CHAPTER 4
The four friars had not sought martyrdom. They knew that their beliefs were not shared by those around them, but they hoped that God might turn the others’ hearts to believe in the glorious truth the four treasured. Brought before the court for one purpose, they soon realized they were there for quite a different one than they had thought—they were to be judged by men who saw them as a threat. When asked about their beliefs and practices, they could not lie; to do so would be to deny God and condemn themselves to eternal punishment. As they perhaps feared beforehand, they were found guilty, without having had the opportunity to accomplish what they came to the city to do. After their execution, people began to speak of them as martyrs, beloved of God, a belief that only further angered those who had judged and executed them.
The four friars could be Johan Barrau, Guilhem Santon, Deodat Miquel, and Pons Roca, burned at the stake in Marseille on 7 May 1318, after having been condemned as unrepentant heretics by Michel le Moine, the Franciscan inquisitor of Provence. Their heresy: belief that the friars, having vowed to follow the Franciscan rule, must live the same life of absolute poverty as Jesus and his apostles, and that not even Pope John XXII, who in his bull Quorun-dam exigit (1317) had ordered the friars to accept their superiors’ rulings on how best to observe their vow of poverty, could remove from them the obligation to own nothing. Anything else would endanger their eternal salvation. The friars’ refusal to renounce their beliefs before even the pope himself was admired by others who shared their belief in the importance of poverty and spoke of the four dead friars as martyrs. The death of the martyrs soon assumed a polemical edge; their admirers referred to the church who killed them as “the great whore … drunk on the blood of the martyrs” (Rev. 17:6). As others were executed as heretics in the decade that followed, their names were also added to the roster of God’s martyrs. Yet these martyrs did not desire death as their founder Francis had; they died because they could not reconcile their religious beliefs with the demands of the dominant order—in this case, the orthodoxy espoused by Pope John XXII.1 The four friars killed in Marseilles in 1318 were only the first to be punished; other Franciscans were burned at the stake, as well as dozens of beguines, lay followers of Francis.2 Within ten years, even the minister-general of the order, Michael of Cesena, who had participated in the condemnation of the four friars, had fled the papal court in Avignon out of fear that he might meet the same fate.
However, this narrative could just as easily have described four other Franciscans: Tommaso di Tolentino, Jacopo di Padova, Pietro di Siena, and Demetrios, who died in Tana, a port city on the northwestern coast of India near the modern city of Mumbai just three years later, on 9 April 1321. The persecutors in this case were Muslims—yet the elemental forces the friars faced were the same. Pride, avarice, and love of self were the weapons the friars feared most, not the swords and burning pyres their killers employed. The two groups of friars had something in common besides their Franciscan robes and their violent deaths: Tommaso di Tolentino (and perhaps his companions) shared with the friars of Marseilles the same conviction about the importance of fidelity to a strict practice of poverty—that is, they were spirituals.
The deaths of these two groups of friars at opposite ends of the world might be a coincidence. What was not a coincidence was the emergence in these same decades of the first narratives and depictions of Franciscan martyrdom. While friars had been martyred in the thirteenth century, no passio survives narrating their suffering and death before the 1320s. The early fourteenth century also saw the beginnings of a pictorial tradition of the passio of Franciscan martyrs, found in the churches of Tuscany. Martyrdom, rather than the desire for it, had become a charged subject for the order in the early fourteenth century. Italo Calvino once wrote that “the language of sexuality makes sense only if it is placed at the top of a scale of semantic values. When the musical score needs the highest and the lowest notes, when the canvas requires the most vivid color: this is when the sign of sex comes into operation.”3 The same thing might be said about the language of death, voluntary or otherwise, in the Franciscan scale of values. Notably, the only Franciscan who was canonized in the fourteenth century, Louis of Toulouse, was not driven by “desire for martyrdom” as his thirteenth-century predecessors had been. In an era of violent conflict within the Franciscan order, the desire to be a martyr no longer seemed so saintly.
Central to understanding the Franciscan fascination with martyrdom is the context in which the first passiones were written and circulated. The accounts were a response to at least two crises of the early fourteenth century, one inside the order, and the other outside. Most immediately, the passiones must be read in the context of the controversy over poverty among conventual Franciscans (those who trusted in obedience to hierarchical authority), rigorist spirituals, and a heavy-handed pope (John XXII), which led to spirituals being burned at the stake for heresy, and the leadership of the order (though avowedly not spirituals) escaping the papal court in Avignon and labeling John himself a heretic. Just as the “desire for martyrdom” was not a simple sign of sanctity in the thirteenth century, Franciscans found accounts of actual martyrdom equally complex in the fourteenth. Early fourteenth-century stories about martyrs allowed Franciscans to think about a variety of overlapping dilemmas. For conventual Franciscans—those who accepted the concept of poverty as malleable and believed that the hierarchy of the order should determine its significance—rejection of the world through stories of martyrdom demonstrated their rejection of material goods in a way that did not conflict with papal bulls mandating their ownership of the goods they used. For spiritual Franciscans, martyrdom demonstrated the corrupt materialism of the institutional church, and their own corresponding purity. For both, Islam and Muslims were not really the issue. Instead, “Saracens” represented their own worst selves: the worldly, politically powerful, and wealthy self that mocked all that the Franciscans valued—yet was increasingly the true face of the order.
The passiones spread outside the order, however, in response to another crisis, this one ongoing and slow-burning: the failure of western Christendom in its struggle to overcome Islamdom militarily and spiritually. The Franciscan accounts gave western Christians a new set of stories in which conflict between Christians and Muslims could be played out, perhaps to a more satisfactory conclusion than through crusade or preaching. Christians, in the thirteenth century, as we have seen, paid little heed to mendicants working among Muslims, preferring the adventures of friars venturing among the Mongols—or the pious who may have desired martyrdom but did not linger for long in Islamic lands. By the 1320s, the effort to convert Maghrebi emirs and Mongol khans had come to naught; no ruling emirs in North Africa had converted, and the Ilkhanids had opted decisively for Islam. Christians still held out hope for conversions in the empire of the Golden Horde, apparently unaware that the khan Özbeg (1313–41) was a stalwart Muslim. And despite continuing optimism about the possible conversion of Mongol princes, the passiones that appeared in the 1320s were empty of Mongols as either persecutors or potential converts. It is only once the Mongols were routinely understood to be Muslims that they began to show up in martyrdom accounts.
Franciscans (and others) chose to tell the stories of martyrs as a way to recast Christian identity and the conflict with Islam, “a search for Western identity through the medium of the Islamic world,” as Suzanne Conklin Akbari characterized similar efforts.4 The stories accomplished this in two ways, but both required decoupling martyrdom from successful missionizing among Muslims. The first sort of martyrdom occurred on the peripheries of the Islamic world, where the “Saracen” could still play the role of persecutor, but where the observing population was not Muslim. This allowed the accounts to link Islam to violence, torture, and hatred of Christianity, but to sidestep the reality that Muslims did not convert by using the non-Muslim population as the sympathetic witnesses to the martyrs and their glories. The second kind occurred among Muslim populations, but abandoned traditional tropes of martyrdom such as miracles, celestial signs, and divine punishment of the persecutors, thus reshaping Christian expectations of martyrdom narratives. This second group of passiones shared much in common with the earliest martyrdoms of the pre-Constantinian period, and with the neomartyrdoms written by Christians under Islamic rule. Victory over Islam in this sphere came at the price of Christian triumphalism. In other words, Franciscan martyrdom abandoned the world to the Saracens.
While the conflict over poverty provided the powder, it was the account of the death of the four friars at Tana in 1321 that sparked widespread Franciscan enthusiasm for their martyrs.5 Although several passiones emerged at around the same time, the story of the Tana martyrs appeared more often, and appeared in close proximity to the broader explosion of interest in Franciscan martyrdom in the 1320s and 1330s. The account of the martyrs of Armenia (1314), for example, had appeared several years earlier, but showed up in fewer manuscripts in the 1320s and 1330s—and few if any of those manuscripts can be given a date earlier than the appearance of the Tana passio. In the next two chapters, I will focus on four such accounts from the early fourteenth century in which the Tana passio was recounted: the transcribed letters contained in the Nero A IX manuscript in the British library (1320s), the chronicles of Paolino da Venezia (c. 1329), the Relatio of Odorico di Pordenone (c. 1331), and finally the world chronicle of friar Johannes Elemosina (1335). These four accounts share a set of intertwined but often conflicting views of Islam, the world, and the place of the Franciscans within it. The Tana account of stalwart friars facing Saracen persecution and dazzling pagan peoples with their piety assuaged deep anxieties, and provided Franciscans with an appealing way of shaping the Franciscan community, and therefore an ideal Christian one—one explicitly defined against Islam. Such a course was effective within the order, for a time. However, few outside accepted the Franciscan claims of humility and patient suffering at Saracen hands.6 None of the Franciscan martyrs show up in non-Franciscan accounts in the Middle Ages, though certainly non-Franciscans knew of the martyrs and read the Franciscan narratives. The ideology of martyrdom had so thoroughly suffused European culture that it was the internal enemy—the heretic, the Jew, the murderer in the woods—who exemplified the elemental threat of evil, and it was the child, the maidservant, even the faithful guard dog who exemplified the patient suffering of Christ.7 While the cult of the ancient martyrs continued, contemporary martyrdom followed less on the model of the Roman martyrs and more on that of the Massacre of the Innocents—the not-even-baptized infants of Bethlehem killed by Herod in his attempt to murder Jesus. Contrary to modern expectations, the story of a friar killed by a Muslim tyrant did not conform to contemporary conceptions of martyrdom—nor did it conform to contemporary notions of Franciscan holiness.
