CHAPTER 1

“I Acquired the Martyrs”: Bishops, Kings, and the Victory of the Martyrs

When Francis of Assisi warned his brethren that a devotion to humility and submission to God’s will could lead to a painful death, martyrdom was already a thousand years old, and was woven into the fabric of Christian theology, liturgy, and piety. Martyrdom was in many ways the ultimate Christian act. In willingly offering their lives, the martyrs imitated Jesus himself, and after death were crowned with glory and were seated among the first-ranked in heaven. Martyrdom expressed in the most inescapable terms the superiority of heaven over earth, the preference for the eternal over the temporal, spirit over flesh, the divine over the demonic—in short, the death of the martyr was not an expression of defeat, but of complete triumph over the world and its challenges. The Christians of first-century Rome rejoiced that “when Paul had borne witness (μαρτυρήσας, marturēsas) before the rulers, he was set free from the world.”¹ Martyrdom was a claim of power by those with none, a smashing of the chains that held the Christians captive to all that enslaved them. The first stories of martyrdom allowed early Christians to confront the overwhelming power of the Roman Empire, rendering its control over the body to be of no account, and transforming the martyr into a conduit of divine power far greater than what the emperor and his minions could muster, power that extended over death and corruption.

This is the story that both Christians and scholars of religion have told about martyrdom for a very long time. It appeals to us for many reasons: it fulfills the desire to understand what the earliest Christians believed and how they viewed the world; it provides a triumphal response to tyrants and oppressive regimes; and it gives agency to victims of violence. And to some extent, this is an accurate summary. But Christians did not remain powerless for long, and the cult of the martyrs was as much a product of bishops seeking to build up their authority in a wealthy church supported by the Roman emperors as it was of early Christians living under the threat of persecution. The bishops’ use of the martyrs, as Lucy Grig argues, “was not just a matter of harnessing the mysterious pre-existing charisma of the martyr. The martyr had to be ‘made.’”² The martyr as miracle worker and glory-filled vehicle of divine power was particularly a creation of a Christianity that had already triumphed over its perceived opponent. When Christians read about or heard of martyrs smiting their persecutors with boils or with a feculent explosion of their bowels, it was because paganism was already dead—at least in the eyes of the triumphant Christian community. The martyr was a victor in a war that had already been won. The triumphalism of the martyr account that became standard in medieval Christian communities stood in contrast to the earliest stories of the martyrs, which focused far less on manifestations of divine power. Instead, they set their sights on the more human display of defiance, exemplified by the bold assertion of Christian truth before non-Christian judges and tribunals. Third-century Christians did not imagine victory over pagan Roman authority happening in this world; they sought only to valorize opposition to it. The significance of this distinction comes in how we understand the miracles ascribed to the martyrs. Traditionally, they have been read as an expression of resistance to persecution by a powerless community. We should instead see in them the confidence of a victorious one.

The Franciscans, strangely enough, found themselves narrating their martyrdoms much as early Christians had. The language of martyrdom was appealing because it allowed members of an increasingly wealthy and powerful institution to cast themselves as humble, abused, and despised on earth but in glory with God in heaven. Franciscans had a long and rich tradition of martyrological thinking to draw upon, and the religious imperative to use it. Yet Franciscan attempts to harvest the power of the martyrs or “to make martyrs” did not match that of the bishops of old. Although a powerful and influential institution, the Franciscan order was beset by internal division and crises in the fourteenth century, which contributed to the friars’ sense of their own oppressed status. Fourteenth-century Franciscans operated in a world where the papacy had effectively monopolized the power to make martyrs, and was disinclined to do so on behalf of the Franciscans. Contemporary Christians may also have found it difficult to imagine Franciscans as despised and oppressed. So why did the Franciscans choose to abandon a millennium-old tradition of triumphal martyrology to go back to the qualities found in the earliest accounts? Friars chose to narrate the passiones of those who died in Muslim lands precisely because Christianity had not triumphed over Islam. Like Rome in the perception of early Christians, the earthly power the Franciscan martyrs opposed was not yet defeated, nor could its defeat be effectively encompassed within the martyrdom narrative. And when we remember that Islam sometimes served as a cypher for the institutional church, it is not surprising that Franciscans did not imagine its disappearance within their own dispensation.

Suffering and Dying in Early Christianity

Martyrdom is now synonymous with death, but its original connotations were with the messy business of living. The classical Greek word martys (μάρτυς), meaning witness, conjured up the world of the law courts in the Hellenistic world in which Christianity was born.³ The earliest followers of Jesus used it in a similar sense; they were witnesses testifying to the ultimate trial of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. Only a hundred years after the death of Jesus did the word begin to signify testimony not just of words but also of acts, particularly the act of dying voluntarily.⁴

Early Christians saw suffering and dying as central to their salvation. One of the earliest martyrs, Ignatios, bishop of Antioch (d. c. 108), proclaimed: “I love to suffer.”⁵ Paul, the author of the earliest texts written by a follower of Jesus, emphasized that through his suffering, death, and resurrection, Jesus defeated Sin and Death, and by sharing in that suffering his followers would also triumph over them.⁶ Paul’s own suffering served as a sign of his authenticity as an apostle, and he clearly saw suffering and dying as meritorious acts that enabled Christians to share in Christ’s own suffering and death, and united them with God in their true home, heaven. He did not, however, speak of those who died as martyrs, nor did he ever make clear what kind of suffering and death was necessary to participate with Christ in eternal life.⁷ To be a follower of Jesus, then, was to suffer. Only through sharing in Christ’s suffering and sacrifice could Christians then participate in his resurrection and eternal life in heaven and become, like him, sons and daughters of God. This did not mean that Christians needed to be crucified in order to achieve resurrection, but that through a variety of ways, both physically and metaphorically, suffering led to salvation.

