CHAPTER 5
The story of the Tana martyrs spread quickly in Europe. Within five years of the composition of Odorico’s account, the passio appeared in three independent sources: two chronicles in Italy and a collection of diverse Franciscan material in England. Other passiones showed up as well; the Tana narrative inspired Franciscans to compose accounts for other martyrs, whose stories had been circulating in some form within the order. Thus, the first full passio of the Moroccan martyrs came out at the same time as the story of the Tana martyrs was spreading through Franciscan networks. Like Jerome of Catalonia, the authors saw Franciscan martyrdom as an anchor for the order in trying times, serving as proof of the sanctity of both individual friars and the order as a whole. But even more than this, the martyrdoms were in dialogue with the ideal of poverty; in some cases, they proved the piety of those most devoted to poverty (i.e., spirituals), but in others they served to replace poverty as a marker of the distinctive brand of Franciscan piety.
Paolino da Venezia: The Courtly Friar Reads the Martyrdom
The Tana martyrs caught the eye of a prominent member of the court of Robert I of Naples in the late 1320s and early 1330s. The Franciscan Paolino da Venezia was one of the earliest to record the story of the Tana martyrs outside of those who had been to India; he described the martyrdom in two different works, first in the Compendium or Chronologica magna1 and again in the longer Historia satyrica (around 1334).2
Unlike Odorico, we can be certain that Paolino was no spiritual; the inventory of his goods following his death included an abundance of silver liturgical vessels,3 and his Franciscan colleagues complained about his exorbitant expenditures on clothing and his employment of entertainers within his household.4 Furthermore, his historical works clearly took the side of John XXII in his conflict with the Franciscans, portraying the spirituals as schismatics and heretics.5 Paolino’s chronicles were designed to be a demonstration of his own intellectual prowess, and so the martyrs, too, were shown to be learned men; they demonstrated that martyrdom was not always just a proxy for conflict with Islam or for the issue of poverty.
Paolino had a distinguished ecclesiastical career in Venice, Avignon, and Naples: after joining the order in the province of Venice (c. 1290), he served as an inquisitor in Treviso, among other offices. He moved to Avignon (1316–26), which seven years earlier had become the refuge of the popes from the tumults of Rome. Paolino made the most of the opportunities Avignon offered. He was appointed as a papal penitencer under John XXII, and filled a variety of diplomatic roles for the pope. It was a heady time to be in Avignon; not only was Paolino present for the conflict with the spirituals, but the papal court drew many others into its orbit. His time in Avignon coincided with that of Robert I of Naples, who resided in the papal city from 1319 to 1324. Paolino was in the enviable position of being able to find patrons in two of the richest and most powerful courts in Europe, all in the same city. Thanks to Robert, he was eventually appointed bishop of Pozzuoli (just outside Naples) in 1324. He did not move south until two years later, and when he did, he spent much of his time at the court of Robert I, just a few miles away from his see.
Paolino was engaged in the intellectual and political life at both courts, and he wrote a number of texts that bolstered his reputation and career. One of his earliest treatises was on good government, De regimine rectoris, written in the Venetian dialect and dedicated to Marino Badoer, the duke of Candia. He also wrote treatises in Latin on chess, geography, and pagan mythology. Robert I owned a copy of his Historia satyrica, and may have annotated it in his own hand.6 Boccaccio, though still young and not well known, mocked his intellectual pretensions, calling him a “Venetian blabbermouth,”7 yet borrowed from his material.8 Boccaccio also did not like Paolino’s prejudice in favor of his patron John XXII, remarking that he did not mention the nefarious deeds of the “tyrant.”9
As a chronicler and compiler of historical texts, Paolino was pursuing a path to prominence popular in the early fourteenth century. Both of his historical texts were world histories, which, like many other thirteenth-and fourteenth-century chronicles, sought to place the history of their region, king, or order within the scope of the history of creation. His colleagues at the papal court in Avignon, such as the Dominicans Bernard Gui (c. 1261–1331) and Ptolemy of Lucca (c. 1236–c. 1327) also composed world chronicles. All three looked back to Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale as a model, and each of them departed the papal court with an episcopal ring on his finger for his good services.10
Like his colleagues, Paolino was not writing history de novo, but was compiling his account from earlier sources. Paolino’s distinctive contribution was the carefully structured graphic schema that organized the diverse material he copied and edited. It featured a series of tables at the beginning of the chronicle, which provided a kind of index, while the text itself was structured through the reigns of emperors, popes, and kings, graphically represented (often as crowned heads) as another way in which the reader could read selectively. But Paolino’s histories were not just scholastic compilations of past events. They naturally incorporated sacred history, and even spurred their readers to meditate on the events of the Crucifixion, as they drew upon Franciscan texts such as the Meditationes vitae Christi as well as more conventional historical narratives like Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History.11
Paolino included an account of the Tana martyrs in both his Chronologia magna and his Historia satyrica.12 Paolino was evidently drawing on some version of Odorico’s account, rather than Bartholomew’s, but it was not a word-for-word transcription. Paolino notably misdated their deaths, placing them in 1319, and did not explain how the friars ended up in front of the cadi. According to Paolino, the friars, claiming to be “lovers of holy poverty,” told the melich that they had traveled to Tana seeking the tomb of Saint Thomas. The Saracens accused them of claiming that “our law is better than the law of Mahumet,” though Paolino did not record the friars as having directly denigrated Islam or the prophet.13 When the population of the town proclaimed them saints, the melich was convinced by the cadi and the mysterious man from Alexandria (named Yusuf and identified as a Saracen), who played a larger role in this account, to have the friars executed.
