Communities of Saint Martin

Front matter

Communities of

Saint Martin

LEGEND AND RITUAL IN MEDIEVAL TOURS

Contents

List of Illustrations List of Tables Preface Introduction PART I. MARTIN’S TOWN: FROM UNITY TO DUALITY

Introduction 1. Martinopolis (ca. 371-1050) 2. Excluding the Center: Monastic Exemption and Liturgical Realignment in Tours PART 2. MARMOUTIER

Introduction 3. History, Legitimacy, and Motivation in Marmoutier's Literature for the Angevins 4. Marmoutier and the Salvation of the Counts of Blois

Index

305 319 321

Illustrations

Maps

An BR 09 DN

. The footsteps of Saint Martin

. Tours, fourth century through sixth century . Tours in the twelfth century

. Procession route on May 12

. Priories of Marmoutier about 1200

. Saint-Martin’s processional diocese

PLATES

. Saint Martin’s body returns to Tours

. The contest in Auxerre

. Marmoutier in the seventeenth century

. Floor of the chapel of Saint Benedict

. The basilica of Saint-Martin as it looked about 1700

Saint Martin and the Theban relics Saint Martin and the pagan tree Saint Martin’s ordination as bishop

. Saint Martin’s apostolic dignity

. The mass of Saint Martin

. Saint Martin and Saint Brice cure the bishop of Liége 12.

Translation of Saint Martin’s head, December 1, 1323 vii

I$

$4 130-31 246

12 58

A R UC Non

Tables

. Blésois relations with Marmoutier

. Angevin relations with Marmoutier

. Eleventh-century history of Marmoutier

. Martin's genealogy

. Thirteenth-century history of Marmoutier viii

168 176-77

Preface

This book concerns the relationship between group identities and cultural expression. Specifically, it examines three medieval communities—the town of Tours, the chapter of Saint-Martin in Tours, and the abbey of Marmoutier near Tours—and the ways in which they defined themselves, or were defined, through the cult of Saint Martin. Because the three communities drew on Martin's cult in different ways, my analysis serves to demonstrate, I hope, that culture is contested territory.

Sources from the early Middle Ages might lead us to believe that there was only one interpretation of Martin's cult. As I indicate in chapter 1, the bishops of fifth- and sixth-century Tours, who controlled the cult, created an idealized image of Tours as Martin's town, and of themselves—the heirs to Martin's see—as the rightful leaders of the community. By the late eleventh century, however, the canons of Saint-Martin and the monks of Marmoutier had gained control of Martin's cult, and they produced new legends and rituals that excluded the cathedral of Tours and its prelate from the symbolic urban community that Martin protected. The two houses also turned to Martin's cult in efforts to define their own corporations and to enhance the interests of their lay patrons. They were especially anxious to strengthen the internal cohesion of their communities, which social and political changes threatened to undermine.

Marmoutier and Saint-Martin used Martin's cult for similar reasons, but they differed in their internal structures and external ties and thus in the ways they elaborated and manipulated it. The cult of Saint Martin did not “mean” simply one thing. Rather, it leant itself to varying uses and interpretations.

By relating the manifold uses and meanings of a single saint's cult to its specific local contexts, I have attempted to elucidate how that cult served the practical, psychological, and spiritual needs of differix x Preface ent collective groups. Although my discussion focuses on the communities of Marmoutier and Saint-Martin, it also shows that Martin's cult was associated with other groups as well—the comital lineages of Blois and Anjou, the cathedral community of Tours, and the burghers of Tours. If this were an ideal world, I would have analyzed the interpretations each of those groups gave to the cult. Unfortunately, however, the sources speak with the voices of Marmoutier and Saint- Martin alone.

Like many historians, I was drawn to my subject by personal concerns and convictions, and in turn I found that my subject shaped those concerns and convictions. As an undergraduate and graduate student, I first took an interest in the study of religion because I was both attracted to and disturbed by the propensity of Americans to explain, confront, or escape social and political processes by reformulating and reinterpreting their cultural and religious traditions. As a woman who is also a professional academic, I have become increasingly aware that I myself and those whom I know, love, and teach have been molded and affected by the cultural construction of our feminine and masculine identities. Indeed, the more I think and write about human society, the more I become convinced that we all find meaning in, and are shaped by, the groups we belong to, either voluntarily or involuntarily, and by the attitudes that we ourselves and those around us hold concerning those groups. My own intellectual approach to knowledge and experience thus compels me to preface this work by acknowledging the people and groups who participated in its formation.

