Martin of Tours - The Shrine and The Devotion

The Shrine and The Devotion

The veneration of Martin was hugely popular in the Middle Ages, above all in the region between the Loire and the Marne, where Le Roy Ladurie and Zysberg noted the densest accretion of hagiotoponyms commemorating Martin, but Fortunat declared, "Partout où le Christ est connu, Martin est honoré." When Bishop Perpetuus took office at Tours in 461, the little chapel over Martin's grave, built in the previous century by Martin's immediate successor, Bricius, was no longer sufficient for the crowd of pilgrims it was already drawing. Perpetuus built a more suitably grand basilica, 38 m long and 18 m wide, with 120 columns. His body was taken from the simple chapel at his hermitage at Candes-St-Martin to Tours and his sarcophagus was reburied behind the high altar of the great new basilica; A large block of marble above the tomb, the gift of bishop Euphronius of Autun (472-475), rendered it visible to the faithful gathered behind the high altar, and perhaps, Werner Jacobsen suggests, also to pilgrims encamped in the atrium of the basilica, which, contrary to the usual arrangement, was sited behind the church, close to the tomb in the apse, which may have been visible through a fenestrella in the apse wall.

During the Middle Ages, the supposed relic of St. Martin’s miraculous cloak, (cappa Sancti Martini) was conserved among the relic collection of the Merovingian kings of the Franks at the Marmoutier Abbey, near to Tours. One of the Frankish kings' most sacred relics, it would be carried everywhere the king went, even into battle, as a holy relic upon which oaths were sworn.

The cloak is first attested in the royal treasury in 679, when it was conserved at the palatium of Luzarches, a royal villa that was later ceded to the monks of Saint-Denis by Charlemagne, in 798/99.

The priest who cared for the cloak in its reliquary was called a cappellanu, and ultimately all priests who served the military were called cappellani. The French translation is chapelains, from which the English word chaplain is derived. One of the many services a chaplain can provide is spiritual and pastoral support for military service personnel by performing religious services at sea or in the battlefield.

A similar linguistic development was undergone by the small temporary churches built for the relic, to which people began to refer by the word for a little cloak, "capella". Eventually, such small churches lost their association with the cloak and all small churches began to be referred to as "chapels".

St. Martin's popularity can be partially attributed to his adoption by successive royal houses of France. Clovis (Cholodovech), King of the Salian Franks, one of many warring tribes in sixth century France, promised his Christian wife Clotilda that he would be baptised if he was victorious over the Alemanni; he credited the intervention of St Martin with his success, and with several following triumphs, including the defeat of Alaric II. As a result, Clovis was able to move his capital to Paris, and he is considered to be the 'Founder of France'. The popular devotion to St Martin continued to be closely identified with the Merovingian monarchy: in the early seventh century Dagobert I commissioned the goldsmith Saint Eligius to make a wonderful work in gold and gems for the tomb-shrine. The later bishop, Gregory of Tours, made it his business to write and see distributed an influential Life filled with miraculous events of the saint's career. Martin's cultus survived the passage of power to their successors, the Carolingian dynasty.