CHAPTER 6

“For the Damnation of Infidels”: Martyrdom and History in the Chronicle of the Twenty-Four Ministers-General

Martyrdom captured the attention of Franciscans (and other Christians) in the 1320s and 1330s, with the spread of the accounts of the martyrs of Tana. While the stories of the martyrs found their way into a variety of different texts, they remained marginal, exciting curiosity and interest, but not becoming central in martyrologies, in accounts of the Islamic world, or in histories of the Franciscan order. With the composition of the Chronicle of the Twenty-Four Ministers-General of the Franciscan Order (c. 1369–74), the martyrs took center stage. Thanks to the popularity of the chronicle, the martyrs, rather than the desire for martyrdom, became a central marker of Franciscan institutional identity, widely recognized throughout the order. The chronicle’s author, however, focused on particular kinds of martyrdoms, and rewrote older martyrdom accounts to fit his concerns and interests. Martyrdom became primarily a means to communicate a sense of a new united Franciscan order, emerging out of the conflicts and chaos of the early fourteenth century. And in fact a new order was arising in the late fourteenth century, that of the Observants, who sought to combine the deep devotion of the strict interpretation of the Franciscan rule by the spirituals with the orthodoxy and obedience of the conventuals.

The chronicle is anonymous, but has, since the seventeenth century, been ascribed to Arnaud de Sarrant, the provincial minister of Aquitaine (c. 1361–c. 1383).¹ The Chronicle of the Twenty-Four Ministers-General (Chronica XXIV generalium ministrorum ordinis fratrum minorum, hereafter referred to as the Chronica XXIV) is a sprawling, shaggy-dog narrative of the Franciscan order, the sort of history one might imagine that Henry Fielding would write, had he been a Franciscan friar. The account is structured through the terms in office of the ministers-general of the order. Interspersed throughout the chronological narrative are stories of Franciscan heroes: the passiones of the martyrs and the vitae of holy men and women from the Franciscan tradition, who reminded the reader of the charismatic and often otherworldly aspects of the Franciscans, in contrast to the institutional and hierarchical framework the ministers provided. Some passiones were also collected separately as an appendix at the end of many of the manuscripts.² These insertions could be quite long; the vita of Giles of Assisi, one of the longer separate lives in the Chronica, runs forty-one pages in print, while the section devoted to the first minister-general, Francis himself, covers only thirty-five. Nearly half of the entire chronicle is devoted to such separate accounts of holy friars.

As Maria Teresa Dolso has argued, the chronicle, while compiled from a variety of sources, offers a unified vision of the order, or perhaps more accurately, a unifying one.³ While the unity of the order was fractured through factionalization of spiritual versus conventual, Arnaud united the order by placing the friars in contrast to the Saracens.⁴ In one sense, the administrators and the holy friars represented the two fonts of authority and authenticity for the conventuals and spirituals respectively.

The language of martyrdom had been an index of individual sanctity for those who had desired it or achieved it in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. But for Arnaud and many of his successors, the qualities of martyrdom now also adhered to the entire order. Jerome of Catalonia’s boasts in front of John XXII were now becoming established truth about the order. This sense of the order as a whole patiently suffering abuse to the point of death drew upon an image of the Franciscans developed by the spirituals during their conflict with the conventuals and the papacy in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century. Angelo Clareno (c. 1247–c. 1337)—a spiritual who escaped persecution through a wily combination of tactics, including being protected by a cardinal in Avignon, establishing his own order, and fleeing to Greece—wrote a history of the Franciscans which was structured around a series of tribulations that the true friars (the spirituals) had suffered. For Arnaud to apply this conception to the order as a whole was an extraordinary usurpation of the spiritual narrative for the propertied and powerful order of the late fourteenth century. The use of martyrdom in this way, however, had striking precedents; Franciscan martyrs served to authenticate the institutionalized order in much the same way the martyrs of early Christianity had authenticated the growing authority of the bishops in the fourth and fifth centuries.

The Emergence of the Observants

The middle and later part of the fourteenth century saw widespread movements across various religious communities endeavoring to return to the original precepts and communal standards of their foundations. Augustinians, Dominicans, as well as Franciscans underwent reform, and so-called observant communities dedicated to this endeavor emerged; for all, the meaning of poverty was one of the central issues.⁵

For the Franciscans, of course, this issue was particularly fraught, given the claims of unique poverty the early Franciscans had made, as well as the continued existence of groups inspired by that message who, by the fourteenth century, were widely considered to be heretical, such as the Fraticelli.⁶ The Franciscan Observant movement emerged in the latter half of the fourteenth century; the traditional date assigned to its foundation is 1368, about the time that Arnaud began his chronicle. What is the relationship between the two? Did Arnaud compose his chronicle as a response to the emergence of the Observants? The chronicler did not directly describe the birth of the movement, though he did record a few events linked to its beginning. Observant historiography, beginning in earnest a century later,⁷ pushed back the origins of the movement to the 1330s with the figure of Giovanni de Valle, for whom there is little contemporary evidence. The Observant chroniclers of the fifteenth century and Arnaud were both attempting to achieve similar ends in their narratives of the order: to knit together fundamental tears in the Franciscan fabric, and more specifically, to interlace spiritual piety with conventual orthodoxy.

According to the narrative established by the Observant chroniclers, and generally followed by historians since, only a decade after the persecution of the spiritual friars and the schism in the order resulting from the flight of Michael of Cesena and Bonagratia of Bergamo from Avignon, the order was again attempting to figure out how to accommodate strict observance of the rule—fittingly, in the March of Ancona, where some of the earliest spirituals had faced persecution and where the Fraticelli continued to be influential. At the abandoned hermitage of Brugliano, Giovanni de Valle, himself a disciple of Angelo Clareno, established a reformist community in 1334. The hermitage was strategically chosen for a new reformist community to demonstrate that the order was still faithful to the rule—the principal criticism that the Fraticelli leveled against the order—but at the same time, remained obedient to the pope. Brugliano lay in the Val di Chienti in the Apennines, about halfway between Foligno and Camerino, which had become a center of Fraticelli activity.⁸ The papal rector of Ancona had been directed to summon Gentile, the lord of Camerino, to submit to papal authority after having offered aid and advice to the Fraticelli in 1337,⁹ and the bishops of Fermo and Camerino had similarly been summoned to Avignon for having granted the Fraticelli special habits and a rule.¹⁰ By 1350 four hermitages were associated with the movement begun at Brugliano, and Clement VI had given their guardians freedom from interference by the superiors of the order, so that they might follow the rule “in its purity and primeval simplicity.”¹¹

But the experiment begun at Brugliano faltered. Arnaud reported in his chronicle that Gentile de Spoleto, a companion of Giovanni de Valle, “burst forth in great temerity, so that the opponents of the whole community of the order were beginning to divide the order with a great schism.”¹² In 1354 the movement was suppressed, Gentile arrested, and the remaining brothers dispersed to other convents.¹³

While this first attempt at reformed Franciscan life failed, another attempt at the same endeavor was made just thirteen years later, by another companion of Giovanni de Valle—Paoluccio de Trinci.¹⁴ Better connected than Giovanni and Gentile, he was a member of the ruling family of Foligno, and in 1368 the provincial chapter of the order was held in the town, at the invitation of the lord, his cousin. Through his influence, Paoluccio was able to regain control of Brugliano for the reformist friars, a victory that marked the permanent foundation of the Observant wing of the order. By the end of the fourteenth century, some twenty-five convents had undergone Observant reform, and more were to follow in the decades after. This narrative, then, tied the late fourteenth-century Observant movement back to the time of tribulation under John XXII, and through Giovanni de Valle, back to Angelo Clareno and the noble tradition of the spirituals which the Observants admired and sought to emulate.

