MARTINO di TOURS, saint — Figure of St. M. in the theory of saints and martyrs in the church of S. Apollinare Nuovo. Musician of the 6th century — Ravenna.
He had great merits as a pacifier and restorer of Rome after the terrible damage of the preceding age. He respected the city’s autonomy; he rebuilt walls, bridges, and gates, restored churches and palaces; he built a palace at SS. Apostoli, near his family’s homes; he summoned Gentile da Fabriano and Pisanello to paint in the Lateran. He subdued by force, and even more through prudence, the cities of the Patrimony and Bologna, and maintained order there with a firm hand, a new creator of the Papal State. Not overly friendly toward the humanists, he nevertheless had Loschi and Poggio Bracciolini as his secretaries.
The epitaph in the Lateran greets him as temporum suorum felicitas; Enea Silvio Piccolomini called him iusti tenax ac pacis cultor. But Egidio da Viterbo lamented that he had increased the power and wealth of the Church, and luxury at the expense of virtue and honor.
Frugal and simple in his way of life, he opened the way to a deeper corruption of the Curia by failing to eliminate its abuses and introducing men into it who were not all worthy, and inaugurated the sad era of great nepotism, making the Colonna a dangerous power in the Papal State and procuring fiefs for them in the Kingdom; it is true, however, that he received valuable assistance from them in the struggles he had to sustain.
1896-1926; N. Valois, La crise religieuse du XVIᵉ siècle, Parigi 1909; N. Mengozzi, Papa M. V. ed il Concilio ecumenico di Siena, Siena 1918; (A. Mercati), Raccolta di concordati, Roma 1919; Pastor, I: Hefele-Leclercq. VII, pp. 473-669; G. Mollat, s.V. in DThC. XI (1928), coll. 197-202. Giovanni Battista Picotti