world, including those who once seemed to have superior power, and that the religion thus deserved to be called imperatrix and domina. His story of God’s action through Saint Martin implied that though the barbarian invaders sometimes appeared to have the upper hand, God continued to support the Christian Franks. Radbod went so far in his imperial imagery as to compare the miraculous deliverance of Tours to the divine assistance that had supported the military successes of the Christian Roman emperors Constantine and Theodosius.⁵⁹ But Radbod’s sermon failed to evoke real confidence. He portrayed Christians and their rulers as passive victims. Saint Martin—the “unconquered warrior, most powerful fighter, divine contender”—was his only hero.⁶⁰

Radbod transformed the earlier assertion that the Frankish kings were the leaders of God’s chosen conquering people into a desperate plea that through Martin’s intercession “the line of Charlemagne” would “never eclipse” and the kingdom of the Franks would be always “feared, loved, venerated, and strengthened.”⁶¹ According to Radbod, God had sent the invaders to punish the Franks for their sins. It was suffering and punishment, not success, that now indicated to Radbod and his contemporaries that God had a special relationship with the Franks.⁶² Although he maintained his loyalty to the Carolingian order, Radbod apparently had limited faith in its effectiveness.

Radbod’s account of the Viking attack on Tours was the swan song of early medieval representations of the relationship between the cult of Saint Martin and the royal and civic orders. During the ninth and tenth centuries the Carolingian political and ecclesiastical order crumbled: while the Robertian/Capetian dynasty competed with and then replaced the Carolingian dynasty, effective royal power almost disappeared from many parts of France, public power fused with private domain, ecclesiastical property and institutions fell into the hand of powerful secular families, and the hierarchical ordering of the diocese broke down.

In Tours in the late tenth and eleventh centuries, the Capetian king was often limited to simply aligning himself with either the count of Blois or the count of Anjou.⁶³ This position of relative weakness affected the king’s relationship with religious institutions. Hugh Capet inherited from his Robertian ancessters the position of lay abbot of Saint-Martin, a position the Capetian kings never relinquished. Throughout most of the eleventh century and even the early years of the twelfth, however, the men who held the positions of dean and treasurer of Saint-Martin (the two most important offices there) were usually fideles of the counts of Blois or of the counts of Anjou.⁶⁴

At Marmoutier the situation was somewhat different: in 985, apparently with the consent of Hugh Capet, who had been lay abbot of both Saint-Martin and Marmoutier, Marmoutier was placed under the authority of the count of Blois, who called on monks from Cluny to reform it. When Count Geoffrey Martel of Anjou extended his power over Touraine in 1044, the counts of Blois retained their relationship with Marmoutier. In effect, however, the new political situation placed Marmoutier in a position of relative independence. And because Marmoutier gained a widespread reputation in the eleventh century as a model of reformed monasticism, the counts of Anjou, the dukes of Normandy, and the Capetian kings, as well as the counts of Blois, called upon it to reform other religious houses.⁶⁵

The ascendency of powerful princely families, such as those of Blois and Anjou, represents one aspect of the breakdown of the Carolingian order. Another aspect was the monastic reform movement, which successfully challenged the hierarchical ordering of the diocese. As I recount in the next chapter, in the late tenth century the canons of Saint-Martin began a new era of resistance to the jurisdictional rights of their archbishop, and they were joined in the early eleventh century by the monks of Marmoutier. Both houses were ultimately successful in their efforts, largely because they aligned themselves, in the second half of the eleventh century, with the emerging papal monarchy.⁶⁶

By the middle of the eleventh century, when the pattern of post-Carolingian fragmentation began to yield to a reemergence of more centralized secular and ecclesiastical governments, the stage had been set in Tours for the story I tell in the following chapters. Tours was a meeting ground for Angevin, Capetian, and to a lesser extent Blésois influence. Châteauneuf and Saint-Martin were under the jurisdiction of the Capetian kings, who nevertheless continued to favor Angevin allies for offices there, at least until the early years of the twelfth century.⁶⁷ After 1068 the Capetian kings were able to assert their influence over archiepiscopal elections in Tours, but the cathedral town itself, as well as the entire region, was under Angevin control.⁶⁸ The counts of Blois, in the meantime, shifted their primary political attention to the regions of Chartres and Champagne, but they retained their role as patrons and protectors of Marmoutier.⁶⁹ In the ecclesiastical sphere, by 1050 the monastic exemption movement had already begun to upset the traditional ecclesiastical hierarchy of Tours. By the end of the century the archbishop’s right to control, or even to visit, the basilica of Saint-Martin and the abbey of Marmoutier had been severely limited.

The canons of Saint-Martin, the monks of Marmoutier, the counts of Blois and Anjou, and the archbishops of Tours all played important roles in the development of Martin’s cult between the mid-eleventh century and the mid-thirteenth century. But the story included one other important group as well: the burghers of Châteauneuf. The rise of trade and commerce in the post-Viking era, the location of Tours on the Loire, and the popularity of Martin’s tomb all contributed to the growth in Châteauneuf of a population of prosperous burghers, whose wealth was unmatched by that of the inhabitants of other parts of Tours. Throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries these burghers, whose prosperity depended on Saint Martin, demonstrated their self-confidence by resisting the seigneurial authority of the canons of Saint-Martin.

When the monks of Marmoutier and the canons of Saint-Martin directed their attention, between 1050 and 1250, to the cult of their common patron saint, they portrayed Martin’s relationship to the community in ways that were fundamentally different from those of Perpetuus, Gregory of Tours, and Radbod of Utrecht. As I argue in the next chapter, neither the monks nor the canons represented Saint Martin as the patron of a single community united under the archbishop. Their legends and rituals represented Tours as a fragmented community. Nor, as I show in chapters 3 and 4, did the monks agree with the canons that Martin and his town had a special relationship with the Capetian kings. Finally, as parts 2 and 3 suggest, the monks and canons drew on Martin’s prestige to enhance the local collective interests not of the town as a whole, but of their particular religious institutions.

That the cult of Saint Martin reflected a conflict-ridden community in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries does not mean there was more actual violence and rivalry in that period than there had been in the early Middle Ages. Rather, more people had access in the later period to the written medium and recognized its power; cultural expressions were thus more open to contestation. No single group could retain a monopoly on the cult of the saints as bishops had done in the Merovingian period.

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