We should pause, however, before we accept this account too blindly. In the first place, we have hardly any fourteenth-century evidence to support it. Giovanni de Valle does not appear in any documentary or narrative source from that period, including the Chronica XXIV. He was first mentioned in Bartolomeo da Pisa’s De conformitate vitae beati Francisci (1391).¹⁵ This does not necessarily mean that the Observant chroniclers of the fifteenth century invented the narrative involving Giovanni out of whole cloth;¹⁶ rather, it suggests that Giovanni’s life and the community at Brugliano, whatever they might have been, were unlikely to have been part of an institutionally backed reform movement, and that the fourteenth-century rigorists were not particularly keen to be tied to the spirituals. Pope John XXII died on 4 December of the same year that Giovanni supposedly began strict observance at Brugliano, and it is doubtful that any such endeavor would have been attempted while the pope of Cum inter nonnullos was still alive. Furthermore, Guiral Ot, the minister-general of the order in 1334, was unlikely to be a supporter either. He was the first minister-general of the order elected since the fall of Michael of Cesena. Only a few years earlier, he had curiously suggested that the order dispense with the part of the rule that forbade friars to touch money, a central marker of Franciscan devotion to poverty. Why would he authorize strict observance of the rule? Duncan Nimmo has ingeniously argued that his support of Giovanni de Valle was not in fact contradictory—both attitudes stemmed from the sense that the controversies over the rule, and particularly papal pronouncements on them, had so complicated the ability of friars to follow it, that simplicity was the best solution—either to follow the rule literally, as he allowed Giovanni de Valle to do in Brugliano, or to dispense with the difficult strictures about money altogether in order to allow the friars to function more efficiently in the secular world.¹⁷ However, the evidence for Guiral’s approval of the community at Brugliano came from the testimony of Mariano da Firenze, a sixteenth-century Observant chronicler, who clearly had his own reasons for wanting to see the Observant movement rooted in an authorized community.¹⁸ Furthermore, we have no evidence of a rigorist community in Brugliano in the first half of the fourteenth century. The papal bulls (such as Clement VI’s in 1350) discussing the rigorist community mentioned four convents associated with the early experiment of Gentile da Spoleto—Brugliano was not one of them.

The Chronica XXIV was begun around the same time as the foundation of the first official Observant convent, but it did not mention Brugliano, Giovanni de Valle, or Paoluccio. Gentile da Spoleto and the collapse of the community was described in association with the four convents of Carceri, Giano, Eremita, and Monteluce (not Brugliano). Their absence is all the more striking given that Giovanni and the other proto-Observant friars had the qualities that Arnaud repeatedly praised in the short vitae of holy men and women—the Franciscan values of withdrawal, meditation, and mysticism, which had long been associated with early Franciscan figures like Leo and Giles, and indeed with Francis himself. We cannot, of course, directly tie the composition of the Chronica to the emergence of the Observants, but it must be noted that the driving force of the chronicle was to demonstrate the unity of the order in a way that acknowledged both the conventual and spiritual traditions. Arnaud may well have been inspired by similar currents within the order that had inspired Paoluccio and his brothers, rather than writing in direct response to the foundation of the movement.

Bridging the Chasm: The Crisis over Poverty in the Chronica

Written by a provincial minister and structured institutionally, the Chronica appears at first glance to be an entirely conventual undertaking. Its focus on the ministers-general bespoke an emphasis on institutional authority consonant with the conventual perspective. Yet, at crucial moments in the chronicle, Arnaud appealed to spiritual themes and conceptions of history. Arnaud was well aware of the ideological struggles that had so often divided the order, but he was diplomatic when speaking directly about them. He nevertheless made himself clear. Following the Council of Perugia in 1322, “when the issue of the poverty of Christ was settled,”¹⁹ the friars declared their fidelity to apostolic poverty to John XXII. Arnaud circumspectly remarked, “At that time, the great tribulation of the Order (maior Ordinis tribulatio) was kindled.”²⁰ The notion of tribulation was central to Angelo Clareno’s understanding of Franciscan history, and Arnaud clearly was familiar with that chronicle, though he never directly cited it.²¹ The differences between Arnaud’s and Angelo’s notions of the tribulations are telling. For Angelo, the seventh tribulation culminated in the execution of spiritual friars at Marseilles in 1318 and the persecution that followed; it was thus personal and demonstrated the sanctity of the individual friars and the values they espoused.²² For Arnaud, this tribulation was institutional and began later, after the decision of a formal general council of the order in 1322 to again endorse evangelical poverty.

Arnaud thus trod a fine line in presenting the tribulation. Pitfalls lay on either side. If he praised the order, then he was suggesting that John XXII’s bull on the poverty of Christ and the apostles was wrong, making himself a heretic. If, on the other hand, he suggested that the order was in error, he cast the first century of Franciscan existence aside as based on heresy. He skillfully threaded the needle by diverting blame to Michael of Cesena, a convenient scapegoat who was disliked by both supporters of John XXII and the spirituals. Michael, he alleged, failed to present the conclusions of the chapter “prudently and reverently” to the pope; but Arnaud did not suggest that the conclusions themselves were in error, as the pope decreed. Through this slip in communication, both the order and the pope were absolved. The significance of this presentation cannot be overstated. Arnaud soldered the two halves of the order together, both chronologically (pre– and post–John XXII) and ideologically (spirituals and conventuals). This slip makes a history of the order possible.

While Arnaud fingered Michael of Cesena for the initial breach between John and the Franciscans, the fault did not fall solely on his shoulders. As a consequence of his miscommunication, some friars fell “from the heights of the most perfect religion into the abyss of sin.” Who were these friars? Arnaud’s description could apply equally to Michael of Cesena and his group, but also to their opponents within the order, the spirituals. Both “shattered the edifice of the Order,” and both “moved the vicar of Christ to great anger.”²³ For Arnaud’s purposes, identifying the friars was not as important as the division they had caused.

Arnaud demonstrated the importance of the order and its unity by transforming the tribulation into a kind of felix culpa. Angelo Clareno had seen the tribulation as part of a spectrum of attacks and suffering unleashed by the devil against those whose sanctity might thwart his ambitions.²⁴ Arnaud instead attributed it to God himself, who permitted the devil to rise up against the order. But God, again working through the devil, also resolved the controversies and division, forcing the friars “against their will to return to the unity of the Order.”²⁵ This claim reflected the deep ambivalence that Franciscans in the later fourteenth century still felt about the controversies of fifty years earlier. Arnaud invoked demonic causes for both the fracturing of the order and the forced unity that was the result of John XXII’s harsh actions. But, as in the book of Job, Satan does his work at God’s behest, so that both the cataclysmic division and painful forced unity—a unity that Arnaud repeatedly celebrated and reinforced—were the product of God’s will. This theologized understanding of the Franciscan crisis avoided the dichotomy that had split the order in the first place. The narrative valorized neither the divisiveness of the spirituals nor the violence of the conventuals, but neither did it denounce either side. Both the divisions and the violence were providential cataclysms, but the Chronica left no single group fundamentally at fault.

The martyrs played a vital role in Arnaud’s defense of the order during its tribulation. While the order was divided by factionalization and troubled by turmoil, Arnaud assured his audience that “many friars shed their holy blood for the confession of the faith.”²⁶ Again, Arnaud was circumspect when it came to which martyrs he was referring to. As has been discussed, a number of passiones were circulating in the early fourteenth century, including those of the Tana martyrs. But the martyrs most directly connected to the tribulation were the spiritual martyrs of Marseilles. Nevertheless, Arnaud was careful not to tip his hand, never revealing which martyrs he intended. Quite possibly, he meant both the martyrs killed in partes fidelium and infidelium. Arnaud argued that, despite the problems the Franciscans faced, “the order’s perfection²⁷ was corroborated by the great love of so many prelates and princes and such a number of friars spilling their blood for the faith, and by the testimony of other prodigies and signs. Its perfection is illustrated by the profession of great clerics and noble people, by whom this religio was preserved under divine protection as if it were founded upon four columns in its righteousness and nobility.”²⁸

The four columns on which the order was founded were the prelates, princes, martyrs, and clerics, and their lives (and deaths) were testimony to the perfection of the order, even in the face of its greatest tribulation. The tribulations that the order had undergone, Arnaud explained, further illustrated “the excellent perfection of this religio,” for it perfectly paralleled the experience of the church as a whole, just as the life of Francis paralleled the life of Jesus. Maria Teresa Dolso has noted that it was during the administration of Guiral Ot, the successor to Michael of Cesena, that Arnaud located the greatest number of vitae and passiones, making this point even clearer.²⁹ Even when the order was at its lowest point, it overflowed with piety and perfect friars.