Although Paolino followed a rough outline of Odorico’s account, his condensed version left out details that altered the valence of the story. Whereas Odorico described the friars as preaching the doctrine of the Incarnation, Paolino specified that they used natural parallels—the rays of the sun, the seeds of the earth—to show that God could have a son yet have no wife. The friars thus showed themselves to be learned friars, who like Paolino himself, were akin to the philosophers thirteenth-century enthusiasts of evangelizing among the Muslims imagined could convert the Saracens through wisdom. Nevertheless, it was not through intellect that the friars triumphed, but through faith, demonstrated in the miracle of the fire. But Paolino also framed this episode differently than either Odorico or Bartholomew had. Jacopo stepped into the fire willingly, having been challenged to demonstrate the veracity of their claims about their religion through a miracle. Thus, the martyrs were like Francis in Bonaventure’s version of his encounter with the sultan, when the saint challenged the Saracen wise men to demonstrate the veracity of their faith by stepping into a fire, as he was willing to do.14 Once again, the martyrs accomplished what Francis only desired. Jacopo’s miraculous preservation in the midst of the flames proved the superiority of Christianity to Islam, whereas in Bonaventure’s account of Francis, the saint never had the opportunity; the sultan refused to kindle the fire.15
Why was Paolino interested in this martyrdom, and why did he include it in both of his historical texts? It is the only Franciscan passio he recorded—probably because it was the only one he knew. The second chronicle, the Historia satyrica, gives us a small clue: his account of the martyrs began with Pope John XXII; he “read a letter in the consistory with great favor” about the martyrs.16 This letter described the martyrdom of the four friars. Unfortunately, Paolino gave no hints about who composed the letter: Was it Bartholomew? Or Odorico? Thus, Paolino not only authenticated the passiones as having been approved by the pope, but he also showed that they were even read aloud to the papal court. John’s potential interest in the martyrs was an opportunity to demonstrate what sorts of Franciscans he found pleasing. With this perspective, certain details of Paolino’s account become more significant. The Venetian never identified Tommaso di Tolentino by anything other than his first name; Jacopo di Padova’s city of origin, on the other hand, was recognized. Paolino thus avoided mentioning a well-known spiritual in John’s textual presence.17
Furthermore, Paolino identified the martyrs as “lovers of holy poverty.” In another context, this might be seen as a recognition of Tommaso’s spiritual associations, but that is not the case here. Instead, Paolino was showing how poverty should work within the Franciscan order. The friars found themselves in India “to preach to infidels” and to seek the tomb of Saint Thomas. The martyrs remained faithful to Franciscan poverty, but their willingness to die gave them their true glory. Like Jerome of Catalonia, the ideal of poverty was sublimated to the holier status of martyr.
The Franciscans of Tana joined the triumphant parade of saints and martyrs that populated Paolino’s chronicle, showing the order to be the culmination of providential history. While Paolino was not following a Joachimite theology of history, he did see the Franciscans as embodying evangelical values that had their origin in the life of Christ and the apostles themselves. “Poverty,” Paolino pointed out, “was the root of non-sinning. It is the origin and fundament of all good things.”18 He made the distinction between possession and use, which John XXII had just a few years earlier undermined in his bull Ad conditorem, pointing out that while use is necessary to sustain human life, possession is not. “He therefore is poor according to the spirit who renounces both the possession of all temporal goods for the sake of God and superfluity in the use of them.” This was the “essence of evangelical poverty,” which comes in two forms: “The second kind of poverty (communal) existed among the apostles.” Not only the apostles, of course—“In order to teach more by example than through words alone, Christ has renounced all possessions.”19 The Franciscans were the only ones to practice the communal poverty of Christ and the apostles, who were the cornerstones of the church. The Franciscans, like the early church, also produced martyrs; the account of the events at Tana demonstrated the continuing evangelical and apostolic piety of the order. Despite John’s bulls, evangelical poverty remained fundamental to the Franciscans.20 But fidelity to poverty could no longer be located in the real or even theoretical poverty of the order: John had forced it to own what it used. The story of the martyrs, appearing at the end of the chronicle, provided both papal approbation of Franciscan piety and proof that such piety was rooted in the values of the primitive church.
Elemosina’s Chronicle: The Triumph of the Church
Another Franciscan chronicler writing around the same time, Johannes Elemosina, showed an even greater interest in the martyrs, making the dead friars central to the order’s history and values. His world chronicle was structured around evangelization and martyrdom. But Elemosina was not a courtly sophisticate like Paolino; nor was he a spiritual—he was the guardian of the convent of Gualdo Taldino, a town in the hills of Umbria.21 The manuscripts containing his chronicle are scruffy and unpolished compared to Paolino’s illustrated and carefully structured opus. Perhaps as a consequence of his obscure location, only two copies of his chronicle survive—both are autographs, so it is possible that no one other than Elemosina himself read or copied the text.22 It is this manuscript that preserved the letters of Giovanni di Montecorvino.
Elemosina, however, did share with Paolino and others of the same era his understanding of what a chronicle should be; his was also a universal history, conceived as a succession of empires. For most of his chronicle, Elemosina drew on earlier accounts, such as Orosius, but he also added his own distinct voice to his account in a number of ways, most prominently through separate notes he appended at the bottom of many of the manuscript pages, which are not based on earlier material. These are almost exclusively on religious subjects; one of the earliest is a chronological note announcing the birth of Jesus in the twenty-seventh year of Augustus’s reign.23 More frequently, however, the notes do not give specific historical information, but rather explain how the history of salvation worked. This history, of course, is not one of dates or events, but of the mysterious grace of God working for the salvation of humanity. At the bottom of the page recounting the deeds of Constantine and his mother Helena, for example, Elemosina added an account describing how “God renewed the world through the Christian faith.”24 The note does not refer directly to the historical account above; Elemosina makes no reference to Constantine, his mother, the cross, the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, or any other such subject, but simply exults in the triumph of Christianity over idolatry that Constantine represented more broadly. These notes were in a sense Elemosina’s guide to the history recounted in the paragraphs above, letting the reader know how the specific events in the history of empire or church fit into the larger divine pattern. And for Elemosina, that pattern was a pattern of triumph.
Once he turned to the Christian era, Elemosina showed a particular interest in three subjects: conversion, martyrdom, and the non-Christian world of the Middle East and Asia, themes Paolino also found compelling.25 Significant enough to receive their own rubrics were the conversion of the Irish,26 the Burgundians,27 the Armenians,28 and the English.29 He also addressed the subject through his notes, as when he described “how nearly all the peoples of East and West came to the faith of Christ.”30 Martyrdom was also a common theme. Beginning with the first Christian martyr, James,31 his chronicle included Hilarian, who died in Ostia;32 four hundred martyrs killed in Lombardy;33 John of Spoleto, martyred by the Saracens;34 the Visigothic king and martyr Hermingild;35 King Oswald of Northumbria, another king and martyr whose story occupied several folios;36 martyrs in Palestine during the Persian invasion;37 and so on. The larger story Elemosina sought to tell, then, was the spread of Christianity to all the peoples of the earth, a mission achieved through the efforts of the church and empire on earth, and through the valiant Christians who were willing to die so that Christianity might triumph. It was a story begun by Eusebius in the fourth century, and fundamental to how Latin Christians understood providential history through the Middle Ages and beyond.
