EPILOGUE
The Chronicle of the Twenty-Four Ministers-General of the Franciscan Order marked the zenith of medieval martyr accounts. No other text contained so many martyrs of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, nor integrated them so firmly into institutional memory and values. But the Chronica XXIV also paradoxically marked the end of medieval martyrdom—few new martyrs (Franciscan or otherwise) were recognized after its composition. Nevertheless, the corpus of passiones collected in the Chronica XXIV was passed on in Observant chronicles and elsewhere, and the canonization of the martyrs of Morocco in 1481 gave papal blessings to at least one set of Franciscan martyrs, permitting the celebration of their feast day and spurring the composition of liturgical offices in their honor. The subject of martyrdom from the fifteenth century through the early modern period remains surprisingly unexplored; Alison Knowles Frazier magisterially studied the relationship of humanists and martyrdom in the fifteenth century, and Brad Gregory has examined the subject broadly across Catholic and Protestant communities of the sixteenth century.1 No one, as far as I am aware, has studied the role of Franciscan and Jesuit narratives of martyrdom in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I cannot fill that gap in this book; instead, in this epilogue I will attempt to sketch out the afterlife of the narratives constructed by the order in the fourteenth century.
Martyrs Among the Observants
The birth of the Observant movement at the end of the fourteenth century fired up the controversies of the earlier fourteenth century, but with the threat of heterodoxy largely removed. The reform movement spread quickly, and the Observants became a powerful community, remaining a part of the larger Franciscan order but with their own priors and convents. The Observants had begun as a return to the semi-eremitical tradition of the early Franciscans, dependent on alms and forgoing status and influence in the larger church or order. But the second generation of Observants took seriously the Franciscan commitment to preaching, and once again engaged in active service to the church. Bernardino da Siena (1380–1444) and Giovanni da Capestrano (1386–1456) engaged in extensive preaching campaigns, thundering against usury, sodomy, Jews, and in the case of Giovanni, preaching a crusade against the Turks.2 Bernardino became the vicar of the Observants, and like the leaders of the order of the thirteenth century, sought to attract a generation of learned friars who would be at home in the pulpit and the confessional, discouraging those who wanted an eremitical life. He established an Observant studium (a place for advanced theological study) in Perugia, and Giovanni di Capestrano urged every province to establish one.3
Other reform communities sprang up in other regions: the Coletans began their own movement of reform in early fifteenth-century France as part of an attempt to reform the Poor Clares, and ended up establishing male reform houses alongside the female communities. In Castile, Pedro de Villacreces (c. 1350–1422) founded a reform movement, the Recollectio Villacreciana, that included both a preaching tradition as well as a focus on eremitism. Pope Eugenius IV in 1446 established an Observant hierarchy that was beholden in name only to the minister-general of the order, and was in most respects independent. The growth and popularity of the Observants culminated in 1517, when Pope Leo X appointed the Observants as the leaders of the entire Franciscan order, displacing the Conventuals. Shortly thereafter (1528), the Observants had to face the establishment of a new community avocating new reform—a movement directed in part against the Observants—that of the Capuchins, who again represented the values of a rigorist understanding of poverty and an emphasis on a semi-eremitical life.