In the midst of his discussion of tribulation, Arnaud inserted a curious short story about Franciscan sanctity (as he often did throughout his chronicle). A friar named Germanus, who was the cook of the convent of Toulouse, appeared to his custos after his death. He was on the cusp of entry into heaven, he explained, but an unpaid debt was preventing his eternal salvation. Upon his request, the custos immediately paid the plumber who had fixed the convent’s water pipes, and Germanus was then able to rest with the saints. The account has the flavor of a miracle story excerpted from a larger collection, but seems oddly out of place in the midst of an account of the order’s most dramatic crisis. Arnaud named the custos as Berengar Malabosco, who is known from other sources,³⁰ while the humble cook Germanus has escaped other historical notice. The story of the holy cook was inserted following the account of the general chapter of Perugia (1322), which had declared the order’s faith in the poverty of Christ, and was the moment when “great tribulation of the Order” commenced. The vision of Germanus (whose name simply means “brother” in Latin) was a response to the crisis. Despite his humble status, Germanus lived a life full of “spiritual joy”—a fourteenth-century heir to Leo, Giles, and John the Simple. Yet Arnaud depicted him as fully immersed in the mundane world of property maintenance, debt, and repayment, just the sort of balance between spiritual and conventual his chronicle was meant to emphasize.

Arnaud even connected Odorico di Pordenone to the tribulation of the order, although he was in the East in the 1320s. Few evangelists appear among the good and the great of Franciscan history from the perspective of Arnaud—Odorico is one of the few who were not martyred and who nevertheless received a mini-vita in the Chronica. While never addressing his motivation, Arnaud noted that Odorico had converted twenty thousand infidels to the Catholic faith, a claim Odorico himself had never made.³¹ After recounting a number of marvelous stories that were not preserved in Odorico’s own account, Arnaud suggested that at the end of his life Odorico wanted to visit John XXII “so that he might plead with him concerning the tribulation of the Order”—that is, the divisions within the order occasioned by John’s rejection of the doctrine of Christ’s poverty. When Odorico fell ill and was unable to travel, Francis appeared to him in a dream, and promised “to take care of your business” at the Curia so that the friar might die in peace in his hometown.³²

Arnaud never followed through with the premise of this narrative. Did Jesus make an appearance in Avignon? To whom was he planning to appear? What was he going to say? It is tempting to see in this a fragment of a spiritual narrative in which Jesus rebuked John XXII about evangelical poverty; the closest parallel I have found is an account in which Odorico is directed by an aged pilgrim to return home because of his imminent death.³³ But Arnaud’s story implied that Odorico (or Christ in his place) was going to correct the pope about some aspect of the conflict over poverty—whether about the pope’s declarations on poverty or his implementation of those declarations we do not know. Again, however, Arnaud managed to walk the fine line between heresy and capitulation.

The Origin of the Order

In his attempt to write a history of the order that unified it in the face of another potential split, Arnaud had in mind and very likely in hand the products of a century and a half of chronicle-writing within the Franciscan order, which aimed to define the order and its fundamental values as Arnaud did. Yet Arnaud put that tradition aside. The vision offered by earlier authors was at odds with Arnaud’s; he zealously avoided the hagiographic and narrative accounts that had been foundational for the order, and crafted a new one, which shifted the emphasis from Francis himself and his early companions and highlighted the martyrs of Morocco. Arnaud, of course, denied any novelty in his account. Instead of the traditional invocation of unworthiness or claims of historical fidelity, Arnaud disavowed his position as author and claimed the humbler position of collector, who gathered together the scattered accounts of the order. His introduction announced his intention that the narratio would be useful for the “erudition of the present and future,” and proclaimed that he had gathered “well-known positive and negative facts,” which were “dispersed in various legends.”³⁴

Given the scope of Arnaud’s project, and his identification of Francis as the first minister-general of the order, the reader might expect the first section of the chronicle to retell some of the popular episodes illustrating the conversion of Francis and the gathering of his first disciples that appeared in the vitae of Thomas of Celano or the authoritative vita of Bonaventure. Arnaud instead chose to include only a few, brief stories that emphasized withdrawal from the world and poverty, and then turned to the assembly of the first brothers. He passed over a myriad of notable events, from Francis’s first vision of military weapons, to his rejection of his father, the speaking crucifix at San Damiano, the creation of the crèche at Greccio, and perhaps most surprisingly, the story of the stigmata.³⁵ Nor did Arnaud discuss one of the fundamental attributes of both Francis and his order: preaching. Aside from a brief remark that the preaching of the saint and his companions around Spoleto “began to inflame many to do penance,”³⁶ no reference was made to Francis’s skill as a preacher, or to the duty of the friars to preach. Arnaud also generally avoided direct reference to Thomas or Bonaventure at all—indeed, one of the few sources he quoted by name when discussing Francis’s early life was the Dominican Vincent of Beauvais.³⁷

While ignoring many events long hallowed as foundational, Arnaud added one anomalous account that did not show up in any previous Franciscan accounts of the order’s early history: the death of the Mediterranean adventurer, king, and crusader, Jean de Brienne (c. 1170–1237). Through his military skills and his advantageous marriages, Jean managed to play an important role in a number of different kingdoms: he was the king of Jerusalem (1210–25) during the Fifth Crusade, and ruled as the Latin emperor of Constantinople (1229–37).³⁸ His relentless focus on success in the world of politics makes him an unlikely associate for the likes of John the Simple and Giles of Assisi. Yet Arnaud inserted a lengthy segment on the king at a pivotal movement in the history of the order, between the institution of the earliest community of twelve friars who kept the canonical hours following the “evangelical life” and the writing of the first rule. The rationale for Jean’s inclusion at this point in the chronology of the order was that, in 1210, Jean became the king of Jerusalem, the same year that Francis assembled his twelve. But why was he included at all in a chronicle of the Franciscan order? It was not a chronicle of world events; few other non-Franciscan events were included. The Franciscan association with Jean actually came a quarter of a century later, at Jean’s deathbed conversion to the Franciscan life in 1237;as Arnaud recounted, on successive nights men in Franciscan garb appeared to him, telling him that it was the will of God that he die wearing the habit. He eventually followed the heavenly instructions, and Arnaud believed that he was buried in the Franciscan church in Assisi as a consequence.³⁹ Clearly, Jean’s assumption of the habit was not a sign of his embrace of a Franciscan life of poverty and humility; there is no evidence, in the Chronica or elsewhere, that Jean distributed his wealth to the poor, for example. Arnaud himself admitted that, in discussing Jean, he was turning aside from his main narrative, beginning the following section with “returning to our subject” and continuing to discuss the earliest history of the order.⁴⁰

Why, then, did Arnaud insert Jean’s story at such an important place in the narrative? Perhaps the clue lies in his description: quoting Bernard of Bessa, the chronicler proclaimed that “Jean had won many victories against the Saracens.”⁴¹ As the paragon of crusading prowess, Jean was the opposite of Francis and his early companions—and that was the point.⁴² The story of Jean was valuable to Arnaud for two reasons: it tied one of the heroes of the thirteenth century to the order, and demonstrated its appeal to knightly audiences. In place of the conversion of the Saracens, Arnaud instead offered the conversion of a Saracen-killer. Perhaps more significantly, Jean de Brienne provided a crucial link between the Franciscans and the ideological struggle Christians were waging against Muslims on a variety of fronts: through crusade, evangelization, and polemical literature. Jean de Brienne’s conversion suggests that while crusading was virtuous, it was not in the end sufficient to ensure salvation or victory over Muslims. Jean’s life of warfare against the Saracens reached a fitting culmination in his conversion to the Franciscan way of life.

In place of a narrative focused on the early order under Francis and his companions, Arnaud offered the martyrs of Morocco, “six among the most perfect of the brothers,”⁴³ as a more important moment for understanding Franciscan origins. The brief account of Francis and the first friars in large part served as a prologue to the story of the martyrs, the main focus of the first part of the Chronica. The Chronica moved toward “mission” and martyrdom with a steady narrative logic. Following the establishment of the primitive fraternity of twelve friars, Francis began sending friars out of Umbria to preach in new areas.

The Moroccan martyrdoms began as part of a larger mission to Iberia. Francis was the first to travel to the peninsula as part of his attempt to win martyrdom at the court of the Miramolin, and Arnaud introduced the tradition that Francis had ended his first abortive trip with a visit to the shrine of Santiago de Compostela. There, God revealed to Francis that “he should acquire suitable places for the brothers to live.”⁴⁴ On his return journey, he preached in Montpellier, and predicted the founding of a convent there. Francis’s promotion of property was at odds with the early tradition of Thomas of Celano, who reported that Francis ordered that the friars abandon a house they occupied in Bologna in 1220. Arnaud drew together in this story three elements not easily reconciled: martyrdom, the acquisition of property, and the establishment of Franciscan communities outside of Italy.