Franciscan martyrdom accomplished a further goal: it moved the spirituality of the order away from the dangerous realm of mysticism. Bonaventure and others had made desire for martyrdom part of the mystical ascent of the ideal friar.8 The desire expressed the friar’s inner orientation, but was not tied to engaging in active preaching or dying for the faith. In the fourteenth century, mystical texts, experiences, and claims became both a more common sign of sanctity as well as a more common sign of heresy. Martyrdom, in contrast, had been intertwined with Christian conceptions of sanctity for a thousand years, and thus was an unassailable orthodox sign of closeness to God. Given the tenuous position that Franciscans found themselves in the aftermath of the events of 1318, the order was rightly concerned about being perceived as a hotbed of heterodox beliefs. A long list of valiant martyrs could help blot out the stain of heresy.
The Crisis over Poverty
The controversy over poverty was so calamitous for the Franciscans because the order had long claimed that they uniquely imitated the absolute poverty of Jesus and the apostles. Of course, the order was struggling to define what it meant to follow apostolic poverty; this struggle had divided the order by the dawn of the fourteenth century. David Burr, one of the foremost scholars of the spiritual Franciscans, has argued that this controversy became significant only around 1270. Earlier, friars had debated and disagreed over a variety of issues: poverty, the status of priests, and the place of theological training in the order. At the heart of many of the issues was the role that Franciscans should play in the world, but the debates prior to 1270 did not map onto any clear division within the order; each controversy had different adherents on each side. After 1270 the concerns of these various groups began to coalesce into a group we can with some reasonableness call “the spirituals,” who focused on a stricter interpretation of the Franciscan rule, particularly around issues of poverty.9 In tracing this movement, we face the same challenge that we have already faced with martyrdom: the sources about the thirteenth-century advent of the rigorist movement were all written in the fourteenth century, in a quite different atmosphere.
Franciscans wrestled with two related concerns: How could the friars live the life of poverty that Francis had enjoined them to live and yet fulfill the demands of preaching and the other ecclesiastical obligations the Franciscans had taken on? Second, what were the consequences of not following the rule of poverty to its greatest extent? Francis had made clear in its opening lines that the rule was essentially “to observe the Holy Gospel.”10 This elision of Gospel and Rule was further complicated by the vow Franciscans took “to observe the rule throughout my whole life.”11 In the thirteenth century, Franciscans and Dominicans feuded over how regular vows were made and what such vows entailed; Thomas Aquinas argued that there was a significant difference between the orders. His own order, the Dominicans, vowed to live according to their rule, which meant that when a Dominican transgressed the rule of the order, he was not transgressing his vows. The Franciscans’ vow to observe the rule, Aquinas suggested, meant that any transgression of the rule was a transgression of their vow, and therefore a mortal sin, although some Franciscans argued against this distinction.12 Furthermore, if the rule was equivalent to the Gospels, any transgression of the Gospels was then mortal sin as well. So theoretically a friar who felt lust would have been committing adultery of the heart—a venial sin for most Christians, but a mortal one for him because of his vow.
Nicholas III (1277–80) intervened with the bull Exiit qui seminat (1279), which attempted to defuse the ambiguities of the Franciscan vow with respect to poverty. The pope ruled that the precepts of the Gospels should be followed as precepts, and the counsels as counsels—that is, the rule and the vow to follow it did not convert ordinary sins (lustful thoughts, for example) into mortal ones.13 The bull, however, accomplished much more than this clarification. Nicholas proclaimed that “renunciation of poverty over all things, individually and in common, is meritorious and holy. Christ, showing the way to perfection, both taught this doctrine by word, and strengthened it by example.”14 As Sean Kinsella has pointed out, “The language of Exiit was so strong an endorsement of the position of the Franciscan order on poverty that the order itself suppressed the fullest dissemination of the bull for fear of the backlash and uproar which would result from the other religious communities.”15 The bull was intended to end disputes over poverty and the Franciscans, and for nearly forty years, the church accepted Exiit qui seminat as definitive.
The Franciscan rule directed the friars to follow a large number of practices, from daily prayers to the central vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity. Because Franciscans vowed both individual and corporate poverty, they developed a particularly rich vocabulary concerning material objects. One central distinction was between ownership (dominium) and use (usus). Franciscans could use things, but not own them, a conceit aided by the willingness of the papacy to own (have dominium over) the things the Franciscans used. But how could they use them? By the late thirteenth century, Franciscans were “using” a great number of books, liturgical implements, clothes, food, and buildings—and to many, Franciscan “use” sometimes did not look much different than the way the wealthy owned similar objects. Many agreed that such use was not faithful to Francis’s vision, but how could one distinguish proper use from improper?
Rigorist Franciscans argued that the vow of poverty required that friars practice usus pauper, roughly meaning “poor use,” or “the restricted use of goods.”16 Clearly, this was a fuzzy notion: What distinguished usus pauper from a less-restricted use of goods? More specifically, if the Franciscan vow of poverty did demand usus pauper, what was the consequence if a friar used goods like a rich man rather than a poor one? If it was considered a mortal sin (as violation of the vow of chastity would be, for example), then much of the order would be constantly in fear of committing a mortal sin through everyday activities. Spirituals approached the topic from a variety of perspectives, but generally urged a more rigorous interpretation of poverty, believing that Franciscans risked damnation if they did not adhere to it. The conventuals, their opponents, argued that the hierarchy of the order should determine appropriate use for their communities; it was not up to individuals, who ought to follow their vow to obey their superiors.
The election and resignation of Celestine V in the course of five months in 1294, and the subsequent election of Boniface VIII (1294–1303), instigated anxiety within the church and the order about dissident groups, and the spirituals were prime among them. Pierre Jean Olivi (1248–1298), a leading figure in the spiritual movement, worked to maintain a strict understanding of poverty that still accommodated the exigencies of the world.17 Olivi argued for a satisfying solution: because it is an indeterminate vow (i.e., fuzzy), violation of usus pauper is usually a venial sin, unless the violation is so obvious as to be beyond any reasonable understanding of “poor use.” Although this explanation of usus pauper seems quite reasonable (and Olivi argues for a quite generous interpretation of what constitutes a baseline usus pauper), a commission of seven theologians in 1283 censured Olivi’s positions on a number of subjects. We do not know, however, exactly which ones and for what reasons. He later received prestigious appointments in Florence and Montpellier, and his views, while not embraced by the leaders of the order, were seen as within the accepted range of opinion. Nevertheless, after his death his works were condemned and burned in 1299—but at the same time, a cult was growing around his tomb in Narbonne.
The papacy of Clement V (1305–14) seemed to offer an opportunity to put the debate to rest: the pope requested papers arguing each side of the debate,18 and then issued his own bull, Exivi de paradiso (1312), which ruled that neither belief in usus pauper nor rejection of it could be deemed heretical. The order would just have to be big enough to encompass both views. Clement promised to chastise leaders who judged the spirituals harshly, but also argued that the spirituals needed to trust their superiors. For a few years following, Clement’s compromise seems to have worked. In Tuscany, a group of spirituals did seize several convents from their superiors, and had to flee to Sicily, but in southern France the newly elected minister-general, Alexander of Alexandria (1313–14), assigned convents in Béziers, Carcassonne, and Narbonne to the spirituals. The death of both Clement and Alexander in 1314 put an end to this truce, and the sixteen persecutors Clement had deposed for excessive harshness soon returned to their former positions. Both the conventuals and the spirituals hoped for the election of a new minister and pope who would support their respective positions. The new minister was Michael of Cesena, whose affiliation with the conventual position was well-known. The spirituals had greater hopes for the new pope; surely he would hew to the line established by his predecessor, Clement V? He did not.