Three teachers especially contributed to my general attitude toward the past and enhanced my enthusiasm with their demand for discipline. Lester Little, whose courses at Smith College first inspired my interest in the relation between religion and society, has remained a source of encouragement and advice and has provided enthusiastic support for my work. Caroline W. Bynum, through her courses, writings, and close readings of my earlier work and parts of this book, has been a source of intellectual stimulation and emotional courage. She has continually reminded me, moreover, that religion is a matter of meaning and that language—my own, as well as that of the people I study—is extremely important. Giles Constable patiently advised me in the early stages. I am grateful for his meticulous readings and for the lesson that it takes enormous discipline, endeavor, and caution to begin to make sense of the past.

Pierre Gasnault and Dom Guy Oury offered advice on the sources

Preface xi of the religious and institutional history of Touraine; Jacques Le Goff and Jean-Claude Schmitt helped with certain problems regarding miracle collections, exempla collections, and ghost stories; and Megan McLaughlin provided useful references on prayers for the dead. David Herlihy, Gabrielle Spiegel, Elizabeth Brown, Edward Muir, and Junius Martin were gracious in reading an early draft and generous in offering advice. Patrick Geary, Barbara Rosenwein, Bernard Bachrach, Geoffrey Koziol, Jeffrey Russell, Warren Hollister, Michael Burger, Barbara Abou-El-Haj, Ronald Sawyer, John Martin, Alan Kaplan, and Thomas Haskell read parts of the manuscript and made many useful comments. Caroline Bynum, Thomas Head, Geoffrey Koziol, Barbara Abou-El-Haj, and Quentin Skinner shared their unpublished work with me. John Ackerman at Cornell University Press has demonstrated tremendous faith in my work and provided support and encouragement when they were needed. I am grateful to them all.

For financial support, I owe a large debt to the Committee of General Scholarships and the Sheldon Fund at Harvard for providing me with a Sinclair Kennedy Traveling Fellowship; to Rice University and the Mellon Foundation for a two-year postdoctoral fellowship; and to the University of California at Santa Barbara for two Faculty Career Development Awards and financial support for ordering research materials, preparing art, and hiring research assistants. Those assistants included Miriam Davis, Michael Burger, and Richard Barton, whose careful help in preparing the manuscript saved me an enormous amount of time and energy.

The Interlibrary Loan department at SUNY Binghamton was especially resourceful in ferreting out books for me, and I am grateful to the library staffs at Rice University and UCSB as well. Madame Laurent, curator at the Bibliothéque Municipale of Tours, offered useful advice and was always cooperative in sending microfilms and photographs. I am also indebted to the photographic staff at the Bibliothéque Nationale, the research and photographic staffs at the Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes, and the staffs at the Bibliothéque Municipale of Charleville and the Archives d'Indre-et-Loire.

Portions of Chapter 4 appeared earlier in different form in my article “Persuasive Voices: Clerical Images of Medieval Wives,” Speculum 61 (1986). Chapter 5 incorporates and augments material drawn from my article "Personal Perceptions, Collective Behavior: Twelfth- Century Suffrages for the Dead," published in Persons in Groups: Social Behavior as Identity Formation in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, edited by Richard C. Trexler. Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studxii Preface ies 36. © Center for Medieval & Early Renaissance Studies, SUNY, Binghamton, 1985. I am grateful to the publishers for permission to reprint this material.

Finally, I thank my parents for their love and support and for the humane values that first shaped my approach to the world.

SHARON FARMER

Santa Barbara, California

Communities of Saint Martin

Introduction

In the past decade and a half historians have brought to light the various uses and interpretations that medieval men and women applied to the relics and cults of the saints. Early medieval bishops associated themselves with the supernatural power of saintly relics, thereby enhancing their own authority. Townspeople defended their communities from Germanic and Viking invaders by carrying the bodies of saints to the ramparts of decaying Roman towns. Monks recounted miracle stories in which their holy patrons wreaked vengeance upon knights who attacked their monasteries and threatened their possessions. The royal abbey of Saint-Denis legitimized royal power and helped to consolidate the collective identity of the French nation by associating the Capetian kings and their subjects with the cult of Saint Denis.!