Subsequently, Francis sent “many brothers” to Spain, where, according to the Chronica, heretics were numerous. Thus, it was not to Islamic al-Andalus that they were sent but to Galicia and Castile, the “Province of St. James.” The first friars sent to Spain (Hispania) were particularly noted for their piety; one refused to converse with women, and his death (which must have been soon after his arrival in Spain, according to Arnaud’s chronology) was miraculously announced to Anthony of Padua, who had not yet joined the order. Curiously, the woman who longed to visit him but was denied was given a name (Maria Garcia), while the saintly brother remained anonymous.⁴⁵ Arnaud described several other pious friars of the province and the miracles they worked; the details concerning the first friars in Spain were more numerous than those given for the narrative of the first friars who gathered around Francis in Umbria, though many of these friars were commemorated at great length in the separate vitae within the Chronica. But these vitae placed them out of the chronological account, and thus removed from the narrative of Franciscan history that Arnaud constructed.

The crowning achievement of the mission to Iberia was the martyrdom of Beraldo and his companions, and their focus was not on heretics, but Muslims. The Franciscans were welcomed to Portugal by Urraca of Castile (c. 1186–1220), sister of the more famous Blanche and wife of Afonso II of Portugal (1212–23), who obtained for them two convents in Lisbon and Guimarães. Afonso’s siblings also had an important role in the passio: his sister Sancha (d. 1227), who had remained unmarried, consulted the friars before they traveled to Seville, and his brother Pedro escorted their relics back from Marrakesh. Urraca requested to know the time of her death, and the friars prophesied that it would come not long after their own deaths: “When we have died in Morocco, Christians will carry our bodies to this city and bury them here, and you yourself with the populace will come out to welcome us honorably and with devotion.”⁴⁶ Once this happened, she would know their prophecies were true and that her own death would soon follow. The king himself was entirely absent from the account—perhaps because Afonso II was excommunicated at that time, and died without being reconciled to the church.

In recounting the story of the martyrs of Morocco, Arnaud clearly had access to some version of the account preserved in the Nero manuscript, but he expanded it and revised it in a number of ways.⁴⁷ The narrative was further elaborated in the account given in the appendix of many of the manuscripts of the Chronica. Arnaud minimized the spiritual associations emphasized in the Nero account of their martyrdom. Instead of the barefoot friars dressed in a habitus dissimilis that the Nero manuscript described, the Chronica claimed that Sancha gave the friars secular clothes, allowing them to enter Seville through “deception by dress” (dissimilatio habitu), “because otherwise they could not cross over to the Saracens.”⁴⁸ Once in Seville, the friars visited the principal mosque of the city, but were interrupted by angry Saracens; in contrast to the Nero account, the Chronica did not mention their plans to preach at the mosque. The account also omitted their conversation with the king in Seville, in which they proclaimed, “May your money join you in damnation.”⁴⁹ And while the Chronica reported that the friars did preach to Muslims in Marrakesh, it did not record the content or their words, unlike the Nero account. Their only quoted statement was to refuse the offer of women and wealth if they would convert: “We refuse your women and wealth, because we reject all things for Christ.”⁵⁰ Thus, wealth became something to be surrendered out of love for Christ, rather than from a sense that it was associated with damnation, as the martyrs had warned the king in Seville in the Nero account.

Arnaud also added a number of episodes to the passio, elaborating on the martyrs’ time in Morocco and their association with the infante Pedro there. In the Nero account, Pedro appeared only to welcome the friars upon their arrival, and then to deliver their relics home after their deaths. The Chronica expanded his role, suggesting that Pedro accompanied the friars from Seville to Marrakesh, and also acted as their guardians once they arrived. Pedro was serving the Almohad caliph as a mercenary (though the Chronica left his association with the Miramolin vague). Under his negligent care, the friars preached publicly in Marrakesh, “wherever they saw Saracens gathering.”⁵¹ When the Miramolin encountered them, he ordered that they be expelled from the city. The five brothers returned, were again discovered, and locked up in prison. After miraculously surviving twenty days without food or water, they were released, expelled, and returned a second time. This time the infante kept them confined to prevent further mischief. But Pedro also had a job to do, and when he needed to go fight the caliph’s enemies, he took the friars along with him. On their return journey from battle, the army ran out of water and for three days could find nothing to drink for themselves or their horses. One of the friars, Beraldo, by striking the ground with a small stake, miraculously created a spring to provide water for the army. After everyone had drunk their fill and the water bags were again bulging, the spring dried up. The friars thus saved the caliph’s army from certain death.⁵²

Arnaud’s version of the passio of the Moroccan martyrs gave the friars ample opportunity to preach to the Saracens, in contrast to the brief Nero account, which hurried the friars to their deaths. But Arnaud resolutely resisted giving any indication that the friars had had any success in converting Muslims, either through preaching or the example of their martyrdom, nor did he give the content of the preaching, as all previous Franciscan passiones had. Even the miracle of the spring failed to impress any of the Muslims whose lives it saved. Nor was the infante Pedro, who played a central role in the story, given a narrative arc of salvation. Although he was responsible for bringing the friars to Morocco, and clearly served the caliph himself, Arnaud did not view that as a problem of his soul—just one of geography. Pedro delivered the bodies of the martyrs back to Coimbra, as they had prophesied to Urraca, but in a larger sense, it was the martyrs who delivered Pedro back where he belonged—extracting him from service to the Miramolin and life in partes infidelium, and returning him to Christendom.

The passio of the martyrs played an outsized role in the Chronica, linking the martyrs to a number of early and important events for the order. In a sense, it marked the true beginning of the Chronica; the foundation of the order that preceded the passio of the Moroccan martyrs reads much more like a prologue than an opening act. The Chronica, of course, connected the story of the martyrs to the conversion of Anthony of Padua to the Franciscan life. This was an ancient association; the first mention of the martyrs was precisely in this context—Anthony’s own hagiography also ascribed the saint’s conversion to seeing the return of the relics of the martyrs from Morocco. But Arnaud went a step further in promoting the significance of the martyrs; they were the model for Franciscans going out into the world, so that even Francis’s journey to Egypt was described after their martyrdom.

The progression of events in the Chronica is instructive. Arnaud first described the establishment of the Franciscans in Spain, who were sent by Francis. This lengthy section was immediately followed by a section grappling with the challenges the friar-evangelists faced more generally. “Brothers were sent in different directions to nearly the whole world,” Arnaud recalled. However, this attempt at evangelization was apparently unsuccessful. The friars were perceived as paupers, because “they were not allowed to build places.”⁵³ As a result, they were expelled from many of the places they journeyed to; the fact that they carried no letters establishing their identity (due to the provisional status of the order at that point) also contributed to the suspicions directed against them. Arnaud may have been reacting to the challenges faced by the friars in places like Hungary and Germany.

A few lines later, however, the Franciscans got it right. In 1219 friars were sent out again to the whole world (echoing the phrasing of the episode above), this time carrying letters from the pope to the prelates of the church. As a result, the friars were “received charitably and thus the Order expanded greatly.”⁵⁴ A sentence later, “in this time,” Francis sent the six “perfect” friars to Morocco. Their lengthy passio follows, accompanied by the consequences of the story, such as the fulfilling of their prophecy about the death of Queen Urraca, and the conversion of Anthony. Francis’s journey to Egypt follows immediately upon this, “in that time of the sending out of the friars.”⁵⁵ The friars sent out referred most immediately to the Morocco Five, but also referenced the more general sending out of Franciscans in 1219—but no other specific group of friars was mentioned other than the martyrs of Morocco. Their prominence over even Francis is all the more surprising given the actually chronology of events; Francis was in Egypt in August or September 1219, and the friars died on 16 January 1220.

Not only was Francis’s journey subordinated to the martyrs, but Arnaud emphasized his failure in comparison to the success of the five martyrs in gaining martyrdom. It is an unexpected reversal; the sainted founder was secondary to his own disciples. The disciples were praised for achieving what the founder himself could not (martyrdom), and the disciples’ journey received several pages of description, while the founder’s was only a few short paragraphs long. It is true that the length of the passages that Arnaud included in the Chronica were at times dependent on the original sources he used. When he discussed the first Franciscan mission to northern Europe, he included a long description of the mission to England but was rather curt about the mission to Aquitaine, the region where he was provincial minister—not out of a preference for England, but because he had access to Thomas of Eccleston’s history.⁵⁶ Nevertheless, he certainly had plenty of material available had he wished to expand on Francis’s mission to Egypt,⁵⁷ and he certainly could have placed the account of Francis’s journey to Egypt ahead of the story of the Moroccan martyrs, as chronology would suggest. But he did not.