Instead, John XXII issued the bull Quorundam exigit (1318) to put to an end to questions about the usus pauper debates.19 The friars were obliged to follow the instruction of their superiors when it came to the practice of poverty; it was not up to them to decide what constituted “poor use.” The narrative that follows is known largely through spiritual sources, and therefore makes a monster out of John XXII and angels out of the friars.20 The pope called upon the spirituals in Narbonne to obey their conventual superiors and summoned to Avignon sixty-two friars who had appealed against them. John asked that they choose representatives to present their position to the papal court. When they came before the pope, he repeatedly arrested each spokesman who stepped forward to speak on their behalf, including Geoffroi de Cournon, who was not closely associated with the spirituals. The remaining friars were remanded to the custody of the order without their defense ever having been heard.
The conventuals in charge of the order then interrogated the spirituals; twenty-five of them refused to accept the bull, for various reasons. The twenty-five were handed over to Michel le Moine, a Franciscan inquisitor who had been one of the sixteen superiors removed from office by Clement V for excessive severity toward the spirituals. A council of thirteen scholars ruled that refusal to follow the bull constituted heresy; as William Chester Jordan has noted, “The deck was stacked against the men whose views the commission was to assess.”21 Twenty of the friars recanted under the interrogation of Michel, and one repented at the very last moment. Four were sent to the stake, the four mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. Within a year, some friars had reconsidered their submission and left “not the order but the walls, not the habit but the cloth,” finding John to be “not a shepherd but a devourer.” According to one tradition, they not only left the order but also left Christendom behind and lived “among infidels”—whether as exiles or evangelists we cannot say.22 Lay supporters of the spirituals were also targeted. Three such beguines were burned at the stake in Narbonne on 14 October 1319, a year and a half after the friars.
As inquisitors were pursuing the spirituals and their supporters, John XXII continued to consider the question of poverty, ownership, and the claims of the Franciscan order to embody the highest level of evangelical poverty.23 John issued Quia nonnunquam on 26 March 1322, which reopened the conversation about evangelical poverty suspended by Nicholas III forty-three years earlier. As Patrick Nold put it, “Henceforth, anyone, be he prelate or master of theology, could freely contradict and impugn what had been previously determined by the Church.”24 The spirituals were persecuted for pursuing the concept of evangelical poverty too far, but to John XXII and others within the church, it seemed that the very notion that the Franciscan order uniquely belonged in the select company of those who have followed true poverty—perhaps limited to the prelapsarian Adam and Eve and Christ and his apostles—was itself heretical. Yet, according to even the most conservative conventual Franciscan, the order followed Christ and his apostles more perfectly than anyone else, including the pope and the Dominican order, which had long criticized the Franciscans on this point. Franciscan poverty always contained an implicit critique of the endowed church, which was evident even in the earliest days of the order. The Franciscans knew this well, yet spiritual and conventual alike could not conceive of abandoning this central value. In 1322 the Franciscans met for their annual chapter in Perugia and reaffirmed their belief in Christ’s poverty as permitted by Nicholas III in Exivi, begging the pope to keep the discussion closed.25
It was during the tense conversation in the papal court before the promulgation of Quia nonnunquam that we find poverty and the order’s history of martyrdom explicitly tied together. John XXII announced to the group gathered before him that he was eager to hear their opinions on Christ’s poverty. Jerome, the Franciscan bishop of Caffa, gave a long speech in support of evangelical poverty, citing his own capture by Muslims as part of his credentials. Jerome averred that if the belief in Christ’s poverty was heretical, “I never saw such an error against the faith of Christ in the court of any heretic, pagan, or schismatic.”26 In recounting his unfamiliarity with poverty as a heresy despite his wide travels throughout the Mediterranean and Black Seas, Jerome was exploiting the widespread assumption that heterodox beliefs draw upon previous heresies; there is nothing heretically new under the sun. Furthermore, Jerome insisted, the Franciscan order had been the “vine of Christ” and extended throughout the known world, conforming to Jesus’ command to preach. “There is no kingdom, no language, no nation where the Friars Minor are not, or have not been, preaching the faith of Holy Mother Church. And their blood has been spilled everywhere, beginning in Morocco all the way to India.”27 When the pope suggested that others, such as the Dominicans, had also died as martyrs in foreign lands, Jerome made clear what he thought of that—“With all due respect, Your Holiness, never has a single preacher (i.e., Dominican) nor indeed any religious, died for Christ among the infidels who was not a Friar Minor”—and proceeded to list nine martyred Franciscans who had recently died.28
John was not impressed by Jerome’s arguments and claims, but for Jerome and the anonymous narrator at least and likely for many others, the martyrdom of so many Franciscans provided cogent proof of their orthodoxy. Jerome was referring to the first and the most recent martyrs: those of Morocco in 1220 and those of Tana in 1321, whose narratives were just in the 1320s beginning to spread throughout western Christendom. If we take Jerome’s speech at face value, then this would be the earliest reference to the Tana martyrs, made less than a year after their deaths, and just months after the first report was written about them in India, but timing alone makes this unlikely.29 While we do not know who the anonymous narrator of this encounter was, we have no evidence to suggest that he was present at the papal palace for these discussions. He composed his account sometime after 1338, a decade after the events occurred. In contrasting the Franciscans to the rival Dominican preachers—whom Jerome suggested were too timid to preach to infidels and schismatics and risk discomfort and death—poverty was intimately tied to the Franciscans’ willingness to die, and was proof of their orthodoxy. Indeed, just as apostolic poverty was a distinctive Franciscan attribute, Jerome claimed that martyrdom among infidels was similarly unique to the friars minor.
After further consideration and discussion, John issued the bull Ad conditorem in December 1322, announcing that the pope would no longer take possession of the things that Franciscans used. The Franciscans now, by default, owned everything that was in their possession—which was a large amount of books, food, and property. Never has any institution been less pleased to receive such an enormous endowment. A year later, he ruled on the question of the poverty of Jesus and his apostles in the bull Cum inter nonnullos. He determined that Christ and the apostles did own the things they used, exercising the ius utendi (right of use) as well as the ius vendandi (right to sell), and to say otherwise was now heretical. The table had turned on the conventuals: they were now faced with the choice of obeying the pope and abjuring the Franciscan understanding of poverty that was fundamental to their identity, or disobeying and facing persecution, the same choice spirituals had faced at conventual hands five years earlier. The Franciscan leadership was summoned to Avignon in 1327. They delayed as much as possible, but eventually showed up in December. They found the atmosphere there threatening, and though they had been ordered not to leave, fled the papal court in the spring of 1328 to take refuge with the Holy Roman Emperor Ludwig of Bavaria, who himself had been excommunicated by the pope. It was in this heated atmosphere of schism, accusations of heresy, inquisitorial trials, and personal and institutional crises of identity that the first full passiones of Franciscan martyrdom were written and circulated.
India in the European Imagination
The enthusiasm generated by the account of the Tana martyrdoms was in part due to the potent blend of exoticism, religious fervor, and apocalypticism that western Christian sources associated with India, as well as the tumult in the Franciscan order. Many of these associations can be traced back to antiquity: the natural wonders of the land, associations with Alexander the Great and with the apocalyptic tribes of Gog and Magog, all combined to make India both familiar and alien.30 Alongside the classical stories were apocryphal acts of the apostles’ and saints’ lives, which depicted a world that had been successfully converted to Christianity in ages past. One such story, that of Barlaam and Josaphat, was in fact the life of the Buddha transmuted into that of a Christian saint.31 The thirteenth century brought a new set of fantasies of India. Beginning with stories of the kingdom of Prester John and continuing with increasing knowledge of the Mongol world, western Christians began to imagine the “East” (only vaguely identified geographically) as a Christian world, or one that potentially could become Christian.32
This stood in marked contrast to the Islamic world, about which Christians were increasingly doubtful that large-scale conversions would transform anytime soon, particularly after the fall of Acre in 1291. Why would Muslims convert at the moment of their greatest triumph over Christianity? That thirteenth-century “dream of conversion” of the Islamic world, as Robert Burns so memorably called it, was dying.33 The world of Asia, on the other hand, appeared to many to be an evangelist’s paradise. It was largely a pagan world, in the categorization of medieval Christians, and it was a truism that pagans were far more likely to convert to Christianity than either Muslims or Jews. Had not the Roman Empire once been entirely pagan, and yet became the source of Christian light to other peoples?
