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 peacemaker and restorer of Rome after the horrible damages of the preceding age. He respected the city's autonomy; he rebuilt walls, bridges, gates, restored churches and palaces; he built a palace at the SS. Apostoli, near the houses of his family; he summoned Gentile da Fabriano and Pisanello to paint in the Lateran. He subdued by force, and more by shrewdness, the cities of the Patrimony and Bologna, and maintained order there with a firm hand, a new creator of the Papal State. Not too friendly toward the humanists, he nevertheless had as secretaries Loschi and Poggio Bracciolini.
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 its luxury at the expense of virtue and honor.
Frugal and simple in his life, he opened the way to a deeper corruption of the Curia, not removing its abuses and introducing into it men not all worthy, and he 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 had their valuable help in the struggles he had to sustain.
Bibliography4 works
1896-1926; N. Valois, La crise religieuse du XVIᵉ siècle, Paris 1909; N. Mengozzi, Papa M. V. ed il Concilio ecumenico di Siena, Siena 1918; (A. Mercati), Raccolta di concordati, Rome 1919; Pastor, I: Hefele-Leclercq. VII, pp. 473-669; G. Mollat, s.v. in DThC. XI (1928), coll. 197-202.
Giovanni Battista Picotti