In 371 the people of Tours, wanting Martin as their bishop for his reputation for holiness, are said to have lured him into the city under the pretense of visiting a sick relative and then acclaimed him bishop by popular demand, an election he tried to refuse, reportedly hiding in a goose pen, whose noisy birds gave him away, an episode later linked to the custom of eating goose on his feast day.
As bishop he kept living as a monk, founding the community of Marmoutier nearby and continuing to travel the countryside personally, destroying pagan shrines and sacred trees and preaching directly to rural populations that earlier bishops, based in cities, had mostly left untouched, work later historians credit with a real role in the Christianization of the Gallic countryside. He died in 397 at Candes, and the dispute between the towns of Poitiers and Tours over which would keep his body, resolved when men from Tours reportedly removed it by night through a window, previews the importance his cult would carry. His cloak, preserved as a relic called the cappa, was carried by later Frankish kings into battle as a protective standard, kept in a portable shrine, or capella, the origin of the word chapel, and the clerics who guarded it were called cappellani, the origin of chaplain. He is one of the most widely venerated saints of the early medieval West, with more churches named for him in France than for any other saint.