In the mid-thirteenth century, India became a great deal more accessible to Europe than it had ever been before.34 The Mongol conquests of Genghis (Chinggis) Khan (d. 1227) and his successors meant that, for the first time, one ruler controlled a vast territory of central and east Asia, connecting the Black Sea to the South China Sea. A European merchant or evangelist could travel to one of the ports of the Levant or the Black Sea (Ayas, in Armenian Cilicia, for example), and then trek across the whole of Asia, remaining in Mongol territories for the entire journey.35 Those who were particularly favored by Mongol rulers might be given golden tablets that would allow them to use the khan’s own efficient transportation network. Though the Mongols did not conquer India, European travelers who ventured across Asia often transited India as a waypoint on their journey further east.36 A sign of the expanded horizons of western Christians appeared in the reissue of the papal bull Cum hora undecima, a call for Franciscan evangelization of infidels.37 The issue by Gregory IX in 1239 was addressed to Franciscans in the lands of the Saracens, pagans, Greeks, Bulgarians, Cumans, and other non-Christian groups familiar from the Middle East and the Black Sea region.38 When it was reissued by Innocent IV in 1245, the list was expanded to include many other peoples, including Indians and Ethiopians.39
Marco Polo, dictating his account in Genoese captivity after returning from the East in 1295, devoted the third book of his narrative of his travels to India, though where he himself visited is not entirely clear. He claimed to have visited Ciamba (perhaps the Malay peninsula) and named places such as Ceylon, Gujarat, and the Malabar Coast, but never specifically placed himself in “greater India,” as he called the subcontinent.40 Whether he visited or not, Marco (or his amanuensis) clearly had some source of reliable information on India. Among the fabulous stories drawn from antiquity, Marco also noted ethnological facts, such as that “Braamans … wear a thread of cotton over their shoulder” so that “they are known by this token through all the places where they go.”41 This was the first reference in European literature to the upanayana thread, bestowed on men of certain castes as a coming-of-age ritual.
Of course, many other travelers from Europe and the Middle East had been to India; the letters of the Cairo Geniza are full of references to Jewish merchants traveling to, trading with, and even settling on the western coast of India, and other sources give glimpses of extended travel across Asia.42 The Franciscan missionary Giovanni di Montecorvino visited India at the end of the thirteenth century on his way to China, and claimed to have converted a hundred people while he was there.43 The marvelous descriptions of Asia suggested that the world known to the Europeans was but a small appendage on the stupendous body of Asia, a body that might become a Christian one. The passio of the four Franciscans in India in 1321 thus combined two popular genres into one: accounts of the marvels of the East with Christian martyrdom. In doing so, it combined the exoticism of the East with the deep familiarity of the cult of the martyrs, and that unique combination is one of the reasons why the passio of the Tana martyrs was the first such Franciscan account to circulate widely.
The Martyrs of Tana: The First Reports
The letters recounting the deaths of Tommaso and his companions traveled back to Europe along the same trade routes that had brought the friars east, arriving in Europe just as the order was in tumult over the meaning of poverty and the challenge of the spirituals. The first letter was that of a Dominican friar, Jordan Catala de Sévérac, one of the many Latin Christians who traveled widely throughout Asia in the era. Jordan evidently met the four Franciscans in the Persian port of Hormuz—a crucial trading city in the Persian Gulf linking India to Aden, the Red Sea, and hence to Egypt and the Mediterranean world—and traveled with them to the western coast of India. When the Franciscans were killed, Jordan himself was out of town, visiting nearby Christian communities and preaching to non-Christians; he mourned that he was not martyred with them.44 When he returned to the city, he took the bodies of his companions to Surat, a port to the north, and six months after the martyrdom (12 October 1321), wrote a letter to the Dominican and Franciscan communities in Tabriz announcing their names and deaths. His letter, however, gave no details of how they died; instead, the letter described the success of Jordan’s own preaching campaign in northern India, and contained a request that his brethren send more missionaries. His report on the four Franciscans was potent propaganda for Jordan’s own mission, but they were not what Jordan thought was most urgent about his letter.45 Jordan’s reaction was thus in line with thirteenth-century attitudes toward the martyrs. Their significance was not in their own story, but in what they demonstrated about others.
The custodian of the Franciscan convent in Tabriz, Bartholomew,46 added a second letter of his own, which fleshed out the narrative of the friars’ deaths—though his source of information is not clear.47 In his letter, Bartholomew reported a series of events that became standard for the four friars of Tana. According to him, the friars were residing in a Christian household in the Muslim-ruled city, and were “hiding from the Saracens,” but were summoned to court to serve as witnesses to an incident of domestic abuse. Brought before the cady (identified as “the bishop of the city”), the friars were questioned about their faith instead. When the cady could not get them to admit that Machomet was the messenger of God, he threw Jacopo di Padova into a large bonfire. When he survived unscathed, the cady attributed his survival to his coat, which he claimed was from the land of Abraham. Thrown back in, naked and covered in oil, Jacopo again miraculously survived, leading the cady and the melic (the ruler of the territory) to proclaim that the friars were indeed miraculous and true friends of God.
The two leaders sent the friars away, but the cady regretted letting them go, worrying that they would corrupt (perverterent) the whole population. They sent armed men after the friars, who beheaded them. Pietro di Siena, who had been away from the house when the friars were first brought to court, was also found, tortured, and executed. The killing of the three friars was accompanied by thunder, lightning, floods, rain, and terrible storms, and the boat that carried the brothers to Tana sank. The melic was crushed by his horse, and sent to hell, all of which led the Saracens and other infidels to wonder: “We have seen such things that we do not know what we should believe.”48 The letters of Jordan and Bartholomew, however, had relatively little circulation. Jordan’s letter has survived in only three manuscripts,49 while Bartholomew’s survived only in one, though it was used later in the fourteenth century by the author of the Chronica XXIV generalium ministrorum ordinis fratrum minorum, and thereby gained wide circulation in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.50
The Letters of 1323
Two curious letters from 1323 provide another route by which news of the martyrs reached western Christendom. Written by friars and merchants who were “pilgrims to India” and sent from Caffa in the Crimea to a general chapter meeting of the order in Toulouse (one that did not occur), the first letter gave brief accounts of several Franciscan martyrs and petitioned for greater support for evangelization, while the second rejoiced in successful Franciscan evangelization among the Mongols of the Golden Horde. Brimming with enthusiasm for the possibilities the friars saw around them, the letters shaped the way a generation of Franciscans thought about conversion and martyrdom. Nevertheless, how they influenced the order is not clear, because the letters survived only in a single manuscript now preserved in the Cambridge University Library, bound with a miscellany of fourteenth-century material, the latest of which is dated to 1377.51 The same hand appears to have copied the texts immediately preceding the letters in the miscellany, including two bulls of John XXII concerning English ecclesiastical affairs, and material relating to the monastery of Bromholm, which shared little in common with the letters from the friars living in the khanate of the Golden Horde. Following the letters in the manuscript are materials more clearly related, but written by someone else: John XXII’s reissuance of the evangelizing bull Cum hora undecima as well as letters to the Mongol khans.
The letters are dated to Pentecost, 15 May 1323; they thus followed closely after Jordan’s letter of 21 October 1321 and Bartholomew’s, dated 14 May 1322.52 Each of the letters (Jordan’s, Bartholomew’s, and the Caffa letters) served as a textual detonator, as the news of the Tana martyrdom raced along the routes connecting Tana to Tabriz, Trebizond, Caffa, and so on further west. The first of the Caffa letters even referred to Bartholomew, the custos of Tabriz, as someone who could also attest the news of the martyrs, and suggested that he was currently present with the (nonexistent) general chapter in Toulouse. Just as Bartholomew wrote in reaction to having received Jordan’s letter (and perhaps to the oral report of the messenger who carried it), the writers in Caffa seem to be responding to Bartholomew’s letter and perhaps even a direct encounter with the custos himself.
The first letter contained brief reports on a number of martyrdoms that had recently occurred in places widely scattered from Bulgaria to India. These martyrs subsequently show up in a number of different sources, none of which cite the letter directly. The letter also claims that Pope John XXII had been impressed by the accounts of the martyrs. It is a curious claim for a group of friars and merchants in Caffa, thousands of miles from Avignon, to be making in a letter directed to the leaders of the order, who presumably were better informed about events in the papal court. The association of John with the martyrs was picked up by other Franciscan chroniclers, though the date when the pope heard of the martyrs varied.
Two sets of martyrs were particularly prominent in the letter of 1323: those of Tana and the martyrs of Armenia. The letter followed the story in Tana as given by Bartholomew, though it was related in a hurried manner. Tana was referred to as the city of Diana, and the martyrs are named as “Iacobus Arnulfus, Thomas de Tartario, Demetrius Apulea et Petrus de Padua.”53 The author of the account is clearly dependent on Bartholomew’s letter, and briefly recounts Jacopo’s miraculous preservation in the fire, and the misattribution of his cloak to the land of Abraham; he also asserts that the cady bore responsibility for their deaths rather than the melich. But there are also crucial differences. The names of the martyrs themselves are garbled; Tommaso, the best known of the martyrs and the one most clearly identified with the spiritual movement, is inexplicably made into a Mongol, and Demetrios, who in other accounts is either Armenian, Georgian, or Mongol, is apparently given an origin in Apulia.