Martyrological themes were woven into both Hellenistic Jewish and early Christian literature, including what would become the canonical New Testament. The Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles portray both Jesus and Stephen as martyrs avant la lettre—their violent deaths transformed them into heavenly beings.⁸ In the Gospel of Mark, the earliest of the gospels, Jesus called upon his followers to “take up the cross and follow me,” an invitation which, in the light of Jesus’ subsequent crucifixion, suggested that Jesus’ followers would also have to die violently to follow him. Furthermore, Jesus warned that preceding the return of the Son of Man, his followers would be persecuted, tested, and tried by suffering, and only through their endurance would they earn salvation.⁹ The stories of torture and execution of Eleazar and the mother with her seven sons in the Hellenistic Jewish account 4 Maccabees reveal that the combination of suffering and salvation were not exclusively Christian.

For Christians of the second century, a martyr’s death was not simply an expression of fidelity; it was a sacrifice, and therefore, like the offerings of animals at the temple of Jerusalem or Jesus’ own death, it conveyed blessings upon the community in whose name the martyr died.¹⁰ The author of the Second Letter to Timothy, writing in the name of Paul, declared that “I am already on the point of being sacrificed; the time of my departure has come.”¹¹ Death, the pseudonymous Paul made clear, is life for Christians, for in living in the body Christians are separated from God, and in death they will be reunited. The early martyrdom of Polycarp spoke of his death as “martyrdom on the Gospel model,” a model established by Jesus himself.¹² In the third century, Origen reminded his fellow Christians: “God once said to Abraham: ‘Get out of your land’ (γη̃). Perhaps it will be shortly said to us: ‘Get out of the earth (γη̃) altogether.’”¹³ By paralleling Abraham’s journey to the Holy Land with the passage of the Christian to heaven, Origen imbued life and death with a series of implicit and explicit values. The Christian’s birthplace, earth, was linked to Abraham’s birthplace, Ur. By following God’s command, Abraham was blessed by God. Abraham was brought to Canaan, which God gave to Abraham’s offspring; the Promised Land for Christians is heaven. Origen’s biblical parallel then suggests that for Christians to remain attached to the land of their birth (earth) would be to refuse to obey the command of God, while traveling to heaven (dying) brings the Christian to the land God has promised and to God’s blessing and reward. To make the point clear, Origen added: “I think that they love God with all their soul who with a great desire to be in union with God withdraw and separate their soul not only from the earthly body but also from everything material.”¹⁴

The book of Revelation elevated martyrdom even further, showing martyrs to be a central part of God’s providential plan. The last book of the New Testament to be written and the last to be accepted as canonical, the book of Revelation described the vision John received of the coming tribulations that will precede the return of Jesus to the earth to confront his satanic rival. Just as Jesus had warned his followers in the Gospel of Mark, the time before his return would be a time of suffering. In his vision, John saw “the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne”; this was not just a testament to the martyred dead, for John further understood that “they were told to rest a little longer, until the number of their fellow servants and their brethren should be complete, who had been killed as they themselves had been.”¹⁵ The number of Christians who had been killed was not simply a function of earthly persecution, but a part of God’s plan; the number was predetermined, and Jesus would not return until their number was complete. As read by the living, this must surely have functioned as a comfort to those whose loved ones had been killed, and even as an incitement for Christians to die, in order that they might be numbered among the predestined saved and might hasten the return of Jesus.

Given this evidence, why do scholars claim that it is only in the fourth century that “martyrs are made”? Early Christian texts are replete with martyrological significance, but the martyrs themselves played a relatively small role. It is only in the fourth century that the individual figure of the martyr took center stage. Nevertheless, the surviving pre-Constantinian accounts of martyrdom give us the names and brief accounts of the martyrdoms of dozens of Christians. These accounts range from the brief and narratively spare to the rhetorically and imaginatively complex, and are difficult to date and categorize. Most accounts survive in ninth-century manuscripts at the earliest, and while they describe martyrdoms that may have occurred as early as 108 CE, the accounts themselves have been read, edited, and copied by generations of Christians. Scholars often implicitly assume that a new genre of literature dedicated to the martyrs, known as acta or passio, emerged in the second and third centuries: acta was a term that linked the martyrdom to a quasi-official transcript of a judicial hearing, and passio evoked the suffering (from Latin patior, to suffer) of the martyrs, a meaning that lingers in the name given to the ultimate account of suffering, the passion of Jesus Christ. The earliest acta et passiones, however, were preserved within other genres, not as distinct pieces of literature. The Acts of Ptolemaeus and Lucius, for example, were contained within the philosophical treatise the Apologies of Justin Martyr (d. ca. 165), and many others have been taken from the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius of Caesarea.¹⁶ The work of scholars from the seventeenth-century Bollandists to their twentieth-century successor Hippolyte Delahaye has culminated in collections that gather together the acta widely accepted to date from the earliest period; particularly valued have been those that may date from the period before the first empire-wide persecutions of Decius (c. 250).¹⁷

These collections (those of Musurillo and Bastiaensen being the most widely cited) have profoundly shaped the way martyrdom has been studied.¹⁸ They present their readers with a corpus that fulfills the desire for the earliest and most primitive acts of the martyrs. Excluded from such assemblages were accounts of figures like Thecla, who was widely popular in Late Antiquity and was praised as the “the protomartyr” despite having died peacefully, protected by God and having little discernible historical status. Also excluded were the apostles, most of whom were also believed to have died as martyrs. Their apocryphal narratives emphasize that status; however, such accounts, while contemporary with other early martyrological sources, have been deemed too tainted with fictional details to be included among the “true” acta and passiones.¹⁹ Yet this distinction suggests that the acta were somehow transcripts of historical events, rather than heavily fictionalized narratives that were often written at a great remove from the events they purport to describe.