The beliefs and rituals that medieval people focused upon the bones of holy dead persons illuminate a society in which perceptions of this world and the next were fundamentally different from our own. The relics of the saints were not inert bones, they were the saints, and those saints sometimes acted in ways that revealed specific and peculiar personalities. The relics of Saint Foy of Conques, for example, performed miracles that were consistent with the personality of a sometimes vain, sometimes playful little girl.2

Monks, peasants, kings, and burghers interacted with the bones of

I. Brown, Cult of the Saints; Van Dam, Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul, 119-40; Herrmann-Mascard, Reliques des saints, 217—21; Sigal, "Aspect du culte des saints: Le châtiment divin"; Head, “Andrew of Fleury and the Peace League of Bourges,” 520-21; Spiegel, "Cult of St. Denis and Capetian Kingship"; Bournazel, “Suger and the Capetians”; Poly and Bournazel, "Couronne et mouvance: Institutions et représentations mentales." On bishops and saints and the uses of relics during the invasions, see below, chapter 1; on Saint Martin’s role as patron saint of the kings of Francia, see chapters 1, 3, and 7.

2. Geary, Furta Sacra; Remensnyder, “Bernard of Angers and the Liber Miraculorum Sancte Fidis"; Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind, 36-42.

dead men and women just as they did with living persons. If a saint failed to deliver protection, a peasant might curse or beat that saint's reliquary, the inhabitants of a town might threaten abandonment and oblivion, or a community of monks or canons might “humiliate” the holy patron by placing the bones on the ground and surrounding them with thorns.3

In the chapters that follow I examine these kinds of beliefs and forms of behavior in a new way. Through a carefully contextualized local study of the cult of Saint Martin in Tours, I have sought to deepen our analytic understanding of two interrelated themes: the relation between cultural expression and group identity, and the “polysemic” nature of saints’ cults and rituals.

The idea that symbols are “polysemic” is a concept anthropologists and historians borrowed from linguists. It suggests that the meaning of a cultural symbol or artifact is never predetermined. Symbols are open-ended; their significance is a matter of interpretation.4 Thus, as Patrick Geary pointed out in his study of medieval narratives about stolen relics, the bones of dead persons have no intrinsic meaning. Rather, living communities interpret the bones, as well as the events and rituals associated with them.5 It stands to reason, and indeed a number of historians have demonstrated, that the uses and interpretations of particular rituals and particular saints’ cults changed over time.6 Some historians have suggested, moreover, that different groups simultaneously interpreted the same relics and the same rituals in divergent ways.7

To date, however, studies of conflicting interpretations of saints’ cults have emphasized that competing corporate groups used and manipulated relics and legends to enhance their claims to status and legitimacy. They have devoted less attention to how the specific inter-

3. Geary, "Humiliation of Saints"; Geary, "Coercion des saints dans la pratique religieuse médiévale." On townspeople threatening a saint with oblivion, see chapter 1 below.

4. Turner, Forest of Symbols, esp. 50-51; Bynum, "Introduction," Gender and Religion, I-20.

s. Geary, Furta Sacra, 5 ff.

6. Koziol, “Pageants of Renewal: Translations of Saints in the Province of Reims”; Jones, Saint Nicholas of Myra, Bari, and Manhattan. Jacques Dubois’s careful study of Saint Fiacre’s cult in Brie reveals a number of significant changes over time, but his approach is more textual than interpretative: see Sanctuaire monastique au Moyen Age.

7. See, for example, Colette Beaune’s discussion of resistance to Saint-Denis’s claims concerning the royal saint, Naissance de la nation France, 83 ff.; and Geary on competing monastic communities, Furta Sacra, 68 ff. Some historians have evoked both popular and clerical points of view from individual texts that were written by clerics: see Remensnyder, “Bernard of Angers”; Schmitt, Holy Greyhound; and chapter 9 below.

nal structures and religious purposes of corporate groups affected their relations to the cult of saints, and they have tended to ignore questions of spirituality and psychological need. The culture of the group, as presented in these studies, is a matter of functional utility; polysemy is a matter of competing claims to status.

In much of this book, I too provide a functional analysis, focusing on the uses of Saint Martin's cult in an era of intense group competition—the eleventh century through the early thirteenth century. During that period, several competing communities and lineages in and around Tours appropriated or referred to Martin's cult in their attempts to enhance their status and prestige. Their texts and rituals represented Martin and his relation to the community in ways that were radically different from the representations that had been produced in the early Middle Ages.

As I show in chapter 1, the fifth- and sixth-century bishops of Tours created a powerful and pervasive image of an organic and harmonious civic community, united (or so they claimed) under the leadership of the dead bishop Martin and his living partner, the occupant of the episcopal see. Tours, as those bishops represented it, was Martin's town, and it was thus appropriate that Martin's successors— the bishops of Tours—should act as its leaders and protectors.