What Eusebius began, Elemosina thought he might finish. The quickening of apocalyptic time was manifested most clearly in the trifecta of martyrdom, Franciscan values, and conversions. He discussed “the great Christian king of India” and his devotion to the Holy Sepulcher,38 the efforts of Franciscans like Giovanni di Montecorvino in Mongol lands,39 and, of course, the Franciscan martyrs who died in India. Like Odorico, Elemosina offered an image of a world on the verge of conversion, and saw the work of Franciscan friars across Asia in the vanguard.
The martyrs of Tana appear at the very end of his chronicle—indeed, Elemosina may have been inspired to write his account by hearing of their deaths. The beginning of his history indicates that he had originally planned to end his chronicle in 1331,40 and he indeed stopped his historical chronicle at this point. Thus he suggested that he structured the text to conclude just as the account of the Tana martyrs reached Avignon. The last twenty folios of the chronicle abandon the chronological narrative and are devoted almost exclusively to Franciscan martyrs, evangelism among infidels, and apocalyptic materials: first the words of Christ himself to his apostles, warning them of the plagues and earthquakes that would presage the coming of the Son of Man,41 and then the visions of the biblical prophet Daniel.42 Only a few paragraphs interrupt this focus: one short entry describing the disastrous flood in Florence in 1333 (which could be considered apocalyptic) and an even briefer mention of the death of John XXII and the coronation of Benedict XII in 1334.43 While we cannot be certain why Elemosina wrote his chronicle, it seems that in concluding with a series of Franciscan martyrdoms and the scriptural predictions concerning the end of the world, Elemosina might have seen in his own day the quickening of apocalyptic chronology, and intended his account to be a complete history of the world, from beginning to end.44 The accounts of the Franciscan martyrs, particularly those who died in India, happening in the furthest reaches of the known world, were a signal that the evangelization of the whole world was nearly complete and that the end of the world was at hand.
The importance of the Tana martyrs to Elemosina is further signaled by his treatment of their story. Rather than giving a brief paraphrase or retelling their passio in his own words as he had done for other historical accounts, he transcribed all the materials he had about the martyrs, including both the letter of Jordan and the account of Odorico.45 But Elemosina did not discuss any other Franciscan martyrdoms: the martyrs of Morocco (1220), Ceuta (1227), Valencia (1231), and Armenia (1314) all go unmentioned. He did briefly refer to one other Franciscan martyr: Stephen. He did not give a location for his martyrdom, but gave the date of 1333 and mentioned his miraculous escape from chains.46 Why? The most likely reason is because he did not have the full passiones for any of the martyrs other than the Tana four and the brief account of Stephen. The absence of other Franciscan passiones in a chronicle devoted to evangelization and martyrdom is further evidence that the Tana friars were the first Franciscans to receive a full passio. All other accounts of Franciscan martyrs were written after their stories began to circulate.
Elemosina did, however, include a story about other Franciscan martyrs in his chronicle—but did not recount their deaths. In 1307 five friars traveled to Egypt; the motive for their journey was, like so many of the friars who traveled outside Christendom, for “the consolation of Christian captives.”47 Many former inhabitants of Palestine and Syria were enslaved in the Mamluk realm, for less than twenty years had passed since the Mamluks had conquered the remaining Frankish holdouts of Tripoli and Acre. The friars were impressed by Egypt: the great city of Cairo, the magnificence of the court of the sultan, and the marvels of the vast desert all amazed the visitors. They particularly commented on the Christian population of Cairo, noting that they all “obey the Sultan just as the Saracens, and because the majority are faithful and true, they commit to them the care of provinces and cities.”48 The friars were also surprised to find that the soldiers who escorted them to the sultan’s court were Christian knights, and yet were entrusted with the sultan’s safety.
The pleasant experience of the friars in Egypt stood in stark contrast to their later fates, which Elemosina briefly noted. One of the friars, Monaldo di Ancona, was among the martyrs killed in Armenia in 1314; his martyrdom was not included in Elemosina’s chronicle, but he was named in his catalogue of Franciscan holy men.49 Another, named Angelo, was killed by heretic Bulgarians (previously mentioned in the letter from Caffa in 1323), and a third (Francesco) died at the hands of infidels in the midst of celebrating Mass.50 Why include the story of their travels to Cairo and not include an account of their martyrdom? Their account of their visit to Cairo brimmed with the possibility of conversion. The friars praised the Saracens in a number of ways: the caliph “agreed with the friars about many things” in a discussion about scripture, and the sultan had “the greatest devotion” for the monastery of Saint Catherine on Mount Sinai.51 As we will see below, Monaldo’s passio instead emphasized that the Saracens obstinately refused to convert, even when confronted with miracles. What the story of their visit to Cairo shows us is how new Franciscan martyrdom really was in the 1320s and 1330s. Elemosina was as interested as anyone could be; it was central to his chronicle, and the martyrs appeared prominently in his catalogue of holy men. Yet even he was uncertain how to treat the Franciscan dead. The best he could do was to include the accounts he had access to, of their travels among the Muslims, and mention the little information he had on their deaths.