Few of even the earliest martyr acts can be read purely within a pre-Constantinian or pre-Decian context. Indeed, it is not clear whether we even have the tools to determine what is early and what is later. Historians have often relied on characteristics of the narrative, such as the presence of miracles and narrative complexity to judge, but it is unclear whether these are reliable markers. Scholarship has narrowed the field down to just seven acta that could be dated to the middle of the third century or earlier, suggesting that they were in fact the transcripts of the trials themselves.²⁰ But Gary Bisbee has compared the form of the earliest acta to preserved transcripts of other Roman trials, particularly two of the presumed oldest acta, those of Justin and Polycarp, and found that neither can be called copies of an official record (commentarius). About Polycarp, Bisbee simply concluded, “If the author of the Martyrdom of Polycarp did possess a commentarius of Polycarp’s trial, which is doubtful, the commentarius-form would have been inimical to his intent.”²¹ Éric Rebillard has recently published a new collection of early martyrdoms, based not on uncertain claims of authenticity, but on two criteria: the martyrdom occurred before 260, and the text is independently attested by either Eusebius or Augustine. The result is a slightly expanded collection of eleven texts, which still excludes the apocryphal acts of the apostles.²² The result is that our understanding of the values and significance of martyrdom in early Christian communities has been skewed by an overemphasis on “what happened” rather than on how martyrdom was actually discussed and valued in those communities.

Third-century accounts of martyrdom did not dramatize suffering and death—instead, they dramatized the choice of the martyr to confront the authority and power of the persecutor. Alison Elliott noted that “the climatic center of the passio was not the moment of death but the interrogation scene in which tyrant and martyr face each other in public in the courtroom.”²³ These confrontations exist in one form or another in nearly all the early accounts. Sometimes they were framed around the power of the martyrs to identify themselves as a Christian against the various labels of the Roman authorities, sometimes around religious differences, but they all allowed the martyrs to speak in their own voices—that is, as given by the composer of the martyrdom. The martyrs could thus articulate their own beliefs and self-identification in a way that framed the confrontation with imperial authority on the terms that the author or community wished to use to highlight their difference from the Romans. One of the most common contrasts the martyrs sought to elucidate was between the God “who made the heavens and the earth”²⁴ and the pagan gods, variously dismissed as only made of stone, or as images of dead men, or as demons.²⁵

The martyrs also compared the temporary suffering of their coming torture and deaths with either the eternal torture of the damned in the afterlife,²⁶ or contrasted it to the eternal salvation they were winning. Apollonius argued that Christians offer “a pure and unbloodied sacrifice … on behalf of the spiritual and rational images that have been disposed by God’s providence to rule over the earth,”²⁷ in contrast to the bloody sacrifices offered to the irrational idols of the Romans. The debate for Maximilian was between serving Christ and serving the world; having been sealed by baptism, he could not accept the lead seal that would induct him into the Roman army.²⁸ Julius the Veteran had the opportunity to explain his beliefs about Jesus to the prefect Maximus, who thought it foolish to follow a dead, crucified man over the living emperors,²⁹ while Phileas taught his torturer about the resurrection of the body.³⁰ Most accounts tended to use a shared language of sacrifice and justice.³¹ Such disputations grew less central as the passiones were rewritten in Late Antiquity and the early medieval period, but they reemerged in Franciscan texts as friars grappled with describing a confrontation with a worldly power they could not overcome.

Acquiring the Martyrs: Bishops and Power in Late Antiquity

Once Christianity became legally established and imperially patronized under Emperor Constantine (312–336), Christians in the Roman Empire generally no longer faced the threat of (or the opportunity for) martyrdom. Perhaps more importantly, imperial and aristocratic wealth and influence began to flow into Christian communities, making them socially and physically visible for the first time. The martyrdoms that did occur in this period, such as those in Persia or among the Donatists of North Africa, generally did not become part of the martyrological tradition of the Latin church.³²

By the late fourth century, the connection between the martyrs and their community began to be mediated through the figure of the bishop, particularly in the Latin West. Where once they symbolized the resistance of the citizen of heaven to the demonic powers of the earth, the martyrs now became the conduit of episcopal power, emblematic of the growing institutional reach of the church; the bishop became the protégé of the martyr.³³ As Ambrose, bishop of Milan proclaimed: “Because I do not merit being a martyr, I acquired the martyrs.”³⁴ The bishop could deploy the martyrs to build up the reputation of the local community, fight heresy,³⁵ and teach doctrine.³⁶ The signal virtue of the martyrs became not defiance of worldly authority, but obedience.³⁷ In this, the bishops were mimicking the use of martyrs as signs of imperial power; the martyrs became important in the city of Rome, for example, only after Constantine and his successors had built lavish shrines in their honor. As Jean Guyon has argued: “It is not the basilica that was created for the martyrs, but rather it was the basilicas that created the martyrs.”³⁸ As the martyr became a bulwark of institutional authority, the martyr’s once fierce expression of free will and personal identity were replaced by expressions of obedience and charity.³⁹ Ambrose could imagine them as his bodyguards: “Let everyone know the kind of defenders I need, those who can fight back but are not wont to attack.”⁴⁰ Large, mosaicked basilicas were built over martyrs’ tombs and places of death, their passiones read aloud in public liturgies, their virtues offered as models in sermons, and their mortal remains publicly collected, adored, and exchanged as precious relics.⁴¹ Bishops were central in all these activities.