The story of the martyrs of Armenia was also based on an earlier letter written by a Franciscan custos, in this case of Trebizond, written shortly after the martyrs’ deaths in 1314. (This letter will be discussed further in Chapter 5.) Like the account of the Tana martyrs, this narrative too feels rushed and a little garbled. Following the earlier letter, the 1323 epistle briefly recounts the miracle of the blind man, the punishment of the Armenian priest associated with the friars, and the celestial signs and wonders that occurred after their deaths. The third of the friar-martyrs, however, is identified as Ferdinand rather than Francis, as the letter from Trebizond had specified.54
The letter followed the two passiones with a quick summary of other martyrdoms that had occurred recently: Franco de Burgo, the guardian of Caffa, who died in Tabriz; and Peter the Little (Petrus Parvus), Bertrand de Malacho, Aaron, and Pons, who may have died with Franco or perhaps elsewhere. The letter also mentions Angelo di Spoleto, killed by the Bulgarians. These martyrs subsequently appeared in a number of other Franciscan sources, often in concert with the dead friars of Tana. But, curiously, they never earned full narratives of their own, and many did not make it into the Chronica XXIV, which preserved the greatest number of Franciscan passiones from the later Middle Ages.
The conclusion of the letter made a clear argument about how its readers should understand the deaths of the friars. “Concerning their martyrdom and many miracles in the East,” the author proclaimed, “many Catholics and infidels publicly testified.”55 Furthermore, “more than a hundred princes, barons, and chiliarchs and their families and innumerable children have been reborn in our faith through the work of the friars in a few years”; their names and statuses would take too much time to detail, assured the author.56 The letter was thus a testament of Franciscan devotion to evangelizing, even unto death, and their success in that endeavor.
A second, much longer letter joined the first, and was addressed particularly to the cardinals as well as to the rest of the church, and further elucidated their successful evangelization. The letter began with the Gospel precept that a candle should not be hidden under a bushel, but set up high to give light to all. That light was the faith carried by the friars into the darkness of the northern empire of the Mongols. The author claimed that a third of the empire “has received the light,” but that the friars could only be present in a tenth of it. The letter was thus a plea for more evangelists to be sent to the Golden Horde; the friars had even sent to the pope some of the idols they had seized as proof of their success. The stories of martyrdom should help make their point: “All spiritual men should be made brave rather than terrified by what has been written, namely how many of us and others have died in horrible torture by the Saracens and by the pagans.”57 The friars urged their Franciscan readers to come east; becoming “like the elephant [who] seeing bloody clothes may grow aggressive, you sons of blessed Francis may come in quick support to our aid.” The letter-writers also reached back to the model offered by Francis, “whose example when he presented himself in the court of the sultan out of faith and exposed himself to the fire, although the tyrant, moved by we do not know what spirit, did not permit it.”58
This was one of the few times that Francis’s own journey to Islamic lands was cited as motivation for others to follow. The letter also evoked the values of the primitive Franciscan order as further motivation: “Rather than pull back, take heart and consider preferable the poverty of our food, the worthlessness [vilitas] of our clothes, frugality, roughness, hardness and scarcity.”59 Harking back to the early days of the order, these words would have sounded sweet to the ears of a spiritual—particularly the reference to the vilitas (shabbiness or cheapness) of the friars’ clothing. While shabby habits had been one of the outward signs of strict fidelity to apostolic poverty, Pope Clement V had written approvingly of vilitas in his bull Exivi de paradiso (1312),60 and the constitutions enacted in 1316 after the election of Michael of Cesena also required vilitas.61 It was thus less a sign of spiritual sympathy (although it could be that) and more a signal of orthodox rigor, a sign that the Franciscan institution still adhered to the austerity of the days of Francis himself.
Spreading the Tale of the Tana Martyrs: Odorico di Pordenone
The account of the martyrdom of the four friars written by the Franciscan traveler and missionary Odorico di Pordenone, who visited Tana just a few years after the martyrs’ deaths, was far more influential than the letters of Jordan and Bartholomew and those sent from Caffa. His account of his travels through Asia, the Relatio, was widely read throughout Europe—both in its original Latin edition and then in a number of vernacular languages.62 A sense of his success in spreading the story of the martyrs can be gotten from another Franciscan missionary, Pascal de Vittoria, who visited Tana. When he wrote home from Almalik (now in western China) in 1338, Pascal did not mention the martyrs of Tana; instead, he drew attention to the more recent martyrdom of Stephen in Saray just a few years earlier, confident that his brethren were already well informed about the martyrs who had died in India.63
While the stream of letters from Tabriz and Caffa may have stoked an interest in Franciscan martyrs, they had relatively little circulation. It was Odorico’s account of the martyrs of Tana that was responsible for a rekindling of Franciscan interest in martyrdom, not in the sense of the spiritual desire for martyrdom, which had been so important in the thirteenth century, but in the act of dying for the faith itself. Furthermore, it engaged the interest of non-Franciscans as well; his account was widely read and translated, and it is likely that it is through him that the Tana martyrs became almost as well known as the Moroccan martyrs of a century earlier.
Odorico opened his account by introducing himself: “I crossed the sea and visited the country of the unbelievers (partes infidelium) in order to win some harvest of souls.”64 Despite this introduction, the friar had little to say about any harvesting he had actually accomplished. Instead, he offered an account about a part of the world that fascinated and terrified many western Christians. Odorico probably left Italy sometime between 1314 and 1318, and returned in 1330, thus spending twelve or more years in various parts of Asia. He lived in Beijing for three years (1324–27), and then returned to Europe by an unknown route. His travels began in Constantinople, then continued by sea to Trebizond, and overland across Persia to Hormuz. There, he boarded a boat—which Odorico noted was bound together only with twine so that he “could find no iron on it at all”65—that took him to Tana, following a route similar to the one the martyrs themselves had traveled.
Odorico did not write down the story of the martyrs in 1324 when he was in Tana, but recounted it orally to his amanuensis Guglielmo da Solanga in 1330 when he returned to Europe. Whatever information he did learn while traveling was mixed together with his (and Guglielmo’s) understanding of what a martyrdom account should sound like, along with some version of the story recounted by Bartholomew. Odorico passed through Tabriz on his way east, but did not mention any interactions with the Franciscans already established there; nevertheless, he probably heard of the story of the martyrs in Tabriz before he even reached Tana. The martyrdoms take up considerable space in the Relatio, and reveal what Odorico thought about his own travels as an evangelist and a Franciscan. They also shaped the views of his readers toward the eastern world and its inhabitants.
But the importance of the martyrs was not limited to the account of their deaths; the relics of the martyrs also played a vital role in Odorico’s larger narrative. The friar claimed that he had exhumed the bodies of the martyrs in Tana (unaware perhaps that Jordan had buried them in Surat), except those of Pietro di Siena, whose remains “God had concealed until he should be pleased to reveal them,”66 and brought them with him on the remainder of his travels, their miracles helping him on his way. He eventually deposited them in the Franciscan church in Zayton (generally identified with Quanzhou) in China, which had recently become the seat of a Franciscan bishop. Thus, the travels of Odorico were also the travels of the martyrs and their relics, and the fact that they remained to be venerated in China again spoke to the possibility of the transformation of the East into a Christian world through the piety of the Franciscans. The account of the martyrs sits in the middle of the Relatio, and their passio and the subsequent story of their relics takes up a significant portion of the whole text. It was clearly central to the image of the East that Odorico sought to portray. A century later, the relics still figured prominently in the local cult around Odorico in Udine; the fifteenth-century fresco cycle in the church of San Francesco in Udine, where Odorico is interred, features a scene of Odorico being saved from a house fire by the relics, bundled in a bag under his arm.67
Odorico (and the four friars before him) visited a city that straddled the boundaries between the known world and the marvelous exotic world further to the east. The friar believed that Tana had once belonged to King Porus, who had battled Alexander the Great with elephants and lost (though the historical battle took place in the Punjab, in modern-day Pakistan); it was thus part of story that educated Christians had long told and retold, the primal first encounter between an essentialized “East” and “West.” Yet it was also a world of wonder: bats the size of pigeons, rats as big as dogs, and filled with pagans who worshipped fire, snakes, and trees.
According to Odorico, the friars had not intended to go to Tana at all; they had been heading to Polumbum, on the extreme tip of India (modern Kollam)68—a popular route that Odorico himself later followed.69 Once stranded in Tana, the friars found lodging in the small Christian community of the town, which according to some versions was Nestorian. The man and wife of the house quarreled, the husband beat the wife, and the wife complained to the cadi (a judge trained in Islamic law).70 When he asked for witnesses, the wife named the four Frankish “rabbans,” a title given to monks in Syrian and Nestorian churches, living in the house.