Arnaud’s organization of the early history of the order was notably not followed by his successors, although in many other respects his chronicle was quite influential. The sixteenth-century Observant chronicler Nicolaus Glassberger (d. 1508) listed missions to Hungary and Spain first, and then very briefly discussed the Moroccan martyrs, with the emphasis of the description being on Francis’s reaction to their martyrdom, rather than the passio itself, about which few details are given.⁵⁸ Even the appendix included in many manuscripts of the Chronica XXIV abandoned the approach Arnaud used in the text itself. The mission of the friars was explained as a reaction to the “anger of the Saracens” directed against the Christians in both the East (Syria) and the West (Morocco). Francis’s journey to Egypt was thus synchronized with that of the martyrs to Morocco, and made part of the same defensive struggle against the Saracens.⁵⁹

Furthermore, even as the Chronica subordinated Francis’s journey to that of the Moroccan martyrs, it also contrasted them. Whereas Beraldo and his companions fearlessly insulted Islam, Francis returned to Christian lands once he realized that the Muslims would not tolerate preaching against Muhammad—he did not persist as his disciples did. Arnaud only halfheartedly endorsed the tradition that if Francis failed as a martyr, he succeeded as an evangelist, secretly converting the sultan to Christianity. By the fourteenth century, this tradition rested on solid ground; Bonaventure included it in his hagiography, giving it the seal of authority. Arnaud had cautiously suggested that “elsewhere it is said that the sultan was converted by the blessed Francis, and after the death of the saint, he was baptized at the end of his days by two friars, whom the saint sent to the sultan,” an account once again taken from the Actus beati Francisci.⁶⁰ Such augmentation of the legend a century after it was first composed by Thomas of Celano should scarcely surprise us. But it is clear that Arnaud looked upon this story with some suspicion. His presentation of Francis’s journey to Egypt was all the more remarkable given his failure to include Thomas’s and Bonaventure’s assurance that Francis’s failure to die was a result of his preservation by the Lord for the greater glory of the stigmata. Nor did Francis as successful evangelist prove to be a model that Arnaud would use for the generations of friars after Francis. That role fell to the Moroccan martyrs. Indeed, the Chronica continued the frame of the “sending of the friars” to contextualize the next several events discussed, which included sending friars to more peaceful locations, such as Provence and England. The five martyrs of Morocco thus emblematized Franciscan conformity to the model of the apostles, not Francis’s own mission.

Arnaud also gave new significance to martyrdom. Whereas the desire for martyrdom had been central in earlier accounts of both Francis and the Moroccan martyrs, Arnaud added the denunciation of Islam as part of the mission itself. Of course, this had already appeared in the accounts of the early fourteenth century, which we discussed in the last chapter, but Arnaud developed it from a sign of fearless preaching to a goal in its own right, including it in the preaching of Francis himself. Once Francis realized that “the Saracens freely listened to the friars preaching about the faith of Christ and evangelical doctrine, whatever it be but openly contradicted their preaching about the mendacity and perfidy of Machomet … then expelled them from their cities … he returned to the lands of the faithful.”⁶¹ The Chronica thus suggests that even Francis saw the demonization of Muhammad and Islam as central to the preaching to Muslims. According to the hagiographic material collected at the end of many copies of the Chronica, Francis sent the Morocco Five not only to preach Christianity to the Miramolin, but also to “attack the law of Muhammad [legem Machometicam impugnandum],” an injunction that did not appear in any of the thirteenth-century or early fourteenth-century sources.⁶²

Martyrdom and the Elimination of Christianity

The friars who died in Morocco were only the first in a long list of Franciscan martyrs whom Arnaud threaded through his account. We can see the model of the martyrs of Marrakesh clearly reflected in a group of martyrs who died in Morocco just seven years later. It is likely that this group never existed, and was simply a variant account of the martyrs of 1220 that came to have an independent existence.⁶³ Arnaud was probably the first to separate them from the martyrs of 1220 and assign their place of death to Ceuta. Yet their story illustrated the function of martyrdom for Arnaud; it separated Christian from Muslim, rather than allowing for the inclusion of Muslims within the community of the saved.

Like their predecessors, the seven martyrs of Ceuta were “inflamed by the ardor for martyrdom,” and desired to spread the Catholic faith.⁶⁴ They traveled to Ceuta, a seaport on the Straits of Gibraltar, where they preached to merchants outside the city walls, “because to enter the city was not permitted to any Christian.”⁶⁵ Nevertheless, their desire for martyrdom drove them to break the law, enter the city, and preach to the Saracens; clearly, Arnaud imagined that the listening merchants outside the city were, like the friars, Christians. Like their doppelgängers in Marrakesh, the Franciscans were arrested and promised “many good things” by the “king” and his councilors if they ceased insulting Islam and denied their own faith. Once they refused the offer, they were (again, like their compatriots seven years earlier) beheaded, and their mutilated bodies gathered by Genoese merchants. The association of Franciscan virtue, Muslim persecution, and Morocco was further emphasized by a third brief account, immediately following that of the martyrs of Ceuta, recounting how, some years later, five anonymous friars with a great crowd of Christians were beheaded “so that in that city of Marrakesh, nobody remained who might invoke the name of God.”⁶⁶ A Franciscan bishop had been appointed for Morocco only a year earlier, and just six years later (1233), Pope Gregory IX was bragging about the fertility of the Moroccan church. But Arnaud had no interest in such successes, even though he recounted that the friars were killed in the church of the Blessed Mary—indicating that some kind of Christian community was flourishing there, and that the clergy serving at the church would have been Minorites.

The trajectory Arnaud traced in just a few folios is clear: the Franciscans’ engagement in Morocco began with the first martyrs visiting a Muslim land in which Christians seemed numerous, counting even a Portuguese prince among them. After two missions explicitly intended to convert Muslims and another in which the existence of a Christian church in Morocco was explicitly recognized, the series of events ended with the image of a Muslim city without any Christian inhabitants at all. Contrary to what one might think, this was not a story of failure. For Arnaud, the friars’ mission was not to convert Muslims, but to delineate the boundary between the Christian and Muslim worlds.⁶⁷ After all, it would have done Arnaud little good to suggest that the early friars were successful in their evangelization; one had only to look around the fourteenth-century world to realize that there were more Muslims than ever, and that they were even more politically powerful than they had been in the thirteenth century.

The appendix of the Chronica contains a letter reputedly written by one of the martyrs while incarcerated. The letter contains little historical information; Daniel the would-be martyr tells his correspondent that they had demonstrated before “the king” and his wise men, through “rational means,” that salvation was only possible through Christ. Daniel praised God, “who comforts us in all our tribulations,” and quoted the apostle Paul saying “The wisdom of this world is foolishness.” The heart of the letter is a series of quotations of the words of Jesus, commanding his apostles “to preach the Gospel to all creatures,” and reminding them that “if they persecute me, then they will persecute you.” The biblical citations evoke the Franciscan themes of humility and obedience to God unto death and echo the Regula non bullata. The statement that follows, however, is at first glance startling: “He guides our paths in his way of life to his praise, and for the salvation of the faithful, the honor of the Christians, and to the death and damnation of the infidels.”⁶⁸ This is supported by biblical citations; Daniel cited Jesus in the Gospel of John saying, “If I had not come, if I had not spoken to them, they would be blameless; but as it is they have no excuse for their sin” (John 15:21). Jesus was speaking to the apostles before the Last Supper, and his remark reflects the dichotomy that ran throughout the Gospel of John, between those who belong to God and those who are sons of the devil. Daniel thus suggested that the friars were like Jesus himself, sorting the sheep and goats—and, like much of the Gospel of John, the quotation suggests that these were preexisting categories that the preacher/Jesus only made visible. The goal of the martyrs was not to convert Muslims but to enable their damnation, extending the attack in the Chronica proper even further. Once again, the effect of the martyrdom was to draw the distinction between Christian and Muslim more clearly, rather than blurring it through conversion.

