St. Martin the Confessor, Pope of Rome

Martin was born around 590 in Tuscany of pious Christian parents and entered the Roman clergy in his youth, serving as papal legate at Constantinople before his election to the Roman see in 649. His pontificate lasted only six years but was among the most consequential of the seventh century: he convened in October 649 the Lateran Synod that condemned the Monothelete heresy — the imperial Christological compromise that affirmed two natures in Christ but only one will — and laid down the orthodox confession of two wills, divine and human.

The Emperor Constans II, who had imposed Monotheletism by imperial decree, sent his exarch Theodore Calliopas to Rome in 653 to arrest Martin. Martin, ill in bed at the Lateran, was carried by force to the imperial galley and taken to Constantinople for trial. He was kept for many months in a cold prison, brought before the imperial court for show-trial, condemned for treason, beaten in public, paraded through the streets in chains, and finally exiled to Cherson on the Crimean peninsula — the same place to which the seven hieromartyrs of Cherson had been sent two centuries before.

Martin died at Cherson in 655 of starvation and exposure, the imperial regime having forbidden the local Christians to provide for him. His feast falls on April 14. The Sixth Ecumenical Council in 680–681 vindicated his theology and condemned Monotheletism, but Martin had been dead a quarter-century by then.