But the cadi was not interested in the friars as witnesses to domestic violence. Spurred on by an anonymous Alexandrian,71 a figure Odorico introduced to the story, the cadi instead wanted to engage in a little religious disputation with the strangers. The friars, through rational arguments, proved to all who were listening that Jesus was both God and man. Unsurprisingly, this did not please the cadi, and casting about for some stratagem to attack the friars, turned the discussion around, and asked them: “What do you say about Machomet?”72
This, of course, was a trick, transparent not only to the cadi and the friars, but also to the educated readers of the Relatio. It was well known among Latin Christians that it was against Islamic law to speak ill of the prophet Muhammad; to do so was to risk execution. Odorico himself commented somewhat snidely that “this was the custom of the Saracens, when they cannot maintain their cause by argument, they turn to swords and fists.” Tommaso, as leader of the friars, saw the trap and responded, “We have proved to you by arguments and instances that Christ, who was true God and true man, delivered our law to the world.” Turning to Mohammad, Tommaso diplomatically pointed out, “since him Machomet has come and delivered a law which is contrary to it. If you are wise, then you know what ought to be believed about him.”73 The cadi was not satisfied by this reply and again demanded an answer, “What do you say of Machomet?” Tommaso then retorted, “You wish to know my opinion concerning Machomet? I say to you this: that Machomet is a son of damnation and with the devil his father has a place in hell, and not only him, but all who observe his law, as pestilent, accursed, false as it is, hostile to God and the salvation of souls.” With that, the cadi had achieved his aim, as the listening Muslims shouted, “Let him die, let him die, for he has blasphemed the Prophet!”74
The crowd sought to kill the friars by exposing them to the midday sun, for the heat in India was so great that “if one should stand in the sun for the space of a single Mass, he will die.” The friars, however, survived six hours in the blazing tropical sun, “cheerful and unscathed.”75 The next attempt was more intimidating; the crowd kindled a large fire in the town’s central square. Jacopo di Padova was first, but he stood on the coals with his arms uplifted in prayer, unharmed. The populace watching knew what this meant and proclaimed, “They are saints! They are saints! It is a sin to do them harm! We see their religion is holy and true!” The cadi, however, insisted that the friar was wearing a cloak from the land of the prophet Abraham, which protected Jacopo from the flames.76 Doused with oil and stripped of his cloak, Jacopo was thrown back into the stoked fire, and again emerged unsinged. Again, the people proclaimed the friars’ sanctity, and this time, the melic of the city agreed, telling Jacopo, “We see that you are holy and good men, and that your religion is good and holy and true.”77 Nevertheless, he advised that they leave as soon as possible, as the cadi would try again to kill them.
This miracle, of course, replicated the miracle of the three Hebrew boys in the fire in the book of Daniel (Dan. 3:20–26). And, like Nebuchadnezzar, the ruler of the city saw the miracle as evidence of the goodness of the friars and the value of their religious beliefs. Likewise, the population of the city “were standing about in a state of awe and astonishment, saying, ‘We have seen from these men, things so great and marvelous, that we know not what law we ought to follow and keep.’”78 Although the friars did not have the opportunity to baptize anyone, the people and ruler recognized the martyrs as saints and proclaimed their faith to be true.
The melic, however, was a weak man, and when the cadi pointed out that the reputation for sanctity that the friars had won would inevitably lead to conversion to Christianity and the weakening of Islam, the melic gave his consent for their executions. The next morning, the executioners unwillingly—“We are reluctant to do it, for you are good and holy men”—cut off the heads of the three friars amid the sound of thunder and flashes of lightning, divine signs of favor.79 The fourth friar, Pietro di Siena, who had been left with their belongings in the house of the Nestorians, was then arrested, tortured, and executed, joining his brothers in martyrdom.
None of the participants in the murder of the martyrs survived unscathed. The melic was plagued by dreams of the martyrs, “bright and gleaming like the sun,” threatening him with swords: in a confused ecumenical gesture, he built four mosques (mosquetas) in honor of the martyrs, and put Saracen “priests” (sacerdotes) in charge of them.80 This, however, was not sufficient to assuage the anger of God and the saints; the emperor at Delhi had him and his entire family cut to pieces for killing the friars.81
Odorico took the narrative given by Bartholomew and shaped it in significant ways, drawing on and evoking a much different set of expectations around martyrdom than earlier thirteenth-century Franciscan material. Most strikingly, the martyrs never expressed a desire to die; their deaths were the result of the panicked reaction of a worldly authority to their arrival, not the friars’ yearning desire to be one with the crucified Christ. In this, they stand in stark contrast to the thirteenth-century Franciscan saints, Francis and Anthony of Padua most prominently, who burned with the desire for martyrdom. The narrative played with the expectations of its audience; Franciscans and others were familiar with stories of martyrdom of Christians under Muslim rule, and expected Muslim hostility toward Christianity and a harsh reaction to any insult offered to Muhammad or his religion. Yet the setting was India, whose pagans recognized the sanctity of the martyrs, proclaiming it joyously. Odorico made no appeals for missionaries to be sent to the east, but he had no need to; the account shone with the possibilities of Christian evangelization and the transformation that could produce.
The differences between Odorico’s account and those preceding his are striking. Like the letter of 1323 the Relatio was suffused with the possibility of conversion, but the letter of 1323 had introduced the four friars as having been killed “for constantly declaring that Machomet was hellspawn and filled with a devil”;82 Odorico in contrast showed the friars as being reluctant to insult the prophet. Odorico emphasized the difference between the categories of “Saracens” and “infidels”—a distinction that was not evident in Bartholomew’s letter—and showed the friars to be more circumspect in confronting Muslim authority. But the potential for transformation was limited—not everyone could be converted. Odorico’s account of the martyrs divided Tana into two groups: the Saracens, who persecuted and killed the martyrs, and “the people.” He explained at the outset that “the people are idolaters, for they worship fire, and snakes and trees too. The land is under the dominion of the Saracens, who have taken it by force of arms.”83 This distinction was absent in the earlier letters. These two groups react in diametrically opposed ways: the Saracens persecute, denying the evident truth of Christianity attested by the numerous miracles and the friars’ persuasive arguments, while the idolaters vociferously proclaim the martyrs’ sanctity and the veracity of their faith. Odorico repeatedly emphasized the difference—the people who proclaimed the miracle of the fire were the “populus idolatra.”84 The only exception was the melic, who was Muslim, yet recognized the goodness of the martyrs.
Translating Tana
But Odorico’s account did more than give an uplifting account of Christianity’s triumph in a distant corner of the world. It also suggested that exotic Tana was in many ways not as foreign as it might have seemed. In fact, Odorico’s helpful translations—begun in Bartholomew’s letter and expanded by Odorico—allowed Tana to be easily envisioned as a city and community such as one the reader might inhabit. Although the story of the martyrs was filled with exotic detail, like the rest of the account, it was domesticated through the cultural translation Odorico offered. The foreign city with its medan, cadi, and melic became an Italian city, with a piazza, a bishop, and a podestà.85 The cries of the populace when witnessing the martyrs’ suffering were the same as a Christian crowd when a new saint has been canonized. This series of correspondences suggested that Tana could be like the Christian cities Odorico’s readers knew; all that was required was the completion of the mission of the friars.
Odorico saw other aspects of the new places he visited through the familiar lens of Christendom as well. The martyrs, so central to his account, had their parallels in India. In Mobar (probably Malabar, that is, modern Kerala), Odorico found many things familiar to him, but at the same time a little strange. There were Christians there, who were associated with the tomb of the apostle Thomas, but the church was filled with idols, and the Christians (Nestorians) were “vile and pestilent heretics.”86 There were martyrs, too: it was the custom in the area to celebrate the anniversary of the creation of a locally revered idol, “as big as St. Christopher,” which was placed in a chariot and led in procession. Pilgrims would cast themselves under its wheels, “saying that they wished to die for their god.” Once crushed by the chariot, their coreligionists burned their bodies, “declaring that they are holy, having thus devoted themselves to death for their god.”87 Devotees of the Christopher-sized god had another path to holy death as well; the devotee could announce, “I desire to sacrifice myself for my god.” He then stood before the statue and removed bits of his flesh to place on the statue until he died of his wounds, and again “they look upon him as a saint.”88
This narrative has a long and curious history; it is the first European account of the cult of Jagannatha, which, contrary to Odorico’s supposition, is actually located in Puri, on the eastern coast of India in the state of Odisha. The massive idol and statue that crushed everything in its path is the source of the English word “juggernaut,” though the friar named neither the god nor the place where he was worshipped. The cult became representative of the image of Indian religion as bloody and superstitious, even though some European observers as early as the seventeenth century realized that the “martyrs” were simply people who had been accidentally killed in the crowded conditions of the festival.89
Odorico included this story to contrast the false Indian martyrs with the true Franciscan ones whose relics he carried with him. He did not record any other stories of sacrificial death from other communities, and his readers would have recognized the Juggernaut story as a form of martyrdom. But we should not imagine that he was drawing a parallel between the Malabar Indians and his own martyrs. The opposite is true; the story of those sacrificing themselves to their gods was intended to highlight by contrast the pious behavior of the true Christian martyrs, the authentic martyrs of Tana. It is striking that one of the crucial differences in behavior (rather than belief) was that the idolatrous martyrs voluntarily sacrificed themselves, whereas the four martyrs never expressed a desire to die. The pagans desired martyrdom, but the Franciscans did not.