Within the context of continuing debates about Franciscan values, martyrdom continued to have an important role, largely through the influence of the Chronica XXIV. Arnaud had written the martyrs into the narrative of the order, and made them exemplars of Franciscan piety. The Observant chroniclers of the fifteenth century followed that model, and they in turn have shaped modern notions, encouraging nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians to regularly project martyrdom as an important marker of Franciscan piety back to the thirteenth century. Indeed, the majority of the surviving manuscripts of the Chronica were preserved in Observant convents, and in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries Conventual friars wrote few chronicles, while the Observants, attempting to provide a firm basis for their communities, wrote several.4
The Observant friar Nicolaus Glassberger, writing in Nuremberg around 1506, relied heavily on Arnaud’s work; a copy of the Chronica in his own hand has survived.5 He included in his chronicle many of the martyrs that Arnaud had collected, from the Moroccan martyrs to Guglielmo di Castromaris and many others.6 Yet the Observant chronicler did not follow the Chronica slavishly, but developed the history of the order along different lines than Arnaud. Rather than beginning with the Moroccan martyrs, Nicolaus began with the missions to Hungary and Spain; he emphasized Francis’s reaction to the martyrdom of the five martyrs of Morocco rather than their passio itself, about which he offered few details,7 and instead focused on Francis’s journey to Egypt.8 Another Observant chronicler, Mariano da Firenze (d. 1523) wrote a five-volume chronicle of the order, which unfortunately was lost, though shortened versions of it have survived. Along with accounts of the martyrs in the chronicle, he also included others who were not in the Chronica, such as the inquisitor Pietro d’Arcagnano (who was given no date or place of death).9
Other Franciscan sources expanded on the conception of the martyrs as models of particular kinds of virtue. Bartolomeo da Pisa’s massive De conformitate vitae beati Francisci ad vitam Domini Iesu (1385–90) demonstrated the many ways that Francis and his order conformed to the life of Jesus. The result was a comprehensive catalogue and history of the Franciscans. His work became a byword for the excesses of Catholic hagiography in the Reformation, ridiculed by the Lutheran Erasmus Alber as the Alcoranus Franciscanorum, the “Qu’rān of the Franciscans.” But Bartolomeo’s central argument, that the history of Francis and the order mirrored the life of Christ, had been implicit in Franciscan texts since the thirteenth century, and it was officially endorsed by the order at a general chapter in 1390. He used the metaphor of the “tree” to structure his treatise, with some forty “fruits” demonstrating the myriad ways his theme developed; the martyrs particularly appear in the eighth fruit, “The Band Following Jesus—Francis Brings Forth Fruit.”10 Where Jesus had twelve apostles, Francis had twelve companions. The twelve companions, however, were just a synecdoche for the whole of the three orders, and so Bartolomeo continued the discussion of the twelve apostles (plus Paul!) not just with Francis’s twelve first brothers, but with a catalogue of all the holy men of the order. He followed the model of the anonymous collection of 1335, organizing the friars by the provinces to which they belonged. Though the narratives were generally drawn from the Chronica XXIV, they were in general shorter and without as much detail. Just as in the Chronica, the martyrs embodied fundamental aspects of the order—but the role of Islam was no longer quite so central. Bartolomeo largely inherited his list of martyrs from Arnaud, so perforce, the friars died by the hands of Saracens in most cases; but the polemic Arnaud invested in the confrontation of Saracen and Franciscan was lost.
Following in this same tradition was La Franceschina by Giacomo Oddi di Perugia (d. 1487). While Bartolomeo was a Conventual Franciscan, Giacomo was an important Observant Franciscan of Umbria in the fifteenth century, serving as the guardian of convents in Assisi, Perugia, and Terni. Unlike all other works involving the martyrs discussed thus far, Giacomo wrote in the Umbrian vernacular rather than in Latin. His Franceschina, or Lo Specchio de l’ordine minore (c. 1474) is a collection of hagiographical material organized around the virtues of the Franciscans: rejection of the world, obedience, poverty, and so on. Giacomo was drawing upon both conventual and spiritual sources: the Chronica XXIV and the De conformitate, but also Angelo Clareno’s Historia septem tribulationem. Like Arnaud, he blended conventual and spiritual perspectives in the interest of portraying the order (in its Observant incarnation) as remaining faithful to the values of Francis and the early community. The eighth chapter is devoted to patientia (endurance), and like Aquinas, Giacomo saw martyrdom as exemplary of the virtue. Giacomo also parted ways with Arnaud in restoring Francis as the example par excellence of martyrial virtue. Quoting the Gospel of Luke, “By your endurance [patientia] you will gain your souls (Lk. 21:19),” he linked the endurance of Francis to that of Jesus, highlighting Francis’s visit to the sultan, where he was beaten and scourged by the Saracens.11 While Arnaud ignored Francis’s stigmata, Giacomo placed the miracle at the center of the saint’s narrative. The stigmata made Francis a martyr, indeed the first of the martyrs;12 through his mystical wounds, Francis shared in the passion of Jesus, and that participation surpassed that of all the martyrs.13 Francis’s disciples demonstrated patientia as well, and Giacomo drew from the ranks of the eremitic friars as well as from a long list of martyrs to prove his point.14 The first example was the brothers Juniper and Bernard, two early companions of Francis; following this was a veritable catalogue of martyrs, some of which were drawn from the Chronica, while others were distinctive to La Franceschina. In this way, he further developed Arnaud’s agenda of using hermits and martyrs as anchors of the order’s piety, insisting that their spiritual achievements demonstrated the same virtue.