By the end of the eleventh century this cultic image of a unified secular and religious community no longer existed. Three competing religious institutions—the cathedral of Saint-Maurice, the Benedictine abbey of Marmoutier, and the canonical chapter of Saint- Martin—claimed roots that extended back to the saintly bishop. Moreover, the contentious burghers of the town also had a stake in the saint's cult. Indeed, on one level or another each of these competing collectivities defined itself, or was defined, by its relationship to Saint Martin. Only two of those communities, however, actively generated texts and rituals concerning Martin's cult: the abbey of Marmoutier, founded by Martin himself in the fourth century, and the chapter of canons at the basilica of Saint-Martin, which had possessed Martin's relics since the time of his death.

Community life was no more contentious in the eleventh and twelfth centuries than it had been in the fifth and sixth. Nevertheless, bishops in the earlier period held a monopoly over saints' cults; this was no longer true in the later period. And though violence remained a way of resolving disputes in the later period, church reformers and powerful rulers were interested in curbing uncontrolled force, assigning to the prince alone this means of keeping the peace and ensuring justice.9 Ecclesiastical reformers and secular rulers—and town dwellers, too—thus encouraged the use of judicial procedures, in which verbal presentation and written documentation could help various claimants obtain their rights, property, and privileges. The eleventh-century conflict between the emperor and the pope, for example, was both a judicial conflict and, in Brian Tierney's words, a “war of propaganda.”? This same expression characterizes the rhetorical disputes between Cistercians and Cluniacs in the twelfth century and among various proponents of the "true apostolic life." In this atmosphere of rationalized dispute, conflicting groups developed a heightened consciousness of their collective identities and of the need to lend written legitimacy to their claims to status, power, or independence. It was a time of fabricated customs and invented traditions.10

As I discuss in chapter 2, the monks of Marmoutier and the canons of Saint-Martin began to fabricate new customs and to invent new traditions in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, when both were struggling to gain exemption from the jurisdiction of their archbishop. The monks and canons cooperated in creating rituals, feasts, and texts that effectively excluded the archbishop from those places and celebrations associated with Saint Martin and his sacred authority. In this way they shattered the unified image of their town that had been passed down to them from the early bishops of Tours. In their textual representations the canons and monks demonstrated that Saint Martin no longer belonged to the town as a whole, and he certainly did not belong to its archbishop. Rather, he was the patron and protector of Marmoutier and Saint-Martin, and in his capacity as protector he fended off evil enemies, including the archbishop of Tours. In their liturgical representations, the canons and monks transformed Tours from a unified ecclesiastical space, with the archbishop at its hub, into a divided space in which the most notable division served to

8. Dunbabin, France in the Making, 277 ff.

9. Tierney, Crisis of Church and State, 74. See also, on the propagandistic nature of many religious sources from this period, including the kinds examined in this book, Constable, "Papal, Imperial and Monastic Propaganda."

IO. [ have borrowed the concept of "invented traditions" from Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition. For discussions of various invented and legitimizing traditions of the eleventh century through the thirteenth century, see Duby, "French Genealogical Literature: The Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” in Duby, Chivalrous Society, 134-57; Spiegel, Chronicle Tradition of Saint Denis, 4, 44-45; Chenu, "Monks, Canons and Laymen in Search of the Apostolic Life," in Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century, 202—38; Benson, "Political Renovatio: Two Models from Roman Antiquity"; Southern, "Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing: 4. The Sense of the Past"; Southern, Western Society and the Church, 101.

through it in attempts to meet their deeper needs for meaning and order. Thus the polysemic meanings of Martin's cult arose not simply from different functional uses, but also from different spiritualities and psychological needs.

Differences in the spiritual styles and preoccupations of Marmoutier and Saint-Martin are readily apparent. At Marmoutier, almost all the texts dealing with Martin's cult address immaterial concerns—moral persuasion, conscience, sin, and salvation. Those from Saint-Martin, by contrast, reveal a corporation whose members were preoccupied with defending their collective position vis-à-vis kings, archbishops, and burghers. It appears, moreover, that the canons of Saint-Martin were more concerned with external behavior, gesture, and ritual than were the monks of Marmoutier. Nevertheless, through their ritualized forms of behavior the canons expressed pressing spiritual concerns; and despite their interest in conscience, the monks continued to assume that liturgy, ritual, and behavior were extremely important aspects of the Benedictine way of life.

