11 November - Martin was born in the year 316 in Pannonia, in the city of Sabaria, now the city of Szombathely, Hungary. His father was a military tribune of the Roman Empire, i.e. a senior officer in charge of the administration of the army. It is probably no coincidence that Martin's name means "dedicated to Mars", Mars being the god of war in Rome.

Martin suit son père à Pavie lorsque ce dernier y est muté. À l'école, l'enfant est vraisemblablement en contact avec des chrétiens, vers l’âge de dix ans, il veut se convertir à Martin followed his father to Pavia when his father was transferred there. At school, the child was probably in contact with Christians, and at about the age of ten he wanted to convert to this religion because he felt attracted to serving Christ. As the son of a military magistrate, Martin follows his father on garrison assignments; he is hereditary, so to speak, to his father's career in imperial worship. This father is irritated to see his son turned towards a new faith: while the legal age of enlistment is seventeen, he forces his fifteen-year-old son to join the army. It is likely that Martin was convinced not to harm his parents' social position, so powerful is his Christian vocation. As the son of a veteran, he has the rank of circitor. The circitor is in charge of conducting the night patrol and inspecting the garrison guard posts. At the time, the young man owned a slave, but he treated him like his own brother. Assigned to Gaul, in Amiens, one winter evening in 334, the legionnaire Martin shared his coat with a cold-blooded disinherited man, as he had already lost his pay after having generously distributed his money. He sliced his coat. The following night Christ appeared to him in a dream, dressed in the same coat.

It is also the time when the great Germanic invasions are being prepared; the Barbarians are at the gates of the empire. In March 354, Martin takes part in the campaign on the Rhine against the Alamans at Civitas Vangionum in the Rhineland; his religious convictions forbid him to spill blood and he refuses to fight. To prove that he is not a coward and that he believes in providence and divine protection, he offers to serve as a human shield. He is chained up and exposed to the enemy but, for some unexplained reason, the barbarians ask for peace. Martin serves another two years in the army, an elite unit of the imperial guard of which he was a member for 20 years; this would bring the total length of his service to 25 years, the legal length of time in the auxiliary corps of the Roman army, and then he is baptised at Easter still garrisoned in Amiens.

In 356, having been able to leave the army, he went to Poitiers to join Hilaire, bishop of the city since 350. His status as a former man of war prevented Martin from becoming a priest, so he refused the position of deacon offered to him by the bishop. Martin was given the power of a thaumaturgist as well as that of an exorcist. At that time the Aryans were very influential in the political power. While Hilaire, a Trinitarian, victim of his political and religious enemies, falls into disgrace and is exiled, Martin is warned in a dream that he must join his parents in Illyria in order to convert them. He succeeds in converting his mother, but his father remains a stranger to his faith; this position may moreover be merely tactical, the father trying to defend his privileged social status. In Illyria, the Arian faith is the dominant faith and Martin, who is a fervent representative of the Trinitarian faith, must no doubt have violent arguments with the Aryans, as he is publicly whipped and then expelled. He flees and takes refuge in Milan, but there too the Aryans dominate and Martin is chased away again. He withdraws with a priest to the desert island of Gallinara. In 360, with the canons of the Council of Nicaea, the Trinitarians definitively regained their political influence and Hilaire regained his bishopric. Martin was informed of this and returned to Poitiers himself. In 361, at the age of 44, he settled on a Gallo-Roman estate that Hilaire pointed out to him near Poitiers. Martin created a small hermitage there, which according to tradition was located 8 km from the town: the Abbey of Ligugé. In 371 in Tours, the bishop in place had just died; the inhabitants wanted to choose Martin, but he chose another path and did not aspire to the episcopate. The inhabitants therefore kidnapped him and proclaimed him bishop on 4 July 371 without his consent; Martin submitted, thinking that this was undoubtedly the divine will. The other bishops did not like him because he looked pitiful due to the excessive mortifications and privations he inflicted on himself; he wore rustic and coarse clothes. In the evening of his life, his presence was required to reconcile clerics in Candes-sur-Loire, west of Tours; the urgency of the unity of the Church meant that despite his old age, he decided to go there. His intervention is successful, but the next day, exhausted by this life as a soldier of Christ, Martin dies in Candes in 397.