Islam itself was similarly put in the context of Christianity. According to Odorico, Saracens went on pilgrimage to Mecca “just as Christians go to the Sepulcher.”90 In Mecca, Saracens also venerated a tomb—that of Machomet. Perhaps most surprisingly, the mosques the melic built for the bodies of the martyrs were not just like churches; Odorico said they were churches, and the clerics in them were “priests.”91 The tombs of the martyrs thus were both Christian and Muslim; both religions were described as having tombs as their most sacred places, and the space occupied by the martyrs was both a mosque and a church. Are these correspondences intended to suggest that Islam too might be transformed into Christianity, or that it was its mirror image, and thus unassimilable?
The possibility that Islam might in some way be made into Christianity is supported by the ambiguous figure of the melic. Like the pagan citizens of Tana (and unlike any of the other Muslims), the melic recognized the sanctity of the martyrs and sought to have them released. In this sense, he echoed the Ayyubid sultan al-Kāmil in Bonaventure’s account of the story of the meeting of Francis and the sultan, in which al-Kāmil was willing to convert, but feared the reaction of his court and subjects.92 Yet it was the melic who was executed with all his family by the emperor for having the friars killed, despite his pious building of church-mosques in their honor. The cadi, on the other hand, did not die, but fled the emperor’s lands. Why? By Christian logic, the melic deserved to die, precisely because of his recognition of Christian truth. He abandoned the martyrs and failed to convert. His story showed both the power of Christianity and why Muslims did not convert and deserved punishment.
Elsewhere in the Relatio, Saracens stand apart from other groups. Odorico delighted in giving offbeat ethnographic information: in the town of Huz, for example, it was the custom for men, not women, to knit and spin.93 But in no place did he describe Saracen habits and customs—at least, not explicitly. The Huzzites might well have been Muslim—Odorico located Huz near Chaldea, but he did not identify them religiously. Odorico showed little interest in Islam or Muslims in a cultural or religious sense, mentioning them only in a political context: he told his readers, for example, that there are “many Christians of all kinds in Tabriz, but the Saracens rule them in all things.”94 The Relatio conveys a sense of Asia as a vast world of paganism, a small part of which was ruled by Muslims, but not inhabited by them. Only in reference to the martyrs did the Saracens appear in a religious context: the melic built mosques in honor of the martyrs; Saracens on Odorico’s ship prayed for wind when they were becalmed, to no avail;95 and the Saracens (as well as the pagans) used earth from the site of the martyrdom to heal the sick.96
The power of Odorico’s account came from the revelation of an exotic world beyond the merely alien Islamic world with which western Christians had traded, fought, and in many places cohabited. The Muslims of Odorico’s account needed no introduction for western readers; they wielded political power, and were unlikely to convert—yet knew enough to know that they should. This Latin Christians already knew. But the Relatio showed that further to the east were vast realms, filled with kings whose wealth and power dwarfed that of any Muslim ruler. The events at Tana demonstrated how willing pagans were to convert when exposed to the deep faith of the Franciscans, the message the letter of 1323 also aimed to convey. Here, then, the audience could have their cake and eat it too. The martyrs shone with all the glory of the martyrs of the age of the apostles, and the Saracens filled the role of the evil persecutor. But the martyrs were victorious in both earthly and heavenly terms; the melic was killed for having allowed the execution of the martyrs, while the martyrs enjoyed a heavenly reward for their sacrifice. As we will see, the Franciscans would soon turn away from this kind of triumphalism.
The surviving manuscripts of the Relatio tell us a great deal about what readers found compelling about the narrative. Unlike Jordan’s or Bartholomew’s account, Odorico’s was widely read and copied, and is preserved in many dozens of manuscripts, some translated into vernacular languages. The greater number were preserved with other travel narratives such as Marco Polo’s and Mandeville’s. Even those texts which were gathered with Franciscan-focused material also betray an interest in travel and the marvels of the East. The fifteenth-century manuscript at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge contains a Pseudo-Bonaventurean text on the Mass and Honorius III’s approval of the Franciscan rule, but also shows a notable interest in Asia and apocalyptic material. The manuscript also includes Pseudo-Methodius’s “Revelations,” the “Purgatory of St. Patrick,” the “Voyage of St. Brendan,” the “Travels of Mandeville,” the letter of Prester John to Manuel Komnenos, the “History of the Three Kings,” a treatise entitled De sarracenis, and the “History of Judas Iscariot.”97 This classification of the Relatio effectively transferred the story of the martyrs into an immensely popular genre, travel literature of the late medieval period, as if a tract on liberation theology was printed in the middle of a spy novel. This is seen most graphically in some of the illustrated manuscripts of Odorico, where illuminations depicting the martyrs are included among other images of the “wonders of the East.”98 Not only did it give the martyrs’ story a much wider readership, but it also transmuted its meaning in a variety of ways. The passio could be read not just as Franciscan self-fashioning in a time of uncertainty, but also as shaping a broader western Christian sense of distinctiveness.
A Spiritual Reading of the Martyrdom
Yet Odorico’s account might well have had a more specific meaning for some Franciscans within the context of the controversy over poverty. Odorico dictated his account in 1330 and died soon after, as the struggles within the order were still raging: Michael of Cesena had fled Avignon only two years earlier. Though old and near death, Odorico made his way to the papal court shortly after his return to Italy, in part to demonstrate his obedience to John XXII in a time when his loyalties might be questioned—or at least a postscript to some of the manuscripts of the Relatio so claimed.99 Odorico himself may well have been loyal, but the story of the martyrs his account spread across Europe was far more subversive, at least from the point of view of Avignon. For some Franciscan readers, an account of friars dying at the instigation of tyrannous religious authorities could have been read as a veiled attack on John himself, the Tana martyrs standing in for (or standing alongside) the friars and beguines killed by the Inquisition.
That sense would have been all the stronger among those who were familiar with the background of the martyrs themselves, particularly Tommaso, who was the leader of the Tana martyrs. Tommaso was imprisoned in 1274 for placing fidelity to the Franciscan rule over fidelity to the pope, and was thus among the first generation of spirituals. In 1290 he was released and spent the remainder of his life between missionary work in the East and trips back to Europe, once as an ambassador for the Armenian king Het‘um II in 1292100 and on another journey as a courier carrying Giovanni di Montecorvino’s letters back from Mongol lands to Europe in 1306.101 We know little about the other martyrs, but their willingness to associate with Tommaso would suggest at least some sympathy for the spiritual movement. Such close association with someone who had already been punished for disobedience would not be a connection taken on lightly, particularly in the 1310s and 1320s. While Odorico did not highlight the martyrs’ spiritual inclinations, the name of Tommaso di Tolentino would have been familiar to many. Angelo Clareno, one of the leaders of the spiritual movement, included Tommaso as a significant figure in his History of the Seven Tribulations (c. 1320s), mentioning both his early suffering in Ancona and his martyrdom.102
The spiritual affiliations of Tommaso di Tolentino and perhaps even of Odorico himself encourage us to imagine a spiritual reading of the martyrdom. The martyrs were killed through the collusion of two men: the cadi, described as the “bishop of the city,” and the melic, who was the “podestà.” The cadi believed that the friars must be killed in order to preserve Islam; the melic was reluctantly persuaded by these arguments, but harbored sympathy for the martyrs. The story thus used the paradigm of the dynamic between Pilate and Caiaphas to structure the martyrdom into a story that paralleled the Crucifixion of Christ. The populace, however, did not occupy the place of the Jews in the Gospel accounts, shouting for the Crucifixion—that role was filled by the Muslims in the earlier scene at the court of the cadi who protested against the Franciscans’ blasphemy. The pagan crowd instead was the equivalent of the gentiles to whom Christian salvation was offered after it was rejected by the Jews—that is, the readers of the story in Europe.
What did this allusion say about the contemporary crisis in the order? The cadi is easily read as John XXII, seeking to destroy the righteous men in a desperate attempt to preserve his corrupt and worldly religious authority. The emperor (who had no explicit religious or ethnic identity)103 avenged the friars—a Franciscan reader sympathetic to the spirituals might see in him another emperor, the Holy Roman Emperor Ludwig IV the Bavarian (1328–47), who supported the spirituals (as well as Michael of Cesena) against the pope, and even appointed a spiritual Franciscan, Pietro Rinalducci di Corvaro, as John’s replacement as pope (antipope Nicholas V). The result of the martyrdom was the flight of the persecuting religious authority (John), the establishment of a cult devoted to the dead martyrs (like those of spiritual friars martyred in Marseilles), and the suggestion that the world would turn to proper Christian belief. This was a set of events that many hoped to see played out in Europe.