All of Arnaud’s successors continued to understand Franciscan martyrdom as persecution by Saracens. Giacomo, however, had a more expansive view of what martyrdom could demonstrate. Giacomo’s catalogue is arranged in reverse chronological order, beginning with late fourteenth-century martyrs and moving backward toward the thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century martyrs of the Chronica at the end of the chapter. Although he characterized martyrdom as displaying the virtue of patientia, several of the martyrs wavered in their commitment.
The first martyr whose life he records is Gentile de la Marcha, who traveled to Cairo to preach Christianity. When he realized he would have to leave as his inability to preach in Arabic hindered him, “a youth of great bodily beauty” granted him the power to speak in Arabic. He nevertheless abandoned his quest, and accompanied the future Doge Marco Cornaro (1365–68) on a pilgrimage to the monastery of Saint Catharine on Mount Sinai. When Gentile had a revelation that his parents had died, he was miraculously transported home to ensure their proper burial. Athough proclaiming him a martyr, neither Giacomo nor his source, Bartolomeo da Pisa, describe Gentile’s death; only some of Bartolomeo’s manuscripts refer to him as a martyr, but Giacomo’s unequivocally does.15 Nevertheless, Gentile was believed to have died in the East, and was the subject of a local cult in Venice.
Even more inconstant was Juan de Otteo from Castile who traveled to Jerusalem with a companion by the name of Consalvo. After preaching Christianity and denouncing “Maccomet” and his law, he was arrested. He was unable to withstand the torture that followed, and renounced his Christian faith, became Muslim, and took a wife. After three years, he wrote to a former brother in Cyprus, asking him to send two friars, because he wished to return to the faith. He did so publicly, and was executed as an apostate by crucifixion.16 Technically, Juan was not a Franciscan martyr; his apostasy and marriage separated him from the order, and Juan’s inconstancy would appear to be an odd demonstration of patientia, but for Giacomo, it was the result and not the path that mattered.
Giacomo’s account also includes familiar martyrs from the early fourteenth century, but often with a twist in comparison to Arnaud’s narrative. Many of the martyrs did not desire death,17 and they insulted Islam less frequently than in earlier accounts.18 The seven martyrs of Ceuta went “to seize holy martyrdom for the love of Christ,” which transmuted the desire from martyrdom to love for Jesus in a Bonventurean manner.19 Once in Islamic lands, the friars made little reference to Islam. Under torture, Daniel (of the seven martyrs of Ceuta) did refer to the “errors of your damned prophet Macomect,”20 but this was not what led to their persecution.
