The Shrine at Tours

Martin of Tours died at Candes on 8 November 397 and was buried at Tours on 11 November, the day that became his principal feast; his grave grew into one of the greatest pilgrimage centers of the Latin West. About 470 Bishop Perpetuus replaced the modest tomb with a great basilica, and in the later sixth century Gregory of Tours — bishop of the city 573–594 — documented the flourishing cult in his four books On the Miracles of St. Martin and in his History of the Franks, where the saint appears as patron and protector of Tours and as the worker of cures at his tomb. This file traces the shrine from grave to basilica to Merovingian cult-center, presenting the healing-miracles strictly as Gregory’s testimony (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

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

The Death at Candes and the Burial at Tours

The end of Martin’s life is recorded by the man who knew him and wrote his Vita, Sulpicius Severus, in the third of his letters, the Epistula ad Bassulam (Epistula 3). Sulpicius reports that Martin, though already old and failing, traveled to the village of Candes, at the confluence of the Vienne and the Loire in the western reaches of his diocese, to settle a quarrel among the clergy there; falling sick, he knew his end was near, and died at Candes (Sulpicius, Epistula 3; trans. Roberts, NPNF 2nd ser. vol. 11). The letter preserves the saint’s famous deathbed words — that he would not refuse the labor of further living if his people still needed him (“Domine, si adhuc populo tuo sum necessarius, non recuso laborem”) — and describes his death lying on ashes and sackcloth, refusing any softer bed (Sulpicius, Epistula 3; trans. Roberts; Stancliffe 1983). Sulpicius gives no consular date, but the year is fixed by the chronology of his episcopate and by later tradition to 397, and the day of death to 8 November.

What followed the death is itself part of the cult’s origin. According to Sulpicius and the later tradition gathered by Gregory of Tours, the people of Poitiers and the people of Tours disputed the possession of the body, each city claiming the saint as its own; the Touronian clergy carried the corpse off by the Loire, and Martin was brought to Tours, his episcopal see, for burial (Sulpicius, Epistula 3; Gregory, Historia Francorum 1.48; trans. Thorpe 1974). He was buried at Tours on 11 November 397 — the day that the Western Church kept thereafter as his feast, Martinmas — in the Christian cemetery outside the city walls, a date and place attested both by Sulpicius’s letter and by Gregory two centuries later (Gregory, De virtutibus sancti Martini 1, prol.; trans. Van Dam 1993; Stancliffe 1983; Van Dam 1985). The coincidence of the death on 8 November and the burial-feast on 11 November is the well-attested datum at the foundation of the entire cult.

The Tomb Becomes a Cult Center

From the first the grave drew veneration, but in the decades after 397 it was still a modest affair. Gregory reports that the original tomb was marked only by a small oratory, and that Martin’s second successor in the see, Bishop Bricius (Brice), built a little chapel over it (Gregory, Historia Francorum 2.14; De virtutibus sancti Martini 1.6; trans. Van Dam 1993; Van Dam 1993, intro.). What transformed the modest grave into a regional and then a supra-regional shrine was the conviction — already implicit in Sulpicius and made explicit by Gregory — that the saint’s virtus, the power he had wielded in life, remained present and active at the place where his body lay. The cult of Martin’s tomb is thus a textbook case of what Peter Brown analyzed as the late-antique cult of the saints: the holy dead understood not as absent but as praesentia, present at the grave as a patron available to his clients (Brown 1981). Martin, the living wonderworker of Sulpicius’s Vita, became the dead patron of Gregory’s Miracles — and the continuity between the two is the cult’s organizing claim (on the living-saint miracles, see Raising the Dead and Healing).

