The Late Roman World and the Army

Martin of Tours was born at Sabaria in the frontier province of Pannonia, in a world remade by Constantine’s turn to Christianity, the son of a pagan army officer who had risen from the ranks. Bound by Roman law to follow his father into military service, the boy who was already drawn to the Church found himself a reluctant cavalryman in Gaul — a catechumen in uniform, soldiering in an empire that had only just ceased to persecute the faith he was learning to profess. This file sets the social, legal, and religious world of the late fourth century into which Martin was born, as it can be reconstructed from Sulpicius Severus and from the historians of late antique Gaul.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism West; father of Western monasticism)

Sabaria and the Birth of Martin

The earliest and almost the only source for Martin’s origins is the Vita Martini of Sulpicius Severus, written in Martin’s own lifetime or very shortly after his death in 397 and composed by a man who had visited him and questioned those who knew him (Sulpicius Severus, Vita Martini 1, 25; trans. NPNF II/11). Sulpicius states plainly that Martin “was born at Sabaria in Pannonia, but was brought up at Ticinum, which is situated in Italy” (Vita Martini 2; trans. NPNF II/11). Sabaria — modern Szombathely in western Hungary — was a town of the province of Pannonia Prima, a Romanized frontier district along the middle Danube that had been thoroughly garrisoned and settled by the military for generations (Stancliffe 1983, pp. 111–120). It was a thoroughly imperial place: a colonia on a major road, home to a mixed population of provincials, veterans, and soldiers, where Latin was the language of administration and the army was the dominant institution of social advancement.

The year of Martin’s birth is not given by the Vita and cannot be fixed with confidence. [Disputed: the Vita supplies almost nothing that fixes the date directly; Stancliffe (1983, pp. 111–133) argues from the internal chronology of Martin’s career for a birth around 336, which would make him considerably younger at his death than tradition holds, while the older reckoning — followed by the Benedictine editors and the NPNF tradition — places his birth around 316 and his early soldiering and the cloak episode in the 330s. The chronology of Martin’s early life is genuinely uncertain, and the figures that follow should be read as the traditional dating with this caveat attached.] On the traditional reckoning Martin was born about 316, three years after the Edict of Milan; on Stancliffe’s, about two decades later. Either way he belongs to the first Christian century of the Roman state — the generation that grew up in the lengthening shadow of Constantine.

A Pagan Soldier’s Son

Sulpicius is careful, and in this he is probably reliable, about Martin’s family. “His parents,” he writes, “were not of the lowest rank, but were heathens. His father was a soldier, who from the ranks rose to the position of a military tribune” (Vita Martini 2; trans. NPNF II/11). The detail is socially precise. To rise ex gregario milite — from the common soldiery — to the rank of tribune was a real, if modest, achievement, and it placed the family in the provincial military service-class that the late empire increasingly relied upon to officer its armies (Van Dam 1985, pp. 13–25, on the militarized society of late Roman Gaul; Stancliffe 1983, pp. 120–123). Martin’s father was, in the language of the time, a veteranus and an officer, a man whose status and whose obligations passed down to his son.

That the family was pagan matters to the whole shape of Martin’s life. Sulpicius presents the boy’s attraction to Christianity as arising against the grain of his household: “When he was of the age of ten years, he betook himself, against the wish of his parents, to the Church, and begged that he might become a catechumen” (Vita Martini 2; trans. NPNF II/11). Whatever the precise dating, the picture is of a child reaching toward the Church in a home that had not embraced it — a pattern that the fourth-century historians of conversion recognize as typical of the slow, household-by-household Christianization of the western provinces, in which the army and its families were among the last bastions of the old cults (Brown 2003, pp. 60–78; Van Dam 1985, pp. 25–40).

The Christianizing Empire after Constantine

The world into which Martin was born was no longer the world of the persecutions, but neither was it yet a Christian world. Constantine’s victory at the Milvian Bridge (312) and the toleration secured in 313 had ended the legal proscription of Christianity and inaugurated imperial patronage of the Church; by the time Martin was a young man, the emperors were Christian, the bishops were figures of public weight, and great basilicas were rising in the cities (Brown 1981, pp. 1–22; Brown 2003, pp. 60–73). Yet paganism remained pervasive, especially in the countryside and the army, and the formal end of public sacrifice lay decades in the future. The empire was Christianizing, not Christian — a society in transition, in which a man might be at once a soldier of Rome and a catechumen of the Church without yet feeling the full force of the contradiction that Martin would later make explicit (see The Cloak of Amiens).

This is the context that gives Martin’s early life its tension. The institutions that formed him — the army, the veteran’s household, the law of hereditary service — belonged to the old order; the allegiance he was choosing belonged to the new. Sulpicius writes the Vita precisely to show how a man bred to the one became wholly given to the other, and he consciously frames Martin’s career so as to set the Christian miles against the Roman one (Stancliffe 1983, pp. 134–148; on this theme see The Miles Christi).

Brought Up at Ticinum

The family did not remain at Sabaria. Sulpicius records that Martin was raised at Ticinum — modern Pavia, in northern Italy — where his father, it seems, was posted or settled (Vita Martini 2; trans. NPNF II/11; Stancliffe 1983, pp. 120–123). It was here, in an Italian provincial town rather than on the Danube frontier, that the boy made his way to the Church and asked to be enrolled among the catechumens, and here that he is said to have already conceived the desire for the ascetic and solitary life: Sulpicius reports that “being yet only twelve years old, he desired to enter on the life of a hermit, and he would have followed up that desire with the necessary vows, had not his as yet too youthful age prevented” (Vita Martini 2; trans. NPNF II/11). The detail is hagiographically shaped — Sulpicius is writing the prehistory of the father of Western monasticism, and he reads the monk backward into the child — but it also tells us that the impulse toward withdrawal preceded, and was frustrated by, the claim the state was about to make on him.

