Martin of Braga

Martin was born around 515 or 520 in Pannonia, the Roman province along the middle Danube, roughly modern Hungary. He travelled east as a young man, spent time in Palestine, learned Greek well enough to translate from it for the rest of his life, and became a monk.

Sometime around 550 he arrived in Galicia, the northwestern corner of the Iberian peninsula, then ruled by the Suevi, a Germanic people who had come in a century earlier and adopted Arian Christianity. Gregory of Tours says he came by sea and that his arrival coincided with the healing of the king's son at the shrine of Martin of Tours, the saint whose name he shared and whose relics he brought.

He founded a monastery at Dumium, near Braga, and became its abbot and then its bishop. Around 570 he became metropolitan bishop of Braga itself. Under his influence King Theodemir and then King Miro brought the Suevi over from Arianism to the Nicene faith, a full generation before the Visigoths of the south did the same. Martin presided at the Second Council of Braga in 572, which organised the church of the kingdom into dioceses and set out how a bishop was to teach converts.

His best-known book came out of that work. De correctione rusticorum, On the Correction of Country People, is a short pastoral letter to a fellow bishop, written to be read aloud to farm villages.

In it Martin walks through creation, the fall, the flood, and redemption in plain words, then turns to the practices his people were still keeping: lighting candles at stones and springs and trees, watching the moon for when to travel, calling the days of the week after Mars and Mercury and Jupiter, women invoking Minerva at the loom, throwing bread into a well. He names each one, explains where it came from, and calls it what he thinks it is, the worship of demons under old names, sworn away at baptism and taken up again.

It is one of the most detailed accounts anywhere of what ordinary sixth-century religion actually looked like at ground level.

He also wrote short moral works drawn from Seneca, Formula vitae honestae, on the four cardinal virtues, and treatises on anger, pride, and humility, which circulated widely in the Middle Ages, sometimes under Seneca's own name. And he made a Latin collection of Eastern church canons, the Capitula Martini, and had the sayings of the Egyptian desert fathers translated for his monks by his disciple Paschasius.

He died at Braga about 579 or 580. Isidore of Seville, writing a generation later, called him a man of no ordinary learning.

Sources: Martin of Braga, De correctione rusticorum and Formula vitae honestae (ed. Barlow, Martini Episcopi Bracarensis Opera Omnia); Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks and De virtutibus sancti Martini; Isidore of Seville, De viris illustribus; the Acts of the Second Council of Braga (572).