The theme of martyrdom and the extinction of the Christian community appears at the end of the Chronica as well, in the account of the martyrs of Amalech (Almalyk) in 1339. Unlike many others in the Chronica, these martyrs were attested in other sources, principally the Franciscan Giovanni di Marignolli, who visited Almalyk on his way to Beijing.⁶⁹ According to Arnaud, the Mongol emperor in Amalech had been converted to Christianity by the friar Francesco d’Alessandria, after the friar had cured him of cancer and a fistula. Benedict XII (1334–42) then sent two legates to the emperor at his request; by the time they arrived in the Mongol capital, the converted emperor (never named) had died, and had been replaced by ‘Ali-Sultan (Alisoldanus). The new emperor persecuted Christians, insisting that they convert to Islam. Six friars were arrested, including two lay brothers, and all refused to apostatize. They were killed, along with an interpreter and a Genoese merchant. As a result, “All other Christians who were there denied the faith out of fear of death and became Saracens.” ‘Ali-Sultan was punished by God “some time later,” for “the blood of the holy friars was calling out.”⁷⁰

Arnaud took an account that was already well known—as we have seen, the deaths of the friars were celebrated in a fresco in the Franciscan convent in Siena soon after—and transmuted its significance from one that documented ongoing and successful efforts at evangelization to one about the failure of Franciscan efforts. Giovanni di Marignolli had recounted the same information in the opposite order. He had begun with his own journey and successful evangelization, and then recounted the deaths of the martyrs that had preceded it. The deaths of the martyrs demonstrate Franciscan perseverance and the perils of the path Giovanni had chosen, but not the inevitable end of evangelizing. Arnaud emphasized that sense of failure by adding to the end of the account a letter from Pascal de Vittoria, one of the martyrs of Amalech, written some three years before his death, detailing his journey across Asia. Like the longer accounts of figures like William of Rubruck, he recounted his attempts to preach along the way. Pascal eventually “had victory in all things,”⁷¹ but this came only in death. His lived experience was one of failure and rejection. The Saracens who heard him preach did not convert; rather, they began to persecute Pascal, stoning him and setting fire to his face and feet. Such torments were not part of his martyrdom, but his self-reported experience as an evangelist. The letter encapsulated a conception of evangelizing that mirrored Arnaud’s conception of martyrdom. Pascal expressed no despair at the outcome of his efforts; like the martyrs, he preached against Islam at the door of the mosque, and fully expected the response he received. His torture provided proof of his constancy and the truth of his message; it seems unlikely that he seriously expected the Muslims who heard him to convert.

Both the story of the martyrs and Pascal’s own letter attest to the inhospitality of the Muslims when faced with Christian preaching in Mongol lands. The thrust of Arnaud’s martyrological material was patient suffering and the extinction of Christianity in Muslim-ruled lands. It is curious, then, to read the final paragraph of the section, which records with little fanfare that, after these events, Giovanni di Marignolli was sent as a papal ambassador to the East, was received with honor by the emperor, and given permission to preach; “He converted many and built many churches.”⁷² Later in the chronicle, Giovanni returned to Avignon with evidence of the “innumerable” Christians living under the rule of the Mongol khan. Although the emperor requested preachers be sent, and the pope instructed the order to send more friars, some of whom he would ordain as bishops, “nevertheless those who ought to have accomplished this having grown lukewarm afterwards, it was moved forward a scanty amount further.”⁷³ In 1362 Arnaud briefly recorded the martyrdom of James of Florence, bishop of Zeitun (probably Quanzhou),⁷⁴ and the sending of Guillaume du Prat in 1370 as bishop “to the empire of Cathay” along with sixty friars.⁷⁵ Arnaud thus crafted a narrative that forefronted martyrdom and disguised effective evangelization, and perversely linked successful martyrdom to the extinction of Christianity. In the case of the Mongols, Arnaud preserved sufficient material to craft quite a different story, one of an ongoing and successful mission that brought Christianity to the furthest ends of the earth in fulfillment of a divine commandment, yet chose to subordinate that story to the triumph of the martyrs and their rejection by the Muslims.

Defending Voluntary Martyrdom

The five friars of Marrakesh were the spiritual ancestors of the succeeding generations of Franciscan martyrs who crop up throughout the Chronica, providing near-continual evidence of Franciscan piety and fearlessness. With the exception of the martyrdoms we have already encountered (those of Armenia and Tana) and a few others, none of the other martyrs were attested independently of the Chronica. Their names were often vague or completely lacking; Livinus, who died in Cairo in 1345, was simply from “France” (de Francia or in some manuscripts de provincia Francie),⁷⁶ while another martyr who died in Saray in 1333 was named Stephen of Hungary, a name even more vague.⁷⁷ To make it still more confusing, a second friar with the same name was martyred by the Orthodox Georgians sometime earlier in the fourteenth century.⁷⁸ In other cases, the information given was so brief, vague, or incomplete that the martyr was not rooted to any time or place. Conrad de Hallis was beheaded by Saracens around the same time in an unknown location “for the faith of Christ,” as were two anonymous friars.⁷⁹ Another Conrad (or perhaps the same one) died in Prussia with his companion Voisilus. Even martyrs who had some identifying characteristics were included with little fanfare. Arnaud briefly mentioned the martyrdom of the custos of the Holy Land Jacob and his companion Jeremias with seven other friars, killed by the sultan of Egypt, “Melcassa”⁸⁰ around 1288, presumably as part of the Mamluk conquest of the Frankish East.⁸¹ Despite the large number of friars killed and the inclusion of the brother in charge of the entire province of the Holy Land among the dead, no account was given of the circumstances under which they died. Many cases received only a sentence or two—sometimes the location was not even specified, or the friar remained nameless.⁸² We have no way of knowing whether any of these martyrs had a historical basis; a few appear in equally curt accounts in other fourteenth-century texts, but this is of course no guarantee of their existence. Presumably, Arnaud included all the information to which he had access. Some, like the Ceuta martyrs, had no basis in reality at all. What is significant is Arnaud’s enthusiasm for them. The martyrs appear regularly throughout the chronicle, and the great majority of them suffered and died at Saracen hands.

Arnaud also used the passiones to tackle a number of questions surrounding martyrdom. Central to almost all Franciscan martyrdoms was the question of the means by which death was achieved. Voluntary martyrdom had been debated in early Christian communities, and the validity of the passiones of the Córdoban martyrs was questioned because of the martyrs’ choice to die. The story of Livinus, who died in Cairo in 1345, directly confronted the question in a distinctly scholastic fashion.⁸³ Like so many others in the Chronica, Livinus is not known from any other source, and never became the subject of any cult. His story was intended as a justification for all the Franciscan martyrdoms, which were almost all voluntary.

Despite having received a vision from the Virgin Mary promising him martyrdom, Livinus was uncertain as to how one should go about “shedding his own blood.”⁸⁴ In proper scholastic fashion, the friar posed the issue as a disputation (disputavit et clare determinavit), with the quaestio as: “Is it licit according to God for a Christian to enter a mosque of the Saracens to preach the Catholic faith and to condemn the law of Muhammad?”⁸⁵ Why was this an issue? Livinus, in a somewhat schizophrenic moment, offered arguments for both sides, even addressing himself in the second person. Noting that Islamic law considered this action a capital offense, he pointed out to himself: “You state or suggest that you will be killed by others, you therefore kill yourself.”⁸⁶ On the other hand, Livinus found sufficient examples of other martyrs and saints doing the same, and furthermore, some had managed to preach in mosques without being killed. The conclusion of the disputation was clear: it was licit.

Having established the piety of voluntary martyrdom, Arnaud set about putting it into action. He entered a Cairo mosque on Friday and began to preach loudly in French against Islam to the sultan and the rest of the congregation. Interpreters were present, but they concealed what Livinus was saying, not wishing to anger the sultan. Livinus therefore switched to Arabic (which he miraculously became capable of speaking), and the sultan tried to dissuade him from following his foolhardy path, offering him great status and wealth if he would convert. When Livinus refused, the sultan (with great consideration) thought that Livinus looked hungry, and supposed that he might have a more positive attitude after some food, and offered him a snack. Though the friar ate a little of what he was offered, he still refused to convert. On Sunday he was brought before the sultan, and again he “contemptuously insulted Muhammad and his law.”⁸⁷ The next day he was beheaded in the main square. Livinus subsequently appeared to his friend Adam, who had desired to be martyred along with him, and showed him an enormous book in which all the names of martyred friars, past and future, were written—a description that fit the Chronica better than any other surviving Franciscan text. The “glorious and splendid habit” in which Livinus appeared suggested that Adam and the reader could rest “consoled in the Lord,” knowing that the triumph of the martyrs was rooted in their Franciscan values.