Conscription and the Law of Hereditary Service

That claim came in the form of conscription, and Sulpicius is explicit that it was compelled rather than chosen. Martin, he writes, “was, by the order of the emperor, when he was fifteen years old, enrolled as a soldier, and was kept in military service, first under Constantius, and then under the Caesar Julian” (Vita Martini 2; trans. NPNF II/11). The compulsion was not arbitrary but legal. The late empire bound the sons of veterans to follow their fathers into the army: hereditary military service was a fixed feature of the fourth-century state, enforced by law and designed to keep the legions and cavalry supplied with recruits drawn from established military families (Stancliffe 1983, pp. 123–133; Van Dam 1985, pp. 13–30). As the son of a tribune, Martin fell squarely under this obligation, and Sulpicius presents him as taken into the service against his inclination — the reluctant recruit who would later refuse to fight.

Sulpicius underlines the reluctance: Martin, he says, “gave himself up to the military life,” but did so as one constrained, and “kept himself free from those vices in which that class of men too frequently became involved” (Vita Martini 2; trans. NPNF II/11). The Vita is at pains to show that even within the army Martin lived already as something other than a soldier — abstemious, generous to the point of giving away his pay and provisions, and serving his own attendant rather than being served by him (Vita Martini 2; trans. NPNF II/11). Whether or not every detail is exact, the portrait is coherent with what is known of Christian ambivalence toward military service in the post-Constantinian Church, when the question of whether a baptized Christian could bear arms was still genuinely open and variously answered (Stancliffe 1983, pp. 134–148; on the later refusal at Worms, see The Cloak of Amiens).

A Cavalryman in Gaul

Martin’s unit and posting are not described in technical detail by Sulpicius, but the evidence points to service in the cavalry — the equites of the field army — and to a career spent largely in Gaul, the great frontier command of the western emperors (Stancliffe 1983, pp. 123–133; Van Dam 1985, pp. 13–30). The episode that defines this period, at the gate of Amiens (Ambianum) in northern Gaul, presupposes that Martin was mounted and on the march with a cavalry detachment in a Gallic winter (Vita Martini 3; trans. NPNF II/11). His service under Constantius II and then under the Caesar Julian, whom Constantius sent to Gaul in 355, locates Martin’s soldiering in the western armies during the campaigns along the Rhine frontier of the 350s — though the chronology here interacts with the disputed birth date, since the traditional reckoning would have Martin’s military service spanning the 330s through the 350s, while a later birth compresses it (Stancliffe 1983, pp. 111–133).

What the sources make clear is that Martin’s army years were spent at the edge of the Roman world, in the militarized society of late antique Gaul where the boundary between Roman and barbarian, soldier and civilian, ran through every town and where the army was the central fact of public life (Van Dam 1985, pp. 13–40). It was in this Gaul — not in his native Pannonia nor in the Italy of his upbringing — that Martin would spend almost the whole of his Christian career, first as soldier, then as monk and bishop, until Gaul became the land of his cult (Van Dam 1993, pp. 13–28; on the later career see Marmoutier and Ligugé and Bishop of Tours).

The Catechumen in Uniform

The decisive fact of Martin’s army years, in Sulpicius’s telling, is that he passed through them as a catechumen — a believer enrolled in the Church but not yet baptized, in the manner common in the fourth century, when baptism was frequently deferred until adulthood or later. Sulpicius reports that Martin “was a catechumen” during his service and lived already by a discipline that set him apart from his comrades (Vita Martini 2; trans. NPNF II/11). This in-between status — claimed by Christ but still in the emperor’s pay, drawn to the desert but bound to the cavalry — is the unresolved tension out of which the next, most famous, episode of his life proceeds. The catechumen who shared his cloak at the gate of Amiens was a man already living the contradiction that his baptism and his refusal of arms would shortly bring to its crisis (see The Cloak of Amiens).

For the larger setting of the pre-Schism Western Church to which Martin belonged, see Pre-Schism Church; for Sulpicius and the nature of his testimony, see Sulpicius Severus and the Vita.

References

Sulpicius Severus. The Life of St. Martin (Vita Martini). Trans. Alexander Roberts, in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Series II, Vol. 11. Oxford and New York: Parker / Christian Literature Company, 1894. (Sabaria and Ticinum, the pagan tribune father, the ten-year-old catechumen, conscription at fifteen, service under Constantius and Julian, the catechumen-soldier — all Vita Martini 2.)
Stancliffe, Clare. St. Martin and His Hagiographer: History and Miracle in Sulpicius Severus. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. (Sabaria and Pannonia; the family’s status; hereditary military service; the disputed chronology and the case for a later birth, pp. 111–133; the miles Christi theme, pp. 134–148.)
Van Dam, Raymond. Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. (The militarized society of late Roman Gaul and the place of the army in provincial life, pp. 13–40.)
Van Dam, Raymond. Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. (Gaul as the land of Martin’s career and cult, pp. 13–28.)
Brown, Peter. The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. (The post-Constantinian religious world, pp. 1–22.)
Brown, Peter. The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200–1000. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. (The Christianizing empire after Constantine, pp. 60–78.)