Elemosina also included an account of John XXII’s response to the death of the martyrs in one of the manuscripts of his chronicle, and it was a dramatic affirmation of the martyrs. “The pious report of the holy martyr friars … was echoing from the East to the West, and everywhere the hearts of the brothers were renewed by the fervor of the Holy Spirit,” Elemosina elaborated with a flourish. “When it was announced in the Roman Church, the pope cried tears of devotion.” But the guardian of Gualdo Taldino was willing to go further. “When the lord pope was asking whether these martyrs might be canonized, certain friars of other orders offered their saints for canonization, the pope refrained from judgment over these things, deliberating carefully.”52 Elemonsina’s account went beyond Paolino’s description of the arrival of the story of the martyrs at John’s court. While Paolino had suggested that the pope heard the passio of the martyrs “with great favor,” Elemosina described John as weeping tears of devotion, linking John XXII to the friars whose hearts were renewed by the Holy Spirit when they heard the news. He furthermore put forward the possibility of canonization of the martyrs, which again would seem unlikely given Tommaso’s spiritual inclinations.53 Whereas Paolino had the pope enjoying the passio in the midst of his consistory, Elemosina left the pope thinking carefully about the martyrs, their canonization blocked by the efforts of others. While this account (like Paolino’s) gave papal approbation to the martyrs, it also suggested that the martyrs projected their own kind of authority, which even the pope needed to take time to consider and absorb.
Elemosina tied together the history of the church, the order, and providential history in a way that followed a long tradition within the order; just as Francis was a second Christ, so too was the providential history of Christianity recapitulated in the Franciscan order. This conception of Franciscanism had been critically undermined by John XXII’s bulls on poverty, a subject Elemosina downplayed. His chronicle, however, did not seem compelling to his peers; only two copies survive—both were made by Elemosina himself—and we have little evidence of his influence on other chronicles. It may have seemed that the world was ending, but given the circulation of the manuscript, the Franciscans were not convinced that the values of the order were central to its culmination.
Three Passiones, Two Scribes, One Manuscript
We must turn to an anonymous English manuscript (Cotton ms. Nero A IX in the British Library) to find Franciscans focusing on martyrs other than the four who died in India.54 The manuscript is a compilation, half of which is a collection of Franciscan material written in two different hands. The entire manuscript was bound together by Sir Robert Cotton in the seventeenth century. The first portion was probably written by Jean Salat in the early sixteenth century, and focuses on the conflict between Boniface VIII and Philip IV.55 The manuscript is a key clue to the sudden interest in Franciscan martyrs in the early fourteenth century, but the manuscript itself is an enigma. Both scribes who worked on the Franciscan half of the manuscript included passiones. Does the order in which they were added tell us something about when they were composed, or at least arrived in England? Was the manuscript intended from the start to be a collection of Franciscan passiones, or did the second scribe add more in response to the first?56 If so, what response did the second scribe intend? Expansion of the collection of martyr stories? Contradiction of the tone or values encoded in the first account? As we will see, these were all possibilities.
The first compiler assembled the anonymous “De beato Francisco et impressione sacrorum stigmatum,”57 and two martyrdom accounts: one of the five friars who died in Morocco in 1220, and the other of three friars who died in Armenia in 1314, adding them to a preexisting manuscript containing Thomas of Eccleston’s “De adventu fratrum minorum in Angliam”58 and an anonymous “De Britannia et Britonum rebus gestis.”59 Some indeterminate time later, the second hand added three more texts: the letters of Jordan and Bartholomew concerning the Tana martyrs, and a text entitled “De locis fratrum minorum et predicatorum in Tartaria.” These martyrdoms accounts were not embedded in any larger chronicle or text, so we have little idea what the purpose of collecting them was. The Franciscan portion of the manuscript apparently belonged to the convent in Hereford.60 We cannot be certain about the date when the text was written; the first hand can only broadly be dated to the first half of the fourteenth century, while the second could be later. Based on the materials, the first hand could have been written no earlier than 1314, and the second hand must have been after 1322.
This manuscript in itself embodies the conflicting ways in which Franciscans were inclined to see the world. The first author has preserved (or composed) the first detailed passiones of both the Moroccan (1220)and the Armenian (1312) martyrs to survive. He chose to add them to a manuscript already in the convent in Hereford around 1300, as a rough draft of a letter to the provincial minister Hugh of Hartlepool in the manuscript suggests.61 It is, of course, possible that the scribe chose the manuscript because it was available and not for its contents. Nevertheless, when read together, the texts instill a particular Franciscan identity in its English reader, one that simultaneously rooted the reader in Hereford and presented the Franciscans as opposed to the world. Thomas of Eccleston’s text explains how the Franciscans were established in England, situating the friar writing (and reading) in Hereford, and explaining how the Franciscans came to be there, while the history of Britain gave further background—references to Hereford were marked out, and important moments in Franciscan history were inserted.
The Franciscan values that the collection imparts were distinctive as well. The frame of the account of the stigmata told of the desire of the order in 1288 to learn the exact date and time when Francis received the wounds of Christ. One pious friar spent the night in prayer in Francis’s cell in La Verna, and received a visit from Francis himself in the early morning, who then revealed further details about the miracle. Francis confirmed that it was Jesus himself in the guise of a seraph who had appeared to him. He claimed an angel had warned him in advance, saying “I should prepare myself for suffering and for receiving in me what God might wish to achieve.”62 Francis told the angel that he was ready to accept “whatever suffering that God condescended to inflict.”63 The poverello received the vision of the crucified seraph on the morning of the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. When Jesus then stood before Francis, he asked for alms, but the saint insisted he had nothing to give other than his body and soul. Jesus prompted him to give three golden balls that he was surprised to find in his breast, which represented the three orders that Francis had founded. The account, in addition to giving further evidence supporting the authenticity of the stigmata, emphasized the suffering Francis had endured, and his poverty, something which had not been associated with the stigmata previously.
The First Passio of the Morocco Five
The account of the stigmata was followed by the passio of the Moroccan martyrs in the same hand. This is the first full account of the martyrs, providing a complete narrative of their journey, suffering, and death.64 Nevertheless, it is not the version that has generally been read or cited, though scholars have been aware of it for more than a century. It reveals a great deal about both medieval and modern notions of Franciscan martyrdom. The Moroccan martyrs often appear in general histories of the Franciscan order, of missions, and of Muslim-Christian conflict, and nearly all cite (when a citation is given to a primary source) the late fourteenth-century Chronica XXIV generalium ministrorum ordinis fratrum minorum and its appendix, both of which contain a full passio of the friars. (This narrative was discussed in the introduction; see Chapter 6 for a fuller discussion of it). The accounts in the Chronica were written some 150 years after the death of the martyrs, yet they have been taken as a reliable witness to the circumstances of the friars in the early thirteenth century. The Nero text predates the Chronica text by at least fifty years, and is markedly different.
