✐ ✐ ✐ ✐ A Soldier of Great Prowess in a Motet around 1500* Yossi Maurey Jerusalem The Sanctorale of every medieval church included liturgy for a number of warrior saints: soldiers (Michael, and Roman martyrs such as George, Sebastian, and Maurice and his Theban Legion), kings (the crusading St. Louis), and those who deliberately refused to fight, like St. Martin. It was Martin’s illustrious biographer, Sulpicius Severus, who championed an ideal of sanctity that saw the military vocation as essentially incompatible with a religious one. The Vita by Sulpicius Severus was published just months before the death of its protagonist, and was complemented by three additional Epistles, and finally by the author’s Di- alogues from ca. 404. 1 According to his biographer, Martin enlisted in the Roman army when he was fifteen years old. He served under Emperors Constantius I and Julian for about three years before ultimately renouncing martial life and deciding to become a soldier in the service of God. The ensemble of works by Sulpicius Severus inspired and informed virtually all subsequent forms of venerating Martin, whether devotional, literary, anecdotal, iconographic, or musical in nature; it was Sulpicius Severus who “transformed bishop Martin into St. Martin.” 2 As I have shown in detail elsewhere, Martin’s original, pacifist image underwent significant transformation in the course of the high Middle Ages: Martin the ap- peaser became Martin the dubbed knight; the spiritual warrior was remade into an earthly one. 3 This change was primarily inspired by the exaltation of armed men in the Middle Ages, a religious preoccupation that often took on an allegorical dimen- sion. If the idea of a concurrent religious and military vocation was anathema to Martin’s chief biographer and subsequent generations of hagiographers, it grew in acceptance, in part, when the function of the warrior in Christian society was reha- * A version of this paper was read at the Medieval and Renaissance Music conference in Certaldo, 5 July 2013. I would like to thank Bonnie Blackburn, Fabrice Fitch, Richard Freedman, and Anne Robertson for reading a draft of this paper and for their valuable insights and suggestions. The expertise of Nir Cohen in Finale, together with the perceptiveness and revisions suggested by Marc Busnel, are evident in the edition of the motet. 1 Sulpice Sévère, Vie de Saint Martin, ed. Jacques Fontaine, 3 vols. (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1967). 2 Raymond Van Dam, Saints and Their Miracles in Late Antique Gaul (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni- versity Press, 1993), 13. 3 Yossi Maurey, Medieval Music, Legend, and the Cult of St. Martin: The Local Foundations of a Uni- versal Saint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).