The illegimacy of voluntary martyrdom had been used to discredit martyrs since Late Antiquity, and the work of Eulogius in ninth-century Cordoba had been motivated in large part to defend martyrs against the belief that voluntary death did not earn salvation. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, this continued to be an issue. Thomas Aquinas had defined martyrdom as “the right endurance of suffering unjustly inflicted.” He emphasized the passivity of endurance; “A man should not give another the occasion of acting unjustly,”⁸⁸ the same concern that Clement of Alexandria (d. 215) had about voluntary martyrdom in the second century. Thus, provoking Muslims to anger and persecution through insults to Islam and Muhammad in this view constituted a sin, not a virtue. The story of Livinus vigorously refuted Aquinas’s arguments using the same scholastic method as Aquinas himself, a defense needed for virtually every martyr in Arnaud’s account.

But Livinus did not have to rely solely on the power of scholastic reasoning to be assured of the righteousness of voluntary death. The Virgin Mary, who appeared to him with Joseph, had urged him on to death. When Livinus asked why her son was not with her in the vision, she replied, “You are not worthy of seeing him,” because Livinus had not been assiduous enough in prayer. If he had, Jesus would have appeared and granted him “the grace of martyrdom, which you desire so greatly.”⁸⁹ The visions not only provided a guarantee that Franciscan willingness to die was pious, but also assured readers that Jesus himself urged the martyrs to death and victory.

Martyrdom by Schismatics and Heretics

Not all Franciscan martyrs died at the hands of Muslims. Arnaud recorded a certain number who died at the hands of other Christians—that is, schismatics and heretics—but he depicted them as persecutors quite differently. Conrad of Saxony and Stephen of Hungary were martyred by a group of irate Georgians, whom the friars had been attempting to convert from adherence to Orthodoxy to Catholicism. Arnaud gave a brief account of their deaths, including a vision a local woman had of the two friars as falcons ascending to the sky.⁹⁰ Arnaud did not discuss the content of the friars’ preaching, but simply labeled the Georgians both schismatics and heretics.⁹¹ In contrast to the majority of the accounts in Muslim lands, there is no sense of confrontation with another organized community. No single Georgian is singled out, and no Georgian was vested with any kind of authority or status, such as a judge, bishop, or king. Consequently, the friars died when they were “ferociously attacked, torn apart and killed”—spared the speeches, trials, and executions their colleagues in Islamic lands underwent. Indeed, their deaths were bestial compared to the judicial death of most of the martyrs in Islamic lands, who were most commonly beheaded. A good example is the friar Francis who died in Damietta around the same time; he “was arguing with the Saracens about the Catholic faith and about Christ and was clearly convincing them,” when the Saracens became angry, and began to question him about Islam. When he denigrated “Mahomet and his law,” he was taken “to the court of the preceptor” and shackled in prison. His testimony was sent to the absent “lord of the city,” and only after they had his permission was Francis executed by the sword.⁹² The juridical or political authority of those who persecuted the martyrs was often highlighted, as well as the judicial process by which they were judged. Islam was not simply the evil “other”; it was Christianity’s doppelgänger, and the order’s as well. The judicial execution of the friars for blasphemy was the mirror image of Christian inquisitions against heretics gone wrong, attacking the pious in defense of error, rather than the other way around. But in spiritual Franciscan eyes, this was precisely what inquisitions were when they executed friars and beguines devoted to poverty, such as the four killed in Marseilles in 1318.

Franciscans who died at the hands of heretics within the bounds of western Christendom appear even less frequently, but nevertheless do appear. The first example is two inquisitors killed in Chabeuil, near Valence, in 1321 by heretics.⁹³ Arnaud gives few details about their lives or deaths, not even specifying how they died, other than “after various tortures.” He emphasizes, however, that they carried out their duties in a “manly way.”⁹⁴ Why are they included? Unlike any of the other martyrs who died in partes infidelium that Arnaud clearly found far more compelling, the two inquisitormartyrs (Chatalanus and Pierre Paschal de Valenciennes) were the subject of an ongoing canonization process, begun soon after their deaths.⁹⁵ Inquisitor-martyrs were particularly favored by the papacy; the Dominican Peter Martyr, killed in the course of an inquisition in Lombardy, was the saint most quickly canonized in history.⁹⁶ Despite the prospect that these might be the order’s first martyr saints, Arnaud was distinctly uninterested in Chatalanus and Pierre Paschal. His dismissal of these martyrs demonstrates the centrality of Muslims and Islam for the order’s conception of martyrdom.

Evangelization and Martyrs

Franciscans always understood martyrdom in the context of evangelization. But the rhetoric of the Chronica put the two on diverging paths. The martyr denounced Islam, often as a means of damning Muslims rather than saving them, and died as a consequence of those insults. Those who traveled to non-Christian lands not intending to die as martyrs (ostensibly as evangelists, though as we have seen they generally focused on Christians), on the other hand, had an entirely different agenda. As has already been discussed, Franciscan chroniclers often ignored them, and Arnaud was no exception. The presence of friars in North Africa went entirely unnoticed, with the exception of a brief note about “Agnellus, bishop of the Moroccans,” who was listed among the holy friars of the Province of Aragon.⁹⁷ Other than his title, the reference did not recognize his labors among the Muslims. Giovanni da Pian del Carpine was sent to convince the king of the Tartars “not to attack and persecute Christian lands and in order to explore the ways of life, customs, and religion of the Tartars”—a combination of an ambassador and anthropologist, and a good synopsis of Giovanni’s work. Arnaud clearly doubted the other report that he had heard; “Others say that the Pope sent them in order to discover whether they could incline the king’s soul to conversion.”⁹⁸

Arnaud did give a few martyrs credit as successful evangelists, but their converts were pagans, not Muslims. Ulric and Martin were martyred in Livonia; Arnaud did not give a date for their martyrdom, but placed it during the ministry of Guivat Ot (1329–42). The two were motivated by the desire for martyrdom to go to the castle of Vilnius, “where the worst worshippers of idols who adored the most abominable things lived.” They were arrested by the duke and tortured. When Ulric managed to produce a fully cooked fish from the river, “many infidels were converted to the Catholic faith.”⁹⁹

Other successful evangelists lacked even basic information. Who were they? Where did they operate? Arnaud mentioned, for example, that Minister-General Bonagratia (1279–83) “sent many friars to the northern partes infidelium and enlarged the northern Vicarate exceedingly with great diligence.”¹⁰⁰ One is meant to assume that the expansion of the vicarate was due to the conversion of pagans, but Arnaud was characteristically unwilling to give any information about it or who accomplished it. Likewise, he briefly mentioned the establishment of a vicarate in Vacia “because of the conversion of so many infidels,”¹⁰¹ but gave no details. Arnaud chronicled the death of the “emperor of the Tartars,” named John, who had been baptized by Franciscans with his mother and buried in the convent of Saray. The emperor’s body remained incorrupt even when it was disinterred thirty-five years later, to the amazement of all, but strikingly Arnaud never described the conversion of the saintly khan, nor told his readers about the anonymous friars who converted him.¹⁰² His conversion was mentioned only as part of his obituary, not as part of a report on Franciscan evangelizing. Given that the Mongol khan was probably not a Muslim before his conversion, why was Arnaud hesitant to discuss his conversion further? The answer may be that, from Arnaud’s perspective in the late fourteenth century, the Mongols were Muslim. This sense is supported by his reference to the Saracens’ amazement at the preservation of the emperor’s body. Arnaud clearly envisioned Saray to be a Muslim town by the 1340s at least.¹⁰³ Such a conversion would have been seen by most Christian chroniclers as a parallel to the conversion of Constantine and Helena, one of the most renowned conversions in the Christian tradition. Similar conversions had generated great enthusiasm in Elemo-sina’s chronicle, the letter of 1323, and in the Nero manuscript discussed in the last chapter. Yet, for Arnaud, it was of passing interest. Few evangelists were commemorated in the separate vitae sprinkled throughout the Chronica. Odorico was a notable exception, which may have been prompted by the existence of a local cult in Friuli dedicated to him.