Stories of the Moroccan martyrs, either written or oral, were circulating in Franciscan communities in the mid-thirteenth century, yet the martyrs themselves were not considered to be significant enough to merit a full passio of their own.65 It is, of course, possible that an earlier passio does exist, or that the Nero version is based on an earlier account, but no evidence of it remains. The absence of an account of the martyrs’ deaths in either Paolino’s or Elemosina’s chronicle is particularly telling, given their interest in evangelization and martyrdom. Elemosina did include them in his catalogue of holy Franciscans, but got their names wrong, suggesting that, living in Umbria, the heart of the Franciscan order, there was no established passio available to him. It is difficult to think of a reason why the chronicles would have excluded the martyrs if a passio did exist, and as difficult to imagine that a passio existed that they would not have had access to, given their respective associations with Assisi and the papal court at Avignon. The only evidence suggesting that a passio may have existed in the thirteenth century is Jordan of Giano’s statement that, “when the life and legend of the martyrs were reported,” Francis reminded his brethren that “everyone should glory in his own suffering and not in that of another.”66 The verb used to describe the transmission of the story, “defero,” could refer to oral or written communication, and the reference to the martyrs’ “vita et legenda” might suggest a written text, but neither phrase is conclusive.
What we know about the martyrs from earlier sources is limited. As we have seen, they first appeared in the vita of Saint Anthony of Padua (c. 1232), who was inspired by seeing the bodies of the martyrs returning to Portugal to follow in their footsteps. Anthony himself desired to travel to Morocco and to be martyred, but as with Francis, God had other plans. Anthony’s story only mentioned their martyrdom and a few identifying characteristics; it did not provide a narrative of their deaths or even their names.67 Clare and other members of her order were clearly familiar with the story of the martyrs of Morocco as well, and saw the martyrs as embodying the Franciscan virtues they wished to imitate, but again who the martyrs were and what their deaths represented to the sisters is lost to us.68 Indeed, the title given the passio in the Nero manuscript, “The Martyrdom of the Five Lesser Brothers in Morocco, who were in the life of the blessed Anthony,” acknowledges the martyrs’ shadowy existence in the thirteenth century.69 For the scribe in England, at least, the martyrs were still best known through their connection with Saint Anthony of Padua; he did not presume widespread independent knowledge of the martyrs on their own merits. Similarly, in Thomas de Papia’s thirteenth-century Dialogus de gestis sanctorum fratrum minorum, the Franciscan martyrs appear only as the inspiration for Anthony of Padua’s life, rather than as subjects worthy of their own.70 The title further suggests that there was no preexisting passio for the author to follow. He had a free hand to shape the narrative according to the needs of the community. Most striking, of course, is the fact that the first author was composing the passio of the Moroccan friars at the same time as the order was being thrown into chaos over the debate about poverty. It was also at the same time that the passio of the Tana martyrs began to circulate, but the first scribe of the Nero manuscript did not include those letters or accounts. Was he aware of them? Was he writing in response to them? Or was he impelled to write his passio by the same larger cultural forces that made the Tana martyr accounts so appealing? In that case, the Morocco martyrdom account would be a parallel text, not a response.
The account presented the goal of the friars as both conversion and martyrdom. They were at the outset “inflamed by the fire of loving-kindness; so that they panted for martyrdom soon with all their hearts.”71 Their journey was placed “in the time of the lord pope Innocent III under the teaching of St. Francis for the imitation of the footsteps of our accomplished Savior.”72 Once the friars reached Seville, they approached the central mosque “so that they might turn the infidels away from the teaching of Machomet.”73 Rebuffed at the mosque, they were brought before the king, to whom they proclaimed: “We come to announce to you the faith of our lord Jesus Christ, so that you might believe in the Lord God, forsaking the most vile slave of the devil, Machomet. With us you will have eternal life.”74 Although conversion and martyrdom might seem to be two different goals, in fact they were necessary complements. Preaching was the means by which martyrdom could be achieved, particularly when preaching included vituperative insults directed at the prophet Mohammed. When the king sentenced them to be beheaded, the friars said to themselves: “This is what we have desired: we were constant in the Lord.”75
Their hopes were disappointed when the king’s son intervened, arguing that execution in this case was not just. The king then gave the friars the choice of returning to Christian lands or being sent to the court of the king in Morocco;76 they chose the latter. Once in the custody of the king, the friars engaged in a theological disputation with a Muslim prince, which allowed them to briefly preach. They provided a brief synopsis of Christian doctrine which was proven “by the testimony of many saints, namely by Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and other patriarchs, and after by prophets, then by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, after this by the apostles and finally by the glorious martyrs and the modern saints.”77 After being tortured, they were brought before the king in Marrakesh. He asked them: “Who are you, who insult and mistreat our faith?” To which the friars replied: “Nothing is faith, unless it is the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, whom we preach.”78 With that reply, the king had all the information he needed; he beheaded them himself.
At first glance, the account has all the qualities of a traditional passio: stalwart Christians, fuming tyrants, torture, and death. But crucial elements are missing. The martyrs performed no miracles that might have convinced wavering Muslims to become Christians. Nor did God intervene to protect them during torture, or to express divine approbation of their deeds through celestial signs: no thunder or lightning, no miraculous cures at the site of their deaths. In contrast to the account of the Tana martyrs, this story offers little possibility that the friars might succeed in converting anyone to Christianity. The citizens of Marrakesh were as impious as their ruler, and willingly joined in the desecration of the martyrs’ bodies.79 Even sympathetic Muslims remained unimpressed by the martyrs’ faith. The son of the king of Seville was moved by piety, not to convert to Christianity, but to urge the friars to become Muslims.80 The account also mentioned that a group of “poor women” who had been helping the friars were killed alongside the martyrs; the text did not even bother to identify them as Christians or Muslims, nor give any sign that their deaths were religiously meaningful.81 Strikingly, the narrative did not even acknowledge the cult the martyrs’ relics enjoyed at an Augustinian church in Coimbra, which by the fourteenth century was well known as a miracle-working center.