Martyr stories in the post-Constantinian era elaborated on earlier narratives or were composed afresh. The passiones of the martyrs became longer and narratively more elaborate, the descriptions of suffering and torture more detailed, and the miracles more astonishing. The description of gruesome torture was rooted both in the Christian tradition, which valorized suffering as following the example of Jesus, and also in one of the assumptions of Roman law: that torture produced truth.⁴² The more extreme the torture, the more assured one was of the truth being asserted—thus the martyrs’ testimony to the ultimate truth, the word of God, narratively required the most extreme torture to match the superlativeness of the truth revealed.

Authors of fourth- and fifth-century passiones also showed greater interest in demonstrations of divine power, both during the martyrs’ suffering and after their death. Even early stories made clear that God intervened on earth for God’s friends. Whereas God once simply bore the pain of the martyrs, in later accounts the wounds of the saints miraculously heal, swords fail to sever holy heads, and the flesh of the martyrs becomes impervious to flame. The martyr Romanus continued to lecture the judge on the superiority of Christian belief to Roman superstition even after his tongue had been surgically removed;⁴³ the sword of the executioner could not penetrate Saint Cecilia’s skin after three attempts; Sergius ran nine miles in boots lined with nails, and upon arrival told his persecutor, “Your punishments are not bitter to me, but are sweeter than honey from the comb.”⁴⁴ Not only did God protect the holy flesh of the martyrs, but in the post-Constantinian accounts God punished those who tortured them. Persecutors died gruesome deaths. Furthermore, the conversion of those who viewed the martyrs was also a sign of the martyr’s triumph; those who gathered to mock the martyrs as they died praised them instead—a feature that appeared in pre-Constantinian accounts as well, but is noticeably lacking in later Franciscan accounts.

These miracles mark a profound shift in martyrological thinking. Whereas the triumphal death of the martyrs once demonstrated their superiority to the material world and their return to their true home in heaven, the emphasis on miracles made clear that the rightful place of the martyrs was both in heaven and on earth, a point that was vital to the cult of martyr relics promoted by bishops. Victory was achieved not only through leaving the world, but also by punishing those who had persecuted the martyr. This, of course, was a reflection of the fact that the martyrs were triumphant on earth. The readers or audience of the passio had the dominance of Christianity confirmed; the triumph of the martyr over her persecutor prefigured the triumph of the church over paganism. As the cross became a symbol of Christ’s victory over death and a sign of imperial victory over the enemies of the Christianized Roman Empire, martyrdom became a stand-in for imperial victory over the enemies of both church and empire. This post-Constantinian type of martyrdom became the dominant model for medieval Christians, one with which Franciscans were familiar, yet chose to reject.⁴⁵

As martyrs and their passiones became part of the foundations of the emerging institutional church, the desire to be a martyr became one of the signal virtues of the newest heroes of the Christian community—monks. Living lives of perfection that in an earlier era might have culminated in martyrdom, ascetics in the post-Constantinian era were lauded by their admirers and hagiographers as having the “desire for martyrdom.” Most famously, Anthony of Egypt desired to die as a martyr, at least in the imagination of his hagiographer, Athanasios of Alexandria, “but he was not willing to turn himself in.”⁴⁶ He went so far as to disobey the command of the governor of Alexandria that all monks should leave the city, yet he was not arrested or punished. Like Francis of Assisi much later, God preserved him for a greater purpose, but part of the lesson intended by Athanasios, an archbishop much concerned with the maintenance of proper authority and hierarchy within the Christian community, was that God chose the martyr—the martyr could not make the decision to die. Obedience to God’s will marked the saint, rather than fulfillment of the saint’s own spiritual goals.

The trope of desiring martyrdom was a successor to an older debate about voluntary martyrdom. The topsy-turvy logic of martyrdom could lead to its logical conclusion: Christians volunteering for death. Ignatius of Antioch, on his way to Rome to be executed around 108 CE, insisted that the Christian community there not intervene on his behalf. He begged the Roman Christians to “spare him” so that the beasts of the arena might become his sarcophagus.⁴⁷ Saturus, one of the companions of Perpetua, also voluntarily handed himself over to the Roman authorities for execution.⁴⁸ In contrast, the martyrdom of Polycarp mentions another would-be martyr named Quintus, who “forced himself and some others to come forward voluntarily,”⁴⁹ but then was persuaded by the magistrate to sacrifice to the gods. Self-selection of the martyr in this case led to damnation, not salvation.⁵⁰ Yet, in the same account, Germanicus was praised for “forcibly pulling” the animal who would kill him onto himself. The martyrdom of the archbishop of Carthage, Cyprian, put it plainly: “Our discipline forbids anyone to surrender voluntarily.”⁵¹

Volunteers for martyrdom nevertheless were common; the martyr Euplus came to the prefect’s chamber to shout “I want to die; I am a Christian,” waving a gospel-book to boot.⁵² Such figures were generally not seen as suicides, a concept that did not exist in antiquity as a negative or pathological act. Stories of extreme martyrdom could, however, be an effective means of criticizing other Christians. As Ismo Dunderberg has argued, “All kinds of Christians could be unfavorably disposed towards martyrdom, if it was experienced by someone not belonging to their own in-group.”⁵³ The martyr Montanus urged that heretics should understand the blessing of the martyrs to be a testament to the authenticity of Catholicism.⁵⁴ The desire for martyrdom (unachieved) became an attribute of sanctity and orthodoxy, rather than a statement about a desire to die.