By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Marmoutier and Saint- Martin were generating distinctive images of Saint Martin and using his cult to fulfill different needs. Nevertheless, the sources reveal that the two houses shared certain underlying psychological and spiritual concerns and that they drew on their relationship with Saint Martin to address those concerns.

One central psychological preoccupation entailed corporate cohesion. Through Martin's cult, both the monks and canons articulated, discovered, and elaborated the cultures of their institutions, and those cultures enabled the residents of each house to experience their membership in the group. At both Marmoutier and Saint-Martin the need to reinforce the cohesion of the community seemed especially urgent in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The growth of bureaucratic organization, the extension of centralized governments—such as those of the Angevins and Capetians—and the expansion of monastic and papal empires drew the monastery and the chapter of canons into widening circles of association and caused those institutions to become structurally extended in ways they had never been before. As I show in chapters 5 and 6, the monks of Marmoutier addressed the consequent problems of cohesion by writing histories that deepened their sense of connection to Saint Martin and by telling miracle stories that stimulated the monks' sense of brotherhood within the monastery. At Saint-Martin, as I argue in chapter 7, common rituals provided an antidote, however weakened, to the centrifugal forces that were stretching the boundaries of the corporate group.

For the monks of Marmoutier and the canons of Saint-Martin, cultural expressions that centered on their patron saint involved both the legitimacy and the integrity of their communities. But those cultural expressions also involved a collective spirituality, one that focused, above all, on concern for the souls of the dead. The monks and canons worried about the cohesion of their religious communities because they believed in the efficacy of vicarious assistance for the dead and dying. Each monk and canon relied on the brothers within his community, and on Saint Martin as well, to help him in his quest for a relatively painless afterlife. An emphasis on such vicarious assistance was at the center of the monks' way of life, and it constituted an important part of the religious life at Saint-Martin as well.

Necessarily, this book presents both chronological narratives describing change over time and more static analyses of symbolic and cultural layers. The chronological approach is most apparent in the first part, which traces the evolution from unified to fragmented representations of Tours between the late fourth and early twelfth centuries. By contrast, parts 2 and 3 are not arranged in strict chronological order. Rather, each chapter deals with a particular set of functions or meanings of the cult. Nevertheless, virtually every chapter traces chronological developments. Indeed, one of my recurring arguments is that the monks and canons generated an impressive number of cultic innovations in the years between 1050 and 1250 because they were responding to the forces of change.

exclude the archbishop and his cathedral from the two sections of town dominated by Marmoutier and Saint-Martin.

On one level, it is not surprising that Marmoutier and Saint- Martin joined together to restrain the authority of the archbishop of Tours or that they drew on Martin's cult to do so. The two houses not only traced their origins to Martin himself, they also shared, at various times in the tenth century, the same institutional structure. But near the end of the tenth century Benedictine monks from the abbey of Cluny reformed Marmoutier, and as a result, Marmoutier and Saint-Martin evolved into radically different institutions with distinct social functions and spiritualities. They also formed different alliances with powerful noble and royal families.

To highlight the differences between Marmoutier and Saint-Martin in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, and the consequent differences in their representations of Saint Martin and his cult, I have discussed the two institutions separately in parts 2 and 3. Part 2 addresses the cultural and cultic activities of the monks of Marmoutier, whose monastery was, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, one of the most successful and prestigious Benedictine houses in western Europe. Its religious life was so respected that many of the leading noble families of western Francia called upon its monks to restore and reform other religious houses. Those nobles granted vast amounts of landed property to Saint Martin and his monks, who reciprocated with spiritual favors such as burial at the abbey and assistance for the souls of the dead.

The monks of Marmoutier rewarded some of their noble patrons not only with spiritual favors but also with literary works, including legends associating Martin with those patrons. Especially in the case of the comital family of Anjou, those legends enhanced the collective prestige and status of the lineage. Yet, while the monks of Marmoutier were willing to serve their noble patrons with legends about Saint Martin, they were even more interested in enhancing the legitimacy, cohesion, and spiritual needs of their own community. Those needs resulted, in the twelfth century, from two sets of changes. First, because nobles were becoming more cautious in giving away property, and because the concept of purgatory transformed the role monks could play in assisting the souls of the dead and dying, the reciprocal relationship between monks and their patrons took new forms. And second, the need to administer and organize a vast empire of landed property placed enormous strain on the cohesion of the monastic community. In chapters 4, $, and 6 I describe the monks’ cultural responses to these problems. In legends about Martin and his cult, they propagated new ideas about spiritual relations between monks and laypeople and about the relations among the monks themselves.