Why was this passio so different from that of the Tana martyrs? The five friars died not in the exotic East, but in the part of the Islamic world that was closest to Europe, which had no pagan population that could be imagined as easily converted. The appeal of the account came directly from its rejection of the possibility of conversion; the victory of the martyrs was not of this world. Instead, the friars triumphed by leaving behind the world of desire and material wealth, which Islam represented so effectively in the imagination of medieval Christians. To be martyred by Muslims, then, was the ultimate form of rejection of the world. Furthermore, the triumph of the martyrs could not be gainsaid; martyrs win, no matter the actions of their persecutors. The martyrs were performers who powerfully demonstrated two Franciscan virtues so often in conflict—submission and humility before a world where pride and power ruled, and the dramatic and haughty rejection of the world.82
Nevertheless, the account did share something with the Tana martyrdoms. The friars who died were not identified as spirituals or conventuals, but the narrative evoked concerns dear to the spiritualist movement. When offered worldly wealth to convert to Islam, the friars did not just reject the offer, as Francis had done before the sultan. They cursed the Muslim: “May your money join you in damnation.”83 More strikingly, they walked to Seville “barefoot and following a form of dress different [habitus dissimilis] from others.”84 One of the central ways in which spiritual Franciscans expressed their poverty was through their distinctive habit; the conventual Bertrand de la Tour, papally appointed minister-general of the order after Michael of Cesena fled Avignon, complained about the spirituals’ habitus difformis,85 and John XXII’s bull Quorumdam exigit had specifically condemned spirituals for wearing “short, tight, unusual, and squalid habits.”86 Likewise, the new constitutions of the order, produced following the general chapter meeting of the order in Naples in 1314 (where Michael of Cesena was elected ministergeneral in a defeat for the spiritual faction), insisted that all friars should observe vilitas (cheapness) in their habits, but that this should be uniform—no group of friars should distinguish themselves by wearing distinctively impoverished clothing.87 The habitus dissimilis of the would-be martyrs was a flag few Franciscans would miss. Like the Tana passio, the Moroccan account was open to, and even encouraged, a spiritual reading.
The Passio of the Martyrs of Armenia (1314)
The second martyrdom, written by the same scribe, recounted the death of three friars in the city of Arzenga (Erzinjan) in Armenia in 1314. Unlike the account of the martyrs of Morocco, this story has a clear provenance: it is a copy of a two-part letter. The passio had been composed by the guardian of the Franciscan convent in Trebizond, Carlino de’ Grimaldi, and sent to Philip, the vicar of the East, who then forwarded it on to Raymond de Fronsac, the procurator of the order at the Roman Curia.88 Here, too, the account in the Nero manuscript may be the earliest surviving one; this letter was the source for the information in the letter of 1323.89 The trajectory of the letter followed studiously correct hierarchical lines; the final recipient of the letter, Raymond de Fronsac, had been at the forefront of the conventual attacks on spirituals. He had worked with Bonagratia of Bergamo in 1311 to encourage Clement V to condemn the arguments of Pierre Jean Olivi.
Nonetheless, the account shared some things in common with the story of the martyrs of Morocco: evangelization and martyrdom were two sides of the same coin. In front of the cadi of the city and a gathered group of Muslims, the three friars fired up their audience with a rhetorical question: “And who,” they asked, “is this Macomet who deceives you, asserting himself to be a prophet? What writings, what miracles, what vita bear witness to him?”90 Mohammad’s lack of corroborating evidence was, of course, in contrast to the abundance of evidence verifying Christian truth; this was the same line of argument used by the Moroccan martyrs in the preceding passio. But the friars were not content to evoke the testimony of the patriarchs, the witness of the prophets, martyrs, and saints of old. The Muslims of Erzinjan would have a demonstration all their own: the friars told them, “All is witnessed in the Christian faith, and we are prepared for this faith to offer ourselves freely and willingly to martyrdom and death.”91 Having already insulted Mohammad, the friars were condemned to die—but in dying they would demonstrate the very truth they had just preached. This stands in contrast to the martyrs of Tana, who similarly demonstrated the veracity of the Christian lex through their willingness to die; the difference was that, in the miracle of the fire, the friars were preserved from death, and in the Armenian martyr account, it was the willingness to die and their death that was the proof.
The cadi understood the logic of martyrdom well, and held back those who sought to kill the friars, at the same time telling the brothers, “Go back while you are able.”92 When the friars came back to preach a second time, the cadi could no longer hold the angry Muslims back. The friars were condemned to death, and executed in the public square of the city. As the friars had hoped, the signs and miracles they had spoken of accompanied their deaths. “It was said commonly and publicly from all Armenians of Arzenga,” the author exulted, “that from the very night on which they buried the aforesaid relics and members [of the martyrs], those who wished could see everything by the light and splendors of the sky above the place where the holy relics were placed.”93 Even while they were still alive, they had performed miracles. The cadi had challenged them to heal a blind man as demonstration of the Christian proof through miracles; the friars “made the sign of the cross and a prayer over his eyes, immediately water began to flow from his eyes, then blood.”94 The blind could see, but the watching Saracens were only enraged by the miracle.
The letter presented the martyrdom as a triumph, and unlike the Moroccan account, it included dramatic miracles. Nevertheless, the guardian commented in his letter, “The infidels learned nothing”; at best, they were “confused.”95 Thus, for the first author, Franciscan mission and martyrdom amounted to the same thing—they demonstrated Christian superiority to Muslims, and documented the Islamic rejection of Christian truth.
The martyrdom, however, had a great effect on the indigenous Christian population; the guardian claimed that the Greeks venerated the martyrs’ relics, and that the Armenian community of Erzinjan testified to the miracles that had happened following the martyrs’ execution. Is this, then, a sign of the martyrs’ power to convert? In one sense, yes. Their witness was testimony of the martyrs’ glory by those who were the targets of contemporary papal condemnation and of missions dedicated to their conversion to Catholicism. But no, in the sense that their devotion was not presented as the miraculous conversion of former heretics and schismatics, but the honest devotion of true Christians. In this, the account reflected the experience of other Franciscans evangelizing outside of western Christendom, like William of Rubruck and Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, who found greater success in reconciling eastern Christians to papal authority than in converting Muslims, or even pagans.