Yet, amid persecution and death, martyrdom could have an interior significance separate from physical suffering and death. For Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–c. 215), martyrdom was central to a truly Christian life, not just death. Indifference to the material world and a continual reflection on death made the true martyr, not bloody suffering and a public execution.⁵⁵ Martyrdom was the “extension of a virtuous way of life” that every Christian should seek.⁵⁶ Christians frequently spiritualized or interiorized martyrdom, a gesture that allowed the language of martyrdom to expand beyond physical death. But it also severed the vital connection of the martyrs to the community who proclaimed their glory. Martyrdom might exist in the life lived in purity, but it was a private martyrdom, unseen, unsung, and unremembered.⁵⁷ Thirteenth-century Franciscan discourse on martyrdom often embraced this perspective as part of the tradition of withdrawal and eremeticism. Martyrdom was not necessarily about death, but about preparing the individual for mystical union with God.

Martyrs in the Early Medieval World

By the seventh century, the stories of the martyrs and their festivals provided the annual calendar for Christian communities from Ireland to Mesopotamia. The Coptic calendar began with the Diocletianic persecution of 284 CE, and even in Ireland where there were few martyrs or martyr cults, the rhythm of the year marched to the meter of the martyrs.⁵⁸ So widespread was the influence of martyrial culture that one historian has spoken of the “unstoppable momentum of martyr cult.”⁵⁹ Collections of martyr accounts, both martyrologies and passionaries, circulated and became essential items in monastic libraries.⁶⁰ Although bishops attempted to make the cult of the martyrs a handmaiden to episcopal authority, both lay and clerical enthusiasm defeated their attempts to monopolize them. Gregory the Great famously saw “the moral risks of devotions to figures as defiant and as violent as the martyrs.”⁶¹ Martyrdom was nevertheless the ne plus ultra of sanctity; the accounts about figures as important as Ambrose needed to explain why the saint was not also a martyr, or alternatively had to show a strong desire to be one.⁶²

If the creation of the cult of the martyrs was in part driven by the need to build up the institution of the church and cement episcopal authority, in the early Middle Ages we see kings (alongside continuing episcopal involvement) deploying the martyrs as a way to extend royal authority. Under the aegis of the Carolingian Empire, martyr cults became part of an imperial policy of Christianization, expressed most brutally in Saxony. Carolingian ecclesiastical councils enjoined that churches should be sanctified by the placement of relics in the altars of newly consecrated churches. While Christianization in northern Europe did produce some martyrs, such as Boniface, for the most part northern France and Germany were a landscape barren of martyrs and the sanctified landscape they produced.⁶³ Relics thus needed to be imported from lands that had long been Christian—that is, the Mediterranean world. The church building, the community that worshipped in it, and the surrounding landscape were all sanctified through the martyr—and furthermore, the legitimacy of Carolingian imperialism was also guaranteed by substituting the “charisma” of Rome and the papacy for the sacral kingship of the deposed Merovingians.⁶⁴ For much of northern Europe in the early medieval period, sanctity was tinged with a distinctly foreign hue.⁶⁵ Of the sixty recorded relic translations to Saxony between the eighth and tenth centuries, one-third came from Rome; the remainder came from Francia.⁶⁶ Again, the martyrs became the foot soldiers of institutional power. As Janet Nelson explained, “The Franks now see themselves as the special custodians of the martyrs—and the martyrs as the special custodians of the Franks.”⁶⁷

Evangelization and Conversion

The hagiographers of the Carolingian era forged what became an enduring link between martyrdom and evangelization,⁶⁸ a link Franciscans both exploited and undermined. The connection between the two can seem natural in the modern imagination. The first great Latin theologian, Tertullian (c. 155–c. 240), famously claimed that blood was the seed of Christians, but he did not mean that martyrs were evangelists.⁶⁹ It was the heroic death of the martyrs that was inspirational, not their preaching. We see a shift beginning in the fifth or sixth century, with martyrs converting their persecutors with not just fortitude and miracles, but also through preaching. But the martyrs were not preachers prior to their arrests; it followed upon persecution. Thus, the apostolic model was turned on its head; whereas the apostles preached Christian truth, and therefore were persecuted, the martyrs were persecuted, and then preached, their words restricted to the courtroom or the torture chamber.⁷⁰

Nevertheless, Christians and scholars of Christianity have long seen Christianity as a distinctive religion because of the assumption that Christians seek to convert through preaching. Yet we have little evidence of preaching as a primary means of conversion in Antiquity or the Middle Ages. Preaching was often a contributing factor in conversion; Augustine found that Ambrose’s sermons on the Hebrew Bible removed many of his doubts about Christianity, while several hundred years later, the young Jewish merchant Judah was impressed by the sermons of the bishop of Münster. But in both cases, it took something else to tip the protagonists into the full embrace of Christianity. For Augustine, it was bibliomancy (the reading of the Bible at random for guidance), while for Judah it was the prayers of two pious female recluses.⁷¹

While few sources record any historical individuals becoming Christian through preaching, many record stories of effective preachers, and in many cases, they were also martyrs. Jesus, of course, was the model: he preached, converted many, and was killed for his message. The canonical Acts of the Apostles continued that story with Peter and Paul, whose deaths were implied but not described. Other acts of the apostles were written in the second and third centuries, describing the successful preaching and travels of the apostles, often featuring ascetic themes and concluding in martyrdom. The earliest martyrs, in contrast, were not preachers (though later tradition saw the apostles as the first of the martyrs). Nevertheless, many early passiones featured the conversion of onlookers (often guards or soldiers), astonished by the martyrs’ fortitude and divine glory shining forth.

