Holy Hierarch Martin the Confessor, Pope of Rome

Martin was elected pope after Theodore and led the Church in Rome when Emperor Constans II backed the teaching that Christ had only one will, known as Monothelitism. In 649 he held a council at the Lateran that rejected this teaching, and he wrote to Patriarch Paul of Constantinople asking him to abandon it.

The emperor's representative in Italy arrested him in 653. According to his Life, he was taken at night to the island of Naxos, kept there for a year in want, and then brought to Constantinople, ill, where he was paraded in chains and accused of treason, which he denied. He was sent to Cherson in the Crimea, where hunger and neglect killed him in 655. He is honoured as a confessor, in the East and in the West.