What was the first scribe’s goal in bringing the two passiones together with the vision of the stigmata, Thomas of Eccleston, and the De Brittania? What meaning did martyrdom among Muslims have for his readers in Hereford? Was he inspired by the spread of the story of the Tana martyrs, or was his interest in martyrdom independent? The compilation explained the basic elements of a friar’s identity in particular ways: his place in England elucidated through Thomas of Eccleston and the De Brittania, and the values he should hold as a Franciscan were defined through the account of Francis’s stigmata. Here, Francis’s greatest spiritual moment was one of intense suffering, and one that his hagiographers had characterized as being a superlative form of martyrdom. To make that point even clearer, the scribe followed with two accounts of martyrdom. While the friar reading could not reasonably hope to receive the stigmata, a desire for martyrdom was a potential spiritual goal, with perhaps even the possibility of traveling to infidel lands to achieve it. Even more potent were the values martyrdom was meant to represent: transcendence of the world and rejection of the material and the physical. The Muslims could be read as whatever sought to tie the friars to desire, pride, and physical needs—Muslims may simply be Muslims, or they may represent the worldly church, or indeed the world itself.
The Second Scribe
The second scribe in the Nero manuscript continued with the theme of martyrdom, but understood it in a different light than his predecessor. We do not know how long after the first scribe the second wrote; the hand is later, perhaps even fifteenth century. He began his account with the two letters by Jordan Catala and Bartholomew, reporting on the martyrdom of the friars at Tana; Odorico’s account was not mentioned. The manuscript is the principal source for Bartholomew’s epistle. This was followed by a text entitled “Concerning the Places of the Lesser and Preaching Brothers in Tartaria” (“De locis fratrum minorum et predicatorum in Tartaria”). It listed seventeen Franciscan convents (though it claimed there were eighteen) from the Black Sea to China, while mentioning only three for the Dominicans. The account also listed nine friars who had been martyred in five different locations, including the three who died in Armenia already described by the first scribe. The other five were Francisco di San Sepulcro, who died in Tabriz; Peter, guardian at Caffa, who died in Solcati in the Crimea; Bertrand de Malaco of Tolosa, Aaron, and Pons, who died in the Indian Ocean; and Angelo di Spoleto, killed by the Bulgarians in Mauro Castro, who is likely the same Angelo mentioned earlier in Elemosina and the letter of 1323.
The account ended with the successes the Franciscans had achieved in their missionary work, which was the conversion of a number of important kings, queens, and princes, along with their families.96 The second scribe clearly did not compose any of the narratives, but the collection had a clear agenda. Its textual map marked a vast territory as Christian, or becoming so. Furthermore, it claimed the primary role in that process for the Franciscans, contrasting the plethora of Franciscan convents to the paltry number of Dominican houses.
Little evidence survives to help us understand the relationship between the two scribes. Was the first unable to complete his intended project? If so, he conveniently stopped at the end of the passio of the martyrs of Armenia. How long after the first scribe finished did the second one start? While the two sections were linked by the stories of Franciscan martyrdom, in other ways their subjects were quite different. The first scribe was interested in the origins of his community. The collected texts grounded the community in the history of Britain and the arrival of the Franciscans on the island, while also showing the spiritual origins of the Franciscans, emblematized in the values of the stigmata and martyrdom, while the account of the martyrs of Armenia demonstrated that those values continued into the scribe’s own time in the early fourteenth century. The second scribe, in contrast, was interested in the contemporary order, particularly in Mongol lands. All the material he collected came from the same early fourteenth-century time frame. The account of the Tana martyrdoms, with their exultation over the possibility of conversion and transformation, and the account of the progress of the mendicant orders in establishing Christian churches in Mongol lands, indicates that the scribe shared Odorico’s and Elemosina’s optimism about conversion and martyrdom. In this sense, the second scribe effectively countered the claims of the scribe of the first section of the manuscript. Where the first had portrayed Franciscan mission as a means to martyrdom and the rejection of the world, the second scribe saw a world on the verge of transformation, thanks to the Franciscans.
Is this a manuscript at war with itself, just as the order itself was struggling with bloody divisions over poverty? Or did the second scribe not recognize the rhetorical thrust embedded in the first scribe’s narrative, and simply responded to the theme of martyrdom? While it is tempting to see in this difference the contrasting perspectives of a spiritual and a conventual Franciscan, we cannot know the ideological affiliation of either writer. For the Franciscan reader, the Nero manuscript offered martyrdom as a language that could allow the order to speak with one voice again, a language that expressed the highest aspirations of the Franciscan order, but without depending on the troublesome concept of poverty.
The Oxford Compilation
The assemblage of English history, Franciscan martyrdom, and evangelizing material in the Nero manuscript was echoed in another Franciscan manuscript, now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It also contains a copy of Thomas of Eccleston’s account, and the passio of the four friars who died in Tana. It was likely once a part of the library of the Franciscan convent in Oxford, and was copied from the Nero manuscript. However, the friar who assembled this text did not copy everything from his colleagues in Hereford; he did not copy any of the material from the first scribe. It would seem that he favored the second scribe’s sense of the potential for Franciscan transformation of the non-Christian world to the east. This sense was strengthened by the inclusion of Giovanni da Pian del Carpine’s journal of his travels among the Mongols. But the collection made a broader point about martyrdom by including this material along with other texts principally devoted to poverty, including two sermons of Robert of Grosseteste on the subject, and most strikingly, the “Sacrum commercium.”97
The “Oxford compilator,” as we might call the anonymous assembler of these texts, was gathering Franciscan material of a particular kind. Also included in the collection were texts defending the Franciscans against criticism by the Dominicans (an account of a debate between the two orders in Oxford in 1269),98 as well as William of St. Amour’s attack on the mendicants at the University of Paris, and John of Peckham’s defense of Franciscan confessors. The collection thus aimed to accommodate Franciscan rigor, represented by the passio of the Tana martyrs and the “Sacrum commercium,” with an emphasis on education and engagement with pastoral responsibilities. It is thus little wonder that it is the Tana account that the compiler copied, rather than the passio of the Morocco Five.