The once disparate roles of preacher and martyr became in some respects fused in the Carolingian era, and martyrs became central actors in a story in which Christians embarked on the conversion of the known world. The Christianization of northern Europe was often conceptualized as a continuation of a process begun by Constantine (and his mother Helena). But the spread of Christianity under Constantine was linked to something else—Christian military victory in the world. Early medieval stories of the saints emphasized the power of Christ in this world, not just in the next. The saints healed the sick and crippled after their death; Christ punished those who stole Christian holy books, and rewarded those he favored with victory in battle, even if they were not yet Christian. Olaf, the pagan king of the Swedes, and his army sought divine guidance after a significant defeat in his war with the people of Curland (now part of modern Latvia); they cast lots but could find no god to help them. In desperation, they turned to Christ, who gave them victory.⁷² This kind of triumphalist narrative, which drew upon earlier Christian models, could then proudly portray Christianization as a kind of supra-imperial set of victories by Christ, the apostles, and the martyrs. In the words of the anonymous ninth-century Saxon author of the account of the translation of the relics of Saint Vitus:

After the passion and resurrection of our Lord Savior, after the triumphs of the apostles and victories of the martyrs, at length the King of Kings and the Lord of strength then returned peace to his church after the enemies of peace were vanquished, so that those very kings … whose ancestors killed [the martyrs] visited their tombs. And this victory of Christ, though it leapt among the Romans first, pierced the tribe of the Lombards and more gloriously undertook to triumph in Francia, attacked the Spanish, besieged the British, subjected the tribe of the English; and the Saxons themselves, who were kin of the English, bowed their necks with devout mind, [though] admittedly compelled.⁷³

Here, then, earthly victory and heavenly victory are not really different from one another, nor is one superior to the other—spiritual victory is simply the antecedent to worldly triumph.

But even in the Carolingian world, martyrdom was contested and placed in opposition to evangelization. The paradigmatic missionary-martyr of the Carolingian age was Boniface, whose passio and cult served as a model for generations of saints and their hagiographers.⁷⁴ Born in Anglo-Saxon England as Winfrith, he was posthumously hailed as the “apostle to Germany” and was proclaimed a martyr after dying in 754 while evangelizing among the pagan Frisians; nevertheless, Boniface spent the greater part of his career reforming the church and Christianizing the already baptized.⁷⁵ His tomb at the monastery of Fulda became a popular pilgrimage site soon after his entombment. Yet the great Carolingian scholar (and fellow Anglo-Saxon) Alcuin rejected the linking of martyrdom and mission embodied so prominently in Boniface. Ian Wood has argued that Alcuin strove in his vitae and sermons to minimize the centrality of martyrdom in hagiographic discourse, and to elevate the status of preaching. Thus, in the vita of Willibrord, Alcuin passed over the martyrdom of one of the saint’s companions in a single sentence without ever naming the victim,⁷⁶ and argued about Willibrord himself that “God preserved him for the salvation of others, so that he might be honored by the greater glory of preaching than if he had been crowned by martyrdom alone.”⁷⁷ Nor did Alcuin attribute to Willibrord even the desire for martyrdom. Alcuin was not alone in valuing evangelization over martyrdom; in many ways he was following the model established by the Venerable Bede, who had been the teacher of Alcuin’s own teacher.

The beating heart of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People was evangelization, as Walter Carruthers Sellar and Robert Julian Yeatman satirized in 1066 and All That: “The conversion of England was thus effected by the landing of St. Augustine in Thanet, and other places, which resulted in the country being overrun by a Wave of Saints.”⁷⁸ Bede’s heroes were often saints but rarely martyrs—indeed, his bishops and evangelists were noticeably willing to flee when their budding communities no longer enjoyed royal favor. Mellitus and Justus, sent from Rome to help Augustine in his efforts, fled from the East Saxon kingdom after the death of their patron, Saebert; they settled in Francia, deciding “by common consent that they should all return to their own country and serve God with a free conscience, rather than remain fruitlessly among these barbarians who had rebelled against the faith.”⁷⁹ Similarly, Paulinus, bishop of York, fled back to Canterbury and became the bishop of Rochester after the death of his king, Edwin. The heroic dead in Bede were not the evangelists, but the kings; Oswald of Northumbria is the most obvious example. Bede claimed that the site of his death at the hands of infidels became a place of miraculous healing and veneration, and his holy fame spread far beyond England.⁸⁰ Bede saw Christianity working not in opposition to the world as the ancient logic of martyrdom suggested, but in concert with royal and imperial power. Thus, martyrdom and mission were part of the same inexorable process of Christian victory, and martyrdom could as easily be the attribute of kings as of saints.

Martyrs in Muslim Lands

It is lamentably easy to forget that the history of Christianity for its first thousand years was a story in which Europe played a minor role. The cities and lands with the largest Christian populations came under Muslim rule in the course of the seventh century, including the ancient centers of Christianity—Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Antioch. Just as early Christians had used martyrdom as a way to tell stories in which Christians were victors despite the humiliation of Roman persecution, so too did Christians under Islamic rule use martyrdom to make sense of Muslim military triumph over Christians, and the subsequent relegation of Christians to second-class status. But Christians had a protected status under Islamic law as dhimmis (those under the protection of a dhimma, a treaty) that was quite unlike their position outside the law in the Roman Empire in the pre-Constantinian era. Christians were thus rarely persecuted for being Christians; nevertheless, the same law that protected their religious identity also restricted their ability to build new churches, perform public processions, or attempt to win new converts. In response to the sense of defeat and the ambiguous status of Christian communities, a new genre of martyrdom was born, which bore a close resemblance to Franciscan passiones.