In short, Arnaud painted a complex picture of ongoing efforts at evangelization in which the friars were successfully saving souls, though they were opposed by rival Christians. The converts, however, were pagans, and the friars often had help from secular authority. But most significant of all is that Arnaud knew how missions to pagans ended, whether or not the evangelists died as martyrs: Christianity won. Arnaud had access to the same sorts of information about evangelization among the Muslims, but did not include those narratives in his chronicle. Why? In part because such narratives did not end in Christian triumph, even if Franciscans did manage to convert groups of Muslims in various places. In the end Islam remained as present and powerful as it had been before Franciscan evangelization, if not more so. Martyrdom narratives, on the other hand, provided victory. Furthermore, Arnaud made it clear throughout his account that the salvation of Muslims was not really the goal. Evangelization (or martyrdom) among Muslims was intended to demonstrate Franciscan piety and Christian superiority.

Better than Martyrdom: Giles of Assisi

Martyrdom was not always praised in the Chronica, despite its prominence. While the martyrs were one of the four pillars Arnaud saw as upholding the order, the vita of Giles of Assisi suggests that a life of eremetic withdrawal and mystical contemplation was a superior form of piety. Arnaud certainly devoted great attention to hermit-friars, particularly from the first generation of Franciscans. Giles appeared only sporadically in the hagiographies about Francis written in the early and mid-thirteenth century as the third friar to follow Francis, joining the informal fraternity soon after the poverello’s conversion in 1206. Giles appeared more frequently in the Franciscan literature of the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries as a representative of the kind of saintly simplicity that later generations of friars admired, without reference to martyrdom. Some of the early fourteenth-century sources particularly promoted his mystic achievements. He became one of the heroes of the spirituals and collections of his sayings circulated independently.¹⁰⁴

It is only in the fourteenth century that we begin to see Giles associated with both martyrdom and evangelization. The “Life of S. Giles” was traditionally ascribed to brother Leo, another early companion of Francis; but none of the manuscripts date to the thirteenth century, and as preserved, it is difficult to separate out a thirteenth-century core from fourteenth-century elaborations. It is in the so-called “Short Life” of Giles that we find the first description of Giles’s desire for martyrdom.¹⁰⁵ But in contrast to other material we have seen, Giles suggested that martyrdom was not the ultimate form of piety; in fact, he explicitly criticized it. The target was clearly the traditions around Francis and his desire for martyrdom. Giles provided the opportunity to discreetly set the record straight, so to speak. The other texts associated with Leo and his companions never mentioned Francis’s desire for martyrdom, and they were written to counter the depiction of Francis in the first life of Thomas of Celano, which they believed was somewhat flawed. Thus, the author (be it Leo or someone else) had an anonymous friar tell Giles that “the blessed Francis had said that the servant of God ought always to desire to die and to meet a martyr’s death.” Giles could thus refute the piety of desiring martyrdom and its mistaken attribution to Francis. He responded: “I desire to die no better death than that of contemplation.”

Giles knew what he was talking about; the vita recorded that Giles did indeed seek out martyrdom in the style of Francis and Anthony of Padua. “When at a certain time out of a desire to suffer martyrdom for the love of Christ he went to the Saracens and having returned thence was counted worthy to ascend to the very height of contemplation, he said: ‘I should not have wished then for a martyr’s death.’”¹⁰⁶ The anonymous hagiographer was thus explicitly engaging with the long Franciscan tradition of the desire for martyrdom, and arguing that it was mistaken. The virtues of withdrawal and contemplation were far superior, and could also lead to a kind of virtuous “death.”

Arnaud nevertheless included Giles in his gallery of holy friars, and the Chronica is the only source for the “Long Life” of Giles; it probably did not circulate separately.¹⁰⁷ Arnaud took all the elements of the “Short Life” and expanded it, keeping the criticism of martyrdom and adding a destination: Tunis. Indeed, the account of Giles’s life is one of the longest in the Chronica; it is four times longer those of any other of the early companions of Francis (Bernard of Quintaville, Rufinus of Assisi, Juniper, Leo, and others) and matched only by the combination of Anthony of Padua’s vita and miraculae. At the beginning of the life preserved in the chronicle, the account details Giles’s trips to Spain, the Holy Land, and also Tunis, which were instigated by Francis, “who desired to send brothers to the Saracens and other infidels for the sake of preaching, and for the confession of the faith, and if it was necessary, to be killed.”¹⁰⁸ Giles’s trips thus paralleled Francis’s own three journeys, both in number and destinations. Giles volunteered for the mission to Tunis, but was unable to preach for very long due to the resistance of Christians resident in the city. It is, however, only the title of the chapter that ascribes the desire for martyrdom directly to Giles. The text itself suggests that Francis sent the friars to be evangelists, and recognized that death might ensue, but did not use the word “martyr” in the body of the text, though Giles was described as being “kindled with a divine spirit” in following Francis’s orders.¹⁰⁹

Other vitae of friars from the first generation give a similar glimpse into a sense of what might be amiss with a desire for martyrdom. Brother Juniper was asked a similar question about what sort of death he desired. His response was instructive: when another friar expressed a desire to die in a convent so that the other brothers might pray for him, Juniper asserted, “I would like to be so foul-smelling that no brother would dare approach me; finally they would throw me in some ditch, and there I would die alone and in an abominable state…. The dogs will devour me.”¹¹⁰ What Juniper imagined was something similar to what the body of a martyr might suffer. The difference came in the recognition the martyr received following torture, death, and desecration of the body. Juniper imagined a completely anonymous death, while martyrdom involved a kind of glory that stood in contrast to the true humility that the Franciscans should embody.

Alongside Giles in the Chronica were dozens of holy friars who were similarly devoted to a life (and death) of contemplation. While not one of the four columns of the order, Arnaud and the authors of a diverse body of literature saw in these friars the essence of Franciscanism. Bernard of Quintaville “possessed a special grace when he spoke of God,” and became so enraptured in contemplation that God himself had to chastise Francis for trying to interrupt him.¹¹¹ Clare of Assisi’s cousin Rufinus “was so absorbed in God through the effort of contemplation that he became nearly insensible to earthly realities and hardly spoke,” and Francis himself insisted that “his soul is one of the three holiest souls God cherishes in this life.”¹¹² Roger of Provence refused to speak to his brothers about God, for “a perfect man who is in ecstasy cannot express in a sufficient way through any words whatever he is knowing and sensing.”¹¹³ The attention of these friars was directed inward; they were neglectful of external concerns about food and clothing. Glory and salvation came through the interior experience of God’s presence. In this sense, they were the opposite of the martyrs, whose glory was rooted in embodied suffering and death. Arnaud’s interest in keeping both the martyr and the mystic as central expressions of Franciscanism was part of his overriding mission to reconcile the competing factions of the Franciscan community. The eremitic friars had long been admired within the community and had been seen as spirituals, either in fact or in orientation, as anachronistic as that may have been. By including them, Arnaud was acknowledging a deep strain of Franciscan piety. The martyrs, on the other hand, were elevated by Arnaud himself. They offered the friars an alternative model to the hermit-friars, one devoted to religious glorification through dramatic death. While it is tempting to see in the two groups models for each wing of the order, this is too rigid a bifurcation. Conventuals and spirituals could see themselves in both the hermits and the martyrs.

Conclusion

The Chronica remained the greatest repository of Franciscan martyrs for centuries. The ubiquity and importance of the martyrs in the Chronica were a dramatic change from a century earlier, when no Franciscan passiones existed. While diverse in its material, narratives, and ethos, the Chronica’s martyrdoms emphasize a few key themes. The martyrs were relentlessly driven to pursue their goal of dying, even when their Muslim targets proved reluctant to execute them. Again and again, the Saracens told the friars to just go home, but the brothers returned until they were eventually punished for their insults. Indeed, the Chronica elevated insulting Islam to be a fundamental part of the martyrs’ mission. In his attempt to blend together both the spiritual and conventual heritages of the order, Arnaud found in the martyr who suffered death at the hands of the Saracens an ideal figure to parallel the spiritual-tinged sanctity of the hermit-friars so long admired in the order. This desire to balance the two forces explains why Arnaud abandoned traditional Franciscan narratives about the foundation of the order to promote the martyrs of Morocco. It was only in doing so that he could balance the two springs of Franciscan values and identity.