Fourteenth-Century Catalogues of Franciscan Saints
Franciscan martyrdoms show up in the 1330s in other, shorter sources as well. Elemosina assembled a collection of Franciscan saints and martyrs, which was one of several in the early fourteenth century that began to include martyrs alongside saints and holy men and women; thirteenth-century collections such as that of Thomas de Papia had excluded them. Structured roughly chronologically, the list briefly recorded the names and achievements of Franciscans. It may in fact be the first catalogue of Franciscan saints.99 The author proclaims at the beginning of the text that “these are the names of the holy friars, through whom the Lord displayed miracles,”100 but the miracles are few and far between in any detail. The catalogue gives little information about the individuals catalogued. The martyrs are usually given a name, place of death, and sometimes the manner in which they died. Many of the other holy Franciscans were only named and given a general location, and in many cases it is not clear whether that was their place of birth, the location of their convent, or their place of death and burial. Some exceptional figures received further description: Guilelmo di Todi resuscitated three dead men, and Peter of Brabant had a vision of the Eucharist appearing as a young boy while he was celebrating Mass.101 No dates were given (with the exception of the martyrs of Tana and Odorico di Pordenone).
Toward the end of his catalogue (after mentioning the Franciscans martyred in Acre in 1291), Elemosina paused to express his enthusiasm for Franciscan sanctity as embodied in the martyrs. Echoing his contemporary Jerome of Catalonia, he wrote, “In various parts of the world, many holy friars ascended to God in perfect holiness, were made confessors of Christ, and many were consecrated by martyrdom.” He acknowledged that the martyrs were also evangelists: “Many other friars, while in holy poverty and perfect obedience and true chastity, produc[ed] tears of remorse and of compassion fervently imitating the blessed Francis, joyfully bringing in the harvest by dying in Christ.” But the emphasis again was on their suffering; Elemosina celebrated “those going in cold and snow and severe heat, in obedience to the clergy, [who] came finally to Christ, carrying their vestments of eternal reward.” He admitted that, “although they had not performed miracles and signs, the signs nevertheless were similar.”102 Elemosina thus tied the vows of the Franciscans—poverty, chastity, and obedience—to both preaching and martyrdom, and provided a defense for those holy friars whose deaths were not marked by miracles and wonders. The appearance of the martyrs in the “Memoralia” again demonstrates the novelty of the martyrs in the 1320s and 1330s. The tradition of listing holy Franciscans was well established; generally, that was a way to acknowledge the broader sanctity of the order beyond Francis, Anthony, and the few other canonized saints, particularly the sanctity of the brothers who had gathered around Francis, such as Leo, Giles, Rufinus, and others. What was new in the fourteenth century was adding martyrs to that list. Despite Elemosina’s evident enthusiasm for them, he was confused about the details of many of the martyrs. He only knew the names of three of the martyrs of Morocco, and even these were wrong. Elemosina listed the three names as Leo, Ugo, and Dompnus. By the later fourteenth century, these become the names of three friars among seven who died in Ceuta in 1227. As Isabelle Heullant-Donat has argued, this is strong evidence that the Ceuta martyrs were created to smooth over mistakes like these.103 Similarly, he did not know that Monaldo di Ancona had two companions in his martyrdom in Armenia in 1314 (and also seems to have misdated it to the thirteenth century). It is tempting to argue that he must have composed the Memoralia after his chronicle; this would explain the absence of the Morocco Five from the latter. But he also mistakenly named Jacopo di Padua, one of the martyrs of Tana, as Paulo, an error he did not make in his chronicle. The two texts seem to have been roughly contemporary, and the differences in the names of the martyrs is a further sign of the uncertainty that surrounded their stories and the newness of Franciscan interest in them. Though the cult of the Moroccan martyrs had existed for a century, Elemosina still could not be certain about their names, and had no access to anything like the passio in the Nero manuscript. It would be another fifty years before these stories became better known and the names of the martyrs firmly fixed.
An anonymous martyrology written around 1335 (probably somewhere in Umbria) offers another catalogue of uncanonized Franciscan saints, organized by province rather than by chronology.104 Like Elemosina’s account, which the editor of the Memorialia suggested inspired the text, each name is accompanied by just two or three pieces of information. The author framed his account around an apocalyptic setting, evoking the language of the book of Revelation.105 Like Elemosina, the catalogue of 1335 only listed Monaldo di Ancona of the martyrs of Armenia and identified the Moroccan martyrs incorrectly,106 but got the martyrs of Tana right.107 But other martyrs show up here for the first time: Electus, who died holding the rule (who was mentioned, unnamed, by Thomas of Celano).108 The text lists a number of other martyrs, too, who did not die among infidels, but among heretics: Peter and Cathelanus, who were inquisitors killed in Valence and proclaimed by John XXII,109 as well as Stephen of Toulouse, also an inquisitor. Some martyrs were listed without mention of who killed them: Conrad and Wysclaus died preaching the faith, but the text does not record to whom they preached.110 One manuscript of the 1335 Umbrian catalogue provides us with the first anonymous mention of the martyrs of Valencia.111 The references to the martyrs are too brief to be able to categorize the author’s understanding of martyrdom. Their deaths at the hands of Muslims made them worthy of inclusion in the catalogue; martyrdom was quickly becoming a Franciscan characteristic that needed no elaboration.
Conclusion
These catalogues had little circulation; Elemosina’s “Memoralia” exists in a single manuscript, while the anonymous inventory of 1335 was a little more widespread, surviving in eight copies. But their significance comes less in their influence, which was limited, and more in the way in which they capture how rapidly and enthusiastically the Franciscans rushed to embrace the martyrs in the 1320s and 1330s. The martyrs appeared in a variety of textual formats, but in one way or another each of the authors sought to naturalize the martyrs by including them within the bounds of existing forms of Franciscan rootedness. Enthusiasm for the martyrs rose as the friars could no longer rely on poverty as a fundamental Franciscan virtue. In this sense, the martyr accounts were a balm to spirituals and conventuals alike, and offered a Franciscan identity both could admire. It comes as no surprise, then, that the most important medieval chronicle of the Franciscan order, the Chronica XXIV ministrorum ordinis minorum (1369), took martyrdom to be a central expression of the community’s identity. In doing so, the Chronica strengthened the Franciscan sense of opposition to both the world and Islam, and further muted the hope of conversion some earlier narratives had expressed. As a result, Franciscan and western Christian depictions increasingly emphasized Islam as worldly, untransformable, and utterly opposed to Christianity–an image with a very long legacy.