Neomartyrs, as such Christians are sometimes called, did not die as part of systematic persecution, but as a result of a direct confrontation with the dominant authority initiated by the martyr.⁸¹ In some cases, the martyrs were Muslims who had converted or reconverted to Christianity, an act that contravened Islamic law.⁸² In others, however, they were Christians executed for insulting the prophet Muhammad, such as Petros of Capitolias, a Melkite (Greek Orthodox) priest who was executed in 715,⁸³ or many of the forty-eight martyrs of Córdoba, who between 851 and 860 were martyred for breaking Islamic law in the same way.⁸⁴ A more conventional martyr from al-Andalus, though less historically attested, was the child martyr Pelagius. Pelagius (to the extent that he was a historical actor at all) died around 925, killed at the behest of the Umayyad emir (not yet caliph) ‘Abd al-Raḥmān III (912–961). The emir was taken by the thirteen-year-old boy’s beauty, and when he refused to submit to the emir’s seduction and convert, he was tortured and killed. His story took the traditional tropes of the female virgin-martyr and applied them to a boy. He was the same age as many of the well-known female virgin-martyrs (such as Agnes of Rome). Like the martyrs of Córdoba, no miracles marked his suffering and death, nor did his death inspire any converts.⁸⁵

The Córdoban martyrs are useful to consider in greater detail because they share many qualities with the Franciscan martyrs of several hundred years later.⁸⁶ The forty-eight martyrs who died over the course of nine years came from varied backgrounds. Some were priests, monks, or nuns; others were layfolk. While most were decapitated for insulting Islam, others died as apostates—that is, they were de jure or de facto Muslims, and were executed for abandoning Islam. Some had never identified as Muslims but were legally so because their fathers were Muslim—yet they were raised in the faith of their Christian mothers as a result of particular circumstances. A few were even visitors from other lands, such as Georgios, a monk from the monastery of Mar Saba outside of Bethlehem in Palestine.

The principal advocate for the dead Christians, Eulogius, was a contemporary who had known some of the martyrs personally and who eventually died a martyr himself. Indeed, it was through his composition of their passiones and advocacy for their sanctity that the dead were made known to Christians both in Spain and elsewhere. He was in part motivated to write to counter critics of the dead within the local Christian community, who pointed out that the deaths of the Córdobans looked little like those of the martyrs of the Roman era. There were few miracles, and little evidence of the raging persecuting tyrant who made the choice between life and fidelity so stark. The Cordoban dead had not only to profess their Christian faith, but also to denigrate the beliefs of Muslims in order to be arrested and executed. Nor were the martyrs subjected to the torture that featured so prominently in earlier passiones.

Eulogius responded to the criticisms with various strategies: he cited Gregory the Great, arguing that the lack of miracles was not a sign of a lack of sanctity and showed that voluntary martyrdom had long been Christian practice.⁸⁷ He promoted the Córdoban dead as a different kind of hero than those of the Roman era. The glory of the martyrs shone brightest not through miracles but through their example of stalwart fidelity to Christianity. The martyr was no longer a conduit of divine power, a being who transcended the division between heaven and earth, but a hero whose fortitude embodied the determined resistance of the Christian community to the dark power of this world. The only escape lay in the hope of the bright eternal paradise of the hereafter.

The parallels to the later Franciscan martyrs are inescapable. They share the lack of persecution, the absence of miracles, and the disinterest in torture.⁸⁸ But the connection between the two groups of martyrs was not a direct one. Few of the stories of the neomartyrs made it to western Europe in the medieval period; the exception is those of the Córdoban martyrs, a number of whom were included in the ninth-century martyrology of Usuard, whose text was among the most widespread martyr collections in medieval Europe, and which became fundamental to the sixteenth-century Roman liturgy of the church.⁸⁹ Nevertheless, the full accounts of the Córdoban passiones were not known until the sixteenth century, when Eulogius’s passiones were rediscovered.⁹⁰ Rather, the similarities between them arise from their shared context: the promoters of both the Córdoban and Franciscan martyrs struggled to gain attention and devotion in a context which many Christians felt did not fit what they expected of the martyrs. Furthermore, they shared the struggle to shape Islam and Muslims into a persecuting force in the eyes of their fellow Christians: this was surprisingly difficult despite the unrelentingly negative portrayal of Islam in most Christian sources. Perhaps more significantly, they were constrained by the reality that a story claiming victory over Islam in this world would ring false; readers in both the ninth and fourteenth centuries clearly knew that Islamdom had not been vanquished, but was as potent as ever. In this way, both needed to depart from the model of martyrdom received from Late Antiquity, and to return (perhaps unknowingly) to the model of the earliest accounts, which generally lacked miracles and did not see the martyrs as earthly victors.