The Basilica of Bishop Perpetuus (c. 470)

The decisive monumental step was taken by Perpetuus, bishop of Tours from about 458/460 to 488/490. Gregory records that Perpetuus, finding the existing chapel too small for the crowds, pulled it down and raised over the tomb a great basilica — a building Gregory describes with admiration, giving its dimensions (in his account, some 160 feet long, 60 feet wide, and 45 feet high, with 52 windows, 120 columns, and 8 doors) and recording that the saint’s body was solemnly translated into it (Gregory, Historia Francorum 2.14; trans. Thorpe 1974; De virtutibus sancti Martini 1.6; trans. Van Dam 1993). The dedication is traditionally dated to about 470 (Van Dam 1993, intro.; Van Dam 1985). Gregory reports that the translation of the relics into the new basilica was itself attended by wonders, and that the day of the translation (in his telling associated with 4 July) was kept as a feast alongside the November commemorations (Gregory, De virtutibus sancti Martini 1.6; trans. Van Dam 1993). These reports are Gregory’s testimony to the sanctity of the building and the event, related as such (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

The basilica of Perpetuus made Tours one of the great architectural and devotional centers of fifth- and sixth-century Gaul. It set the saint’s tomb at the focus of a building designed for pilgrimage — for crowds moving toward and around the grave — and it fixed the topography of the cult that Gregory would inhabit a century later: the basilica of Saint-Martin outside the walls, distinct from the cathedral within, the two poles of the Christian city of Tours (Van Dam 1985; Brown 1981).

Tours as a Pilgrimage Center of the West

By the sixth century the shrine of Martin was among the foremost pilgrimage destinations of the Latin West, rivaled in Gaul by few and in reputation by the apostolic shrines of Rome themselves. Gregory’s Miracles of St. Martin is, in effect, a register of that pilgrimage: it records the sick, the blind, the lame, the possessed, and the desperate coming to Tours from across Gaul and beyond, keeping vigil at the tomb, and — as Gregory tells it — being healed there (Gregory, De virtutibus sancti Martini, books 1–4, passim; trans. Van Dam 1993). Van Dam’s translation and study lay out how the shrine functioned as a center of healing, oath-taking, asylum, and social arbitration, drawing pilgrims and petitioners into the orbit of the saint and his bishop (Van Dam 1993; Van Dam 1985). The grave at Tours had become, in Brown’s phrase, a place where heaven and earth were joined, and the saint a patron whose favor structured the religious imagination of a whole region (Brown 1981).

Gregory of Tours and De virtutibus sancti Martini

The flourishing of the later cult is known to us above all through one witness: Gregory of Tours, bishop of the city from 573 to 594, himself a devotee of Martin and the custodian of his shrine. Gregory composed four books On the Miracles of the Bishop St. Martin (Libri de virtutibus sancti Martini episcopi), the largest single dossier of a saint’s posthumous miracles to survive from late-antique Gaul (Gregory, De virtutibus sancti Martini; trans. Van Dam 1993). The work is the principal source for the tomb-cult, and its character must be stated plainly: it is Gregory’s testimony, the report of an interested bishop who served the shrine, believed in its power, and wrote in order to magnify it. The wonders it records are therefore set down here as what Gregory attests — what the Miracles claim happened at the tomb — and not as independently established events (METHODOLOGY §3.5; Van Dam 1993; Stancliffe 1983).

So framed, the contents are these. Gregory reports that at Martin’s tomb the blind received sight, the paralyzed walked, fevers broke, and the possessed were freed; that dust scraped from the tomb, wax from its candles, and oil and water that had touched it carried the saint’s healing power away with pilgrims to distant places; and that the saint punished perjurers who swore false oaths at his grave and protected those who took sanctuary in his basilica (Gregory, De virtutibus sancti Martini 1–4, passim; trans. Van Dam 1993). Gregory includes among these reports cures he says he witnessed or experienced personally — his own relief from illness through the saint’s relics, and healings of members of his household and clergy (Gregory, De virtutibus sancti Martini, prol. and books 2–4; trans. Van Dam 1993). The accumulation of such first-person and second-hand reports is what gives the Miracles its documentary texture; it is also what marks it as a partisan source, and both facts belong to the record (Van Dam 1993; Brown 1981).