Part 3 analyzes the cultural and cultic activities of the canons of Saint-Martin. As I note in the introduction to that section, the chapter of secular canons at Saint-Martin differed from the monastery of Marmoutier in its institutional structure, its spiritual functions, and its political alliances. These differences led the canons to represent, perceive, and employ Martin's cult in ways that differed from those of the monks.

Unlike the monks, who renounced personal property and usually lived together in dormitories, the canons lived in private houses and managed their own private properties. Thus their personal conduct and business activities tended to blend with those of the secular men and women around them. The canons were also intimately linked to the realm of secular politics. One reason for this link was that their lay "abbot" was the king of France, who exercised considerable control over the internal governance of the chapter. In their literature about Saint Martin, the canons sometimes enhanced the legitimacy of their royal patron and abbot, but they also attempted to protect their corporate community from his interference.

A second factor linking the canons of Saint-Martin to the realm of secular politics was the canons' role as the seigneurial lords of an important section of Tours, known as Chateauneuf. The center of the most active commercial life in Tours, Cháteauneuf was inhabited by a group of prosperous burghers who in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries attempted to overthrow the lordship of the canons. As I describe in chapter 9, the canons of Saint-Martin responded to the rebellious burghers with legends and miracle stories conveying the message that Saint Martin himself was the source of authority, justice, and prosperity in Cháteauneuf.

The primary spiritual function of the chapter of canons was to care for Martin's tomb and to perform the elaborate liturgy in his church. That liturgy served in part to impress pilgrims and devotees, who gave gifts to Saint-Martin, just as noble patrons contributed to Marmoutier, because they believed the saint himself was the actual recipient and hoped he would reciprocate with supernatural favors. But whereas at Marmoutier Martin usually reciprocated with gifts that benefited the souls of lay benefactors, at Saint-Martin he tended to restore the bodily health of those who came to his tomb seeking cures.

The monks and canons drew on Martin's cult to promote their respective social and political interests and needs. More important, they turned to the cult, elaborated it, and expressed themselves

PART I Martin's Town: From Unity to Duality

Introduction

In the early Middle Ages the primary "community of Saint Martin" was the city of Tours. Martin's cult gave physical shape to the medieval town, whose principal centers of settlement, religious cult, and commercial activity grew up around three churches associated with the saint. More important, however, fifth- and sixth-century bishops of Tours employed Martin's cult to create an ideal image of the civic community. Tours, the bishops suggested, was Martin's town, and it was united under the authority of its bishop, who guarded Martin's cult and inherited his position.

By the beginning of the twelfth century this *community of Saint Martin" no longer existed. Although a number of earlier events chipped away at this idealized civic community, it was above all the monastic exemption movement of the eleventh and twelfth centuries that caused its complete demise. The monks of the abbey of Marmoutier and the canons of the basilica of Saint-Martin succeeded in gaining exemption from the disciplinary and liturgical dominance of their archbishops. As a result, the archbishops' access to Martin's cult became severely limited. New legends and liturgical observances underscored this change: Tours became, in the symbolic representations that emanated from Marmoutier and Saint-Martin, two communities. On the one hand, there was the new "community of Saint Martin," consisting of Marmoutier, Saint-Martin, and the walled suburb of Cháteauneuf. And on the other hand, there was the now isolated, and less vibrant, cathedral town.

PLATE 1. Saint Martin's body returns to Tours. “But almighty God would not allow the town of Tours to be deprived of its patron." So claimed Gregory of Tours when he recounted how the men of Tours stole away from the parish of Candes with Saint Martin's body while the men of Poitiers, who thought their town had the better claim to the body of the saint, slept. For Gregory this story signified that Martin's power belonged, in a special way, to the town of Tours.

In the top half of this twelfth-century illumination for the feast of Martin's death (November 11), the men of Tours pass the saint's body through a window in Candes (while the Poitevins sleep); in the bottom half the men of Tours sail back to Tours with their prize. Like Gregory of Tours, the canons of Saint-Martin, who produced this illustration, wished to demonstrate that Martin and his power belonged to a particular community. As I argue in chapter 2 and in part 3, however, their definition of the community of Saint Martin differed from Gregory's. Tours, Bibliothéque Municipale, MS. 193 (late twelfth century), fol. 117. Photograph courtesy Tours, Bibliothéque Municipale.