Frescoed Franciscans
It was not only in texts that the martyrs suddenly appeared. They also began to be commemorated in frescoes, stained-glass windows, and other media in the early fourteenth century. The earliest representation of Franciscan martyrs came unsurprisingly from Coimbra, the center of the cult of the Moroccan martyrs. A small stone reliquary depicting the five martyrs in trefoil arcades can probably be dated to the late thirteenth century. In the first arcade is seated the Miramolin, and the first friar is addressing him in prayer. The death of the Franciscans is not depicted, so it is not in a strict sense, a depiction of the martyrdom itself.104 The oldest preserved depiction of Franciscan martyrdom per se (rather than of a Franciscan martyr) is most likely the stained-glass window in the chapel of Sant’Antonio in the lower church of San Francesco in Assisi, roughly dated to c. 1310.105 Monumental fresco cycles also began to include the martyrs; Ambrogio Lorenzetti around 1340 painted two frescoes in the church of San Francesco in Siena as part of a larger cycle decorating the chapter house. Lorenzetti’s work in the church was lost for centuries, and the two frescoes were rediscovered only in 1855; they were moved to a chapel in the choir of the church a few years later. Maureen Burke has identified one of the frescoes as the martyrdom of six friars in Almalyk in 1339, which makes sense of the Mongolian details in the frescoes.106 A fragment of Lorenzetti’s fresco of the martyrs of Tana was rediscovered in the cloister of the convent only in the twentieth century, making it unlikely that he depicted them again in this fresco.107 However, this identification is not certain either; one of the martyred friars was also bishop of Armalech, and none of the participants bore episcopal insignia.
A second Lorenzetti fresco discovered in the chapter house was also moved to the chapel: Saint Louis of Toulouse Before Pope Boniface VIII. This fresco shows Saint Louis on his knees before an enthroned Boniface, who has taken the saint’s hands into his own. Louis is dressed in his Franciscan robes, and the scene is generally taken to represent the renunciation of his inheritance (the kingdom of Naples, of which Boniface was overlord), and the acceptance of his vows to join the Franciscan order, a meeting that happened in 1296.108 In their original setting in the chapter house, the Martyrdom of the Franciscans and Saint Louis were joined by scenes from the passion of Christ, including The Crucifixion of Christ and The Resurrection of Christ. Nevertheless, it is the scenes of Louis and the martyrdom that appear to speak to each other. Beyond their explicit Franciscan content, formal qualities link the two scenes. Both the khan and the pope are elevated on thrones; Burke notes that “the figures of the rulers (pope and khan) … are positioned in the central third of each scene, with an equal height to be found above and below.”109 Boniface, however, is on the extreme left of his panel, while the khan is in the center. Furthermore, Boniface is seen from his right side at a slight angle, while the khan is seated frontally. Both figures lean forward slightly: Boniface toward Louis whose hands he is grasping, and the khan to his right, toward a group of four Mongol figures holding weapons. The khan is not looking at the martyrs about to be beheaded; instead, his eyes meet those of a man in a simple white robe, with a single fillet around his head. He is the least exoticized and least violent of all the figures. Both rulers confront a busy scene: the pope faces three rows of spectators, which include cardinals as well as lay visitors and a crowned figure who has been identified as either Louis’s brother Robert, who became heir to the kingdom as a result of Louis’s vows, or their father Charles, looking on glumly as his eldest son renounces his inheritance. The khan is flanked by two groups of Mongols, with the friars and their guards before him.
The visual links between the khan and the pope open the fresco to being read in a variety of ways. The twinning of the figures of the khan and the pope call to mind a third figure which often appeared in the accounts of the Franciscan martyrs in this period: John XXII. The letter of 1323 was the first to use the pope as a guarantee of the piety and sanctity of the martyrs. Both the Franciscan chroniclers Elemosina and Paolino da Venezia elaborated on this association and recounted scenes in which the passiones of the Tana martyrs were read out before the pope to great effect. This association would have been all the more powerful given the existence of a cycle of frescoes dedicated to the Tana martyrs in the chapter house in Siena, which now is largely lost. The position of the cadi in that fresco would reveal a great deal about how the entire cycle might have been viewed.
Again, the viewer could interpret these associations in radically different ways. Boniface VIII was blessing Louis of Toulouse, just as John XXII was giving his approbation to the martyrs of Tana in the contemporary Franciscan chronicles. But a spiritual reading lurked beneath the surface of both frescoes. The convent in Siena was closely associated with spiritual activity in the early part of the fourteenth century.110 The construction of a grander Franciscan convent in 1326, which the frescoes were planned to complete, may have been intended to put the convent’s spiritual associations behind it. But did they still linger? Would some viewers of the frescoes of 1340 have seen them through a spiritual lens? Both frescoes show pious Franciscans with similar values. Louis was rejecting the world of power and prestige, and the martyrs were demonstrating by their willingness to die their rejection of compromise with the worldly power of the Mongol khan. This, then, curiously aligns the pope and the khan in a similar way as a spiritual reading of the martyrdom of the friars at Tana aligned the cadi and Pope John XXII. Like the khan, John XXII had the suffering and death of the martyrs displayed before him.
Beneath the painting of Louis’s renunciation, too, lurked a spiritual message. Louis was demonstrating his commitment to poverty and humility by rejecting his royal inheritance in order to join the Franciscans. It is a reenactment on a far grander scale of Francis’s rejections of his patrimony, when he stripped himself of his clothes to return them to his father. In the famous fresco of this scene by Giotto in San Francesco in Assisi, Francis confronts his father, while Bishop Guido supports him from behind, wrapping him in his cloak to shield his nudity. The relation between the secular status Francis was surrendering and the religious one he was entering is staged confrontationally. The poverello faces what he rejects, and is aligned with what he is joining. If we apply the same dynamic to the image of Louis before the pope, Louis is handing over his royal prerogatives to Boniface. The prince was, of course, heir to the kingdom of Sicily, over which the pope was temporal sovereign. The centrality of secular authority was emphasized by the presence of the crowned figure in the scene, who represented Louis’s father or brother. This emphasis on the pope’s temporal power and its contrast to Louis’s rejection of it aligns the image with long-standing Franciscan critiques of ecclesiastical wealth and power. Those critiques became more pointed at the turn of the fourteenth century, in reaction to the divisive papacies of Boniface IX and John XXII. In one possible reading of the scene, Boniface represents everything that Louis is rejecting—worldly power, wealth, and prestige. These are precisely the qualities vested in the Muslim persecutors of the Franciscan martyrs—in the convent in Siena, specifically the Mongol khan.
These questions arise in part due to the troublesome nature of claims about poverty. As John XXII understood, the Franciscans’ emphasis on communal poverty and their claim to faithfully follow the evangelical life of Christ and the apostles was a rejection of much of what the established church represented. It was all too easy for Franciscans and others to see in the figures of the Mongol khan, the Miramolin, and the Ayyubid sultan the wealthy and worldly institutional church, led by an equally worldly and wealthy pope. While Innocent III might have seen the humble and poor Francis as the pillar holding up a church crumbling under the weight of its own wealth, John XXII saw the Franciscans, particularly those most devoted to poverty, as tearing the church down. But it was precisely this flexibility of Franciscan martyrdom that made it so appealing to the order. The rejection of the world by the martyrs may have been inspired by the same ideology that undergirded the love of poverty, but it also supplanted it, so that the Franciscan rejection of material possessions need no longer be expressed through devotion to apostolic poverty, whether interpreted rigorously or loosely.
Conclusion
The martyrdom of the friars at Tana was widely read because of the flexibility of its message and because of its arrival in Europe as the Franciscan order was suffering through an existential crisis. The story of the martyrs could assure anxious friars of the fundamental piety of the order; it could also be used, as Jerome of Catalonia had, to defend Franciscans against the specific accusation of heresy in the wake of the controversy over poverty. Martyrdom had the power to unsettle as well as comfort. It could offer a critique of the desire for martyrdom, and it could allow spiritual friars to read the Saracens and the suffering they inflicted as a coded reference to the persecutions of John XXII and his inquisition. The Tana martyrdom also represented a pivot. It was written while Franciscans and others still believed in the possibility of widespread conversion of the Mongols, particularly in the realm of the Golden Horde. Yet the enthusiasm for martyrdom was new; the evangelists of the thirteenth century, like Giovanni di Montecorvino and William of Rubruck, neither sought it out nor glorified it. While Jordan, the letter-writers in Caffa, and Odorico all celebrated the possibilities of transformation and conversion, the promotion of martyrdom transmuted evangelizing enthusiasm into the marvels of martyrdom—which required no proof of success in converting. Specific numbers and names of people baptized could be supplanted with crowds praising the martyrs. Within a decade, however, the crowds dissipated, leaving only the martyrs as a testament to the achievements of the Franciscans in the East.