The miracles of Gregory’s tomb-cult are, significantly, continuous in kind with the wonders Sulpicius had attributed to the living Martin — healings, exorcisms, the rescue of the helpless — so that the dead patron does at his grave what the living holy man had done in the flesh (compare Raising the Dead and Healing; Stancliffe 1983; Van Dam 1993). This continuity is itself a theological claim of the cult: that the virtus of the saint is not extinguished by death but localized at the relics.

Martin as Patron and Protector of Tours

In Gregory’s writings Martin is more than a healer; he is the patron and protector of the city of Tours and, increasingly, of Gaul. Gregory’s History of the Franks is studded with episodes in which the saint defends his city and his church: he reports that Martin’s power shielded Tours and its right of sanctuary against violent kings and counts, that those who plundered the basilica’s lands or violated its asylum were struck down, and that the saint intervened in the affairs of the Merovingian dynasty whose members courted his favor (Gregory, Historia Francorum, e.g. 4.20; 7.21–22; 10.31; trans. Thorpe 1974). The basilica of Saint-Martin was one of the most prized churches of the Frankish kingdoms, a place of asylum, royal benefaction, and political resort, and Gregory — its bishop — writes throughout as the steward of the saint’s patrocinium over the city (Van Dam 1985; Brown 1981).

The Shrine in Merovingian Gaul

By Gregory’s day the shrine at Tours had become a fixed point in the religious and political geography of Merovingian Gaul. Kings and queens of the divided Frankish realms sent gifts, sought the saint’s intercession, and used his church as a place of oath and sanctuary; the basilica’s wealth and immunities made it a power in its own right; and the November feast of Martinmas was among the great festivals of the Gallic year (Gregory, Historia Francorum, passim; De virtutibus sancti Martini; trans. Thorpe 1974 and Van Dam 1993; Van Dam 1985). The political face of this cult — Martin as patron of the Frankish monarchy and the story of his cloak-relic, the cappa — is taken up in the companion file (see Martin and the Frankish Kings). What the present file establishes is the foundation on which that political cult rested: a grave at Tours, a great basilica over it, and a saint believed — on the testimony of Sulpicius and above all of Gregory — to be present and powerful there (METHODOLOGY §3.5; Brown 1981; Van Dam 1993).

See Also

References

  • Sulpicius Severus. Epistula 3 (ad Bassulam, on the death of Martin) and Vita Martini. Trans. Alexander Roberts, A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 2nd ser., Vol. 11. Oxford and New York, 1894. (Martin’s death at Candes; the deathbed words; the dispute over the body and the burial at Tours.)
  • Gregory of Tours. Libri de virtutibus sancti Martini episcopi (The Miracles of the Bishop St. Martin), 4 books. Trans. Raymond Van Dam, in Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. (The tomb-cult; the basilica of Perpetuus and the translation of the relics, 1.6; the healing-miracles and relic-contact cures throughout books 1–4; Gregory’s own reported cures.)
  • Gregory of Tours. The History of the Franks (Decem Libri Historiarum). Trans. Lewis Thorpe. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. (The dispute over the body, 1.48; the basilica of Perpetuus and its dimensions, 2.14; Bricius’s chapel; Martin as protector of Tours, e.g. 4.20, 7.21–22, 10.31.)
  • Brown, Peter. The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. (Tours and Martin as central cases of the cult of the saints; praesentia and patronage at the tomb.)
  • Van Dam, Raymond. Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. (Translation and study of Gregory’s Miracles of St. Martin; the shrine’s functions; the date c. 470 for the basilica.)
  • Van Dam, Raymond. Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. (The topography and politics of the cult of Martin at Tours; the basilica and the city.)
  • Stancliffe, Clare. St. Martin and His Hagiographer: History and Miracle in Sulpicius Severus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. (The death of Martin in Sulpicius’s Epistula 3; the chronology of 397; the relation of Sulpicius’s and Gregory’s portraits.)