St. Martin walks into the emperor's court to stop a manhunt

TRIER, Gaul, 385 AD — Saint Martin of Tours came into this city during the night and went to the church, to pray and nothing else. He is sixty-nine, and has been bishop of Tours for fourteen years. On the road he had been told not to come any nearer unless he first undertook to keep peace with the bishops living here. He came up from Tours anyway. He had three things to ask the emperor. Two were the lives of men who had served the last emperor. The third, and the one he had made the journey for, was that the officers about to be sent into Spain should not go.

Trier is the seat of the western empire. The legions in Britain proclaimed Maximus emperor two years ago. He crossed into Gaul, the soldiers there accepted him, and he made this city his capital. The emperor he displaced, Gratian, was betrayed by his own troops. Andragathius killed him at Lyons on August 25, 383 AD. Bishops have gathered to the court here from many parts, and stayed.

It is not St. Martin’s first time in the city. He has been in this church before: a father once took hold of his knees here, in front of the people and many bishops, and St. Martin raised the man’s paralysed daughter. Butler says he was obliged to come to Trier often on errands of charity. A Spanish case had been running for five years by the time it reached this court. Priscillian was excommunicated with three other leaders of his party by a synod at Saragossa in 380 AD and made bishop of Ávila afterwards. When a synod at Bordeaux last year deposed his ally Instantius, he appealed over the bishops’ heads to the emperor at Trier. St. Martin was in the city then, on other business — pleading for men condemned to death for having stayed loyal to Gratian. He told Maximus that a church case had no business before a civil judge, and that excommunication by the bishops was punishment enough. He came away with the emperor’s promise that the condemnation would not go as far as blood, and then he left. The case went to the prefect Evodius. Priscillian, his two clerks Felicissimus and Armenius, a layman named Latrocinius and a woman named Euchrocia were beheaded. Today’s column reports the trial, the sentence and what the Church’s own writers have made of them.

The executions were not the end of it. The bishops around the emperor pressed him, and he settled on sending tribunes into the two Spanish provinces. These are officers carrying his own authority, with power over the life and the property of anyone they find. Their orders are to search out heretics and take either their lives or their goods. There was no doubt that such a search would sweep up faithful Catholics as well. A man would be judged by how pale he went when they came for him, or by the clothes he happened to be wearing, rather than by the faith he actually professed. St. Martin’s concern was for the Catholics of those provinces, and also for the heretics.

The bishops here had already got that order out of the emperor. Then, expecting no such news, they learned that St. Martin was nearly at the walls. They lost their nerve and began muttering among themselves. They had been kept in Trier for the case, and they were taking communion daily with the Spanish bishop Ithacius, who had accused Priscillian and pressed the charge to the end. What frightened them was not that St. Martin would argue with them. It was that he would refuse their communion, and that other men would take his refusal as a warrant for their own. So they went to the emperor and arranged for court officials to ride out and meet him with the condition attached. The answer that came back was that he would come among them with the peace of Christ. It gave the bishops nothing to keep him out on.

The objection to him at his election in Tours fourteen years ago was that he was a poor figure for the office: some of the bishops called to consecrate him said he was nothing to look at, badly dressed, his hair unkempt. Since Maximus took the West, St. Martin has kept away from the emperor’s table, saying he could not sit down with a man who had taken one emperor’s kingdom and another emperor’s life.

He went to the palace the day after he arrived. He had a long list of petitions and pressed the three that mattered. Two were men of Gratian’s party who had the conqueror’s anger on them: Narses, an officer of the court, and Leucadius, a governor. The third was the tribunes. He got no answer on the first day, or the second. Most people at the time put the delay down to money: the emperor had his eye on the property of the men in question. The treasury had been emptied by the rulers before him, and he is almost always either expecting a civil war or preparing for one.

While he waited, the bishops he would not communicate with went in to Maximus. They complained that they had been condemned before anyone had heard them. One of their number, Bishop Theognitus, had already passed public sentence against them, and they told the emperor that if St. Martin’s authority now stood behind Theognitus they were finished. St. Martin should never have been let inside the walls, they said. He was no longer merely defending heretics but taking their side against the court. Priscillian’s death had settled nothing, they told Maximus, if St. Martin was to act as his avenger. Then they lay down on the floor in front of the emperor, weeping, and asked him to use his power against this one man. Maximus came close to handing St. Martin the same sentence as the heretics.

He tried another way instead. He sent for St. Martin privately and spoke to him kindly. The heretics, he said, had been condemned in ordinary public trials and not by priests. There was nothing in communion with Ithacius and his party that needed condemning. Bishop Theognitus had broken with the rest out of personal dislike rather than principle, and he was the only one who had. A synod held a few days earlier had found no fault in Ithacius at all. None of it moved St. Martin. The emperor lost his temper and walked out of the room, and executioners were appointed at once for the men St. Martin had come to plead for.

When he heard, he went back to the palace, though by then it was night. His terms were plain. Spare those men, and recall the tribunes already on the road to Spain, and he would take communion with the bishops here. Maximus granted everything, immediately.

The next day St. Felix was ordained bishop of Trier, and St. Martin took communion at the ordination with the rest of them. He judged it better to give way for the moment than to leave men who were about to be executed to their deaths.

The bishops then wanted his signature on it, to put the fact of his communicating beyond argument. They pressed him as hard as they could and could not get it. The day after, he left the city.