Martyrdom in the Age of Reform

By the twelfth century, martyrs had become part of the human architecture of the community, second only to the apostles as one of the pillars supporting the church on earth and numbered among the heavenly court closest to the throne of God. Nor was martyrdom entirely a thing of the past—one of the most popular saints of the twelfth century was Thomas à Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury, killed at the altar in 1170 by four knights hoping to please King Henry II. His shrine in Canterbury became one of the most-visited pilgrimage sites in western Christendom during the Middle Ages. The story of Henry and Thomas is a striking one, featuring Thomas as an ambitious and smart young Londoner promoted by a king who sought to remake his kingdom. The king made his protégé archbishop, and then had to face the personal qualities that had made Thomas such an outstanding royal servant turned against him in service of the church. The murder of Thomas in his own cathedral was in some ways an act of violence unremarkable for twelfth-century Europe. Nevertheless, the story of a holy man killed by an angry tyrant for protecting the church was a narrative intimately familiar to Christian audiences. Thomas played the part of the fearless Christian martyr confronting the Roman emperor, who can only rage and rave against those who, their eyes firmly fixed on heaven, defy him. Like the Roman martyrs of old, his place of death quickly became a site of miracles. The making of the martyr involved not only the image of the dead hero, but also the construction of the other participants in the play. In a letter from Guillaume, archbishop of Sens, Henry II became “not so much king of the English as enemy of the angels,” and was compared to Ahab and Herod. In the same letter, Thomas was seen as “freely offering himself as a peace offering to God,”⁹¹ evoking the sacrificial language inherent in martyrdom since the early Christian era.

Thomas’s martyrdom and subsequent popularity demonstrates two important points: the continued potency of the martyrological narrative in a context far removed from persecution by non-Christians, and the narrowing in the High Middle Ages of the meaning of the word “martyr” to those who died defending the institutional church, as opposed to the older understanding of “martyr” as one dying in defense of personal belief and practice. While the concepts of “saint” and “martyr” had been intimately tied, if not synonymous, in early Christianity, the creation of a formal papal process of canonization by the early thirteenth century had led to a radical decrease in the number of contemporary martyrs who were recognized as saints. Stanislaus, bishop of Krakow (1030–79), was one of the few martyrs canonized in the thirteenth century. Like Thomas, he was killed by his king for zealously defending ecclesiastical independence from royal power. The only martyrs the papacy found suitable for promotion were political and inquisitorial ones, such as the mendicants who were killed by Cathars in Avignonet in 1242.⁹² Likewise, Nicholas III (1277–80) beatified the Dominican Pagano da Lecco a year after he had been killed by a heretic in Como (1274): Pagano had been the inquisitor of Lombardy, Piedmont, and Liguria.⁹³ Peter Martyr, a Dominican inquisitor killed by a Cathar, was canonized so quickly after his death that it remains a record to this day. In contrast, no martyrs were canonized who died at the hands of Muslims until 1481.

The language of martyrdom remained potent, even if it did not lead to active cults or recognition by the papacy.⁹⁴ During the Seventh Crusade, Jean de Joinville hailed as a martyr the bishop of Soissons, Jacques de Castel, who threw himself on the swords of the enemy while Louis IX’s armies were in retreat from Damietta, and Louis himself hoped that his brother, Robert of Artois, who had died in a foolhardy attack on Al-Manṣūra, might also be considered one.⁹⁵ And Jean had no doubt that Louis himself was a martyr after his death on crusade outside the walls of Tunis in 1270, despite the fact that dysentery, not Muslims, killed the king. The papacy did not agree in any of these cases, and canonized Louis as a confessor, not a martyr.⁹⁶ The cults of earlier martyrs continued to be widely commemorated and celebrated. The Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine was one of the most widespread collections of saints’ lives in the later Middle Ages. Of the approximately 154 entries on saints, about 97 of them are dedicated to martyrs (62 percent).⁹⁷ The Golden Legend remains faithful to the Roman martyrdoms of old: miracles and conversions abound. And indeed, the vast majority of the martyrs included died in the Roman era; a small number were martyred in the fourth through sixth centuries by Arians, and only two, Thomas of Canterbury and Peter Martyr, died after 700.

Nor was martyrdom limited to the mendicant orders in the thirteenth century. The Mercedarian order was devoted to the redemption of captives, and many of its members died in the course of their duties, such as Peter Paschasius, bishop of Jaen (d. c. 1299).⁹⁸ Martyrial language could be applied to Peter and others like him, though no formal cult commemorated him. Many Christians used the term “martyr” far more broadly, applying it to victims of assassination or of criminal acts like thievery.⁹⁹ In many of these cases, “martyr” connoted a particularly pious person or a person of low social status (or both) who died violently, with religious persecution playing little role: an example would be Simon of Atherton, who was killed by his wife in 1211. A short-lived cult developed around his tomb on the Isle of Wight before it was suppressed by local authorities.¹⁰⁰ Bertrand, patriarch of Aquileia (d. 1350), was assassinated by Friulian nobles who were angered by his attempts to expand episcopal authority at their expense, and became the focus of a martyr cult as well. Likewise, Erik “Plovpennig” of Denmark was killed by his brother Abel in 1250 in revenge for Erik’s earlier attacks on his brother. Margaret of Louvain was killed by thieves who had attacked her employer’s house; they killed Margaret when she resisted rape and fled.¹⁰¹ Children like Simon of Trent, who were imagined to have been killed by Jews, fit into this pattern as well, though these cases also drew upon anti-Judaic and Eucharistic imagery as well as the image of the martyr as a pure innocent. In most of these cases, we find no transformation or miracles beyond healing ones; the martyrs after death were as powerless as they were in life.

Conclusion

The Franciscans were thus heir to a long tradition of martyrological thinking, a tradition that was astoundingly flexible.¹⁰² It could express a radical eschato-logical alienation from the world, harbor antiauthoritarian tendencies, or be the tool of institutional consolidation and orthodoxy. Francis’s own writings evoked humility and self-sacrifice as fundamental to his values, but without expectation of divine reward in this world. Franciscans used martyrdom to confront Islam and to bolster their own institutional authority in the face of crisis, accusations of heresy, and factionalization. In order to do so, they abandoned the language and rhetoric of earthly victory that had characterized Christian martyrdom since the fourth century, ceding victory in this world to Muslims as the price of maintaining their own piety and unity.