The story of the five martyrs of Morocco is retold in the longest section of the chapter, including a description of the martyrs’ visit to Portugal, and their preaching in Seville at the mosque, where Muslims “adore Maccomet.”21 According to Giacomo, friar Octone did preach directly to the prince Abozaida, however, with no result—though Giacomo did not give the content of his sermon.22 Most unusually, Giacomo recorded miracles that accompanied the death of the martyrs; a spring emerged at the place they were martyred, as well as a large number of miracles performed by the martyrs when their relics had been brought to Coimbra in Portugal, directly acknowledging the cult of the martyrs there, which Arnaud had ignored.23 He furthermore changed Saint Francis’s aphorism “Now I can say I have five brothers” to “Now I can say I have five brothers in paradise.”24 The miracle at their deathsite reflected the older story of the miraculous spring created by the friars while they were still alive for the benefit of the caliph’s army; this version, however, has a far more conventional significance—the spring endured, and it marked the place of martyrdom rather than the means by which the friars saved the sultan’s army. The power of the martyrs to distance Muslims from Christians was no longer so central. The virtue of the martyrs was evident, and Giacomo had little need to use them to make polemical points about poverty, reform, or the eremitic life. Like the martyrs of the fourth century, they were now the stalwart pillars of institutional authority. Their presence and power were not evoked through relics, but through the order itself.
Franciscan Martyrdom and Humanists
While narratives of Franciscan martyrdom continued to be copied and put to new uses within the order, particularly among the Observants, humanist interest in martyrdom in the fifteenth century focused on early Christian martyrdom and promoted martyrdom as a Dominican characteristic. Alison Knowles Frazier has shown that, contrary to the received historiographic wisdom that humanists were focused on this world and were uninterested in the martyrial perspective that focused on the world to come, in fact they engaged deeply and frequently with martyrdom, often writing and rewriting passiones.25 Despite their interest in writing about the martyrs, some humanists were reluctant to endorse martyrial values. Giovanni Aurispa (d. 1459), a layman, wrote a passio of Saint Mamas of Antioch, but warned his readers that they should not take this as inspiration to become martyrs themselves or even to pursue extreme asceticism.26 Only a few of the martyrs that interested the humanists were medieval: Peter Martyr was popular. A few new martyrdoms appeared as well: Antonio di Rivalto, a Dominican killed in north Africa in 1460 had two passiones written for him in the late fifteenth century;27 Andrew of Chios, a neomartyr, died in Turkish-ruled Constantinople in 1465; and Simon of Trent, a child-martyr, supposedly was killed by Jews in 1475. The few fifteenth-century martyrs that did appear were Dominican. The catalogue of saints by Giannotto Manetti (d. 1459), contained within his Adversos Judeos et Gentes, was incomplete, but Manetti singled out the passio of Peter Martyr as having renovated martyrdom.28 It is a claim that would have made Arnaud or Jerome of Catalonia grind their teeth in frustration.
But not all humanists ignored the Franciscans. One enigmatic text entitled Tractatus de martyrio sanctorum demonstrated the power of Franciscan rhetoric about martyrdom even outside the order. The Tractatus was written in 1437 in Constantinople by a secular cleric and humanist Tommaso de Arezzo. While Tommaso was not a Franciscan, his inspiration to write (and to die as a martyr) came from the promotion of martyrdom within the order. He wrote his treatise for three anonymous friars, who were his intended companions in martyrdom. Tommaso identified indirectly the Observant Franciscan Alberto da Sarteano (1385–1450), who had served as vicar-general of the order for a brief period and was a close friend of Pope Eugenius IV, as the source of their martyrial enthusiasm, though it is unclear whether Tommaso and his companions had ever met Alberto. Alberto had traveled to the Holy Land as a papal emissary in 1435, and petitioned to preach in more distant infidel lands, but it seems the pope turned down his request. While in Bethlehem, he urged two imprisoned friars by letter to embrace martyrdom, and indicated his willingness to join them.29 On Alberto’s return to Italy, he wanted to write a defense of martyrdom against its detractors, a treatise that perhaps would not have been much different from Tommaso’s, but he never had the time to write it. He later traveled to Cairo as part of the preparations for the ecumenical council of Florence-Ferrara, but did not take advantage of his time there to preach or pursue martyrdom.30 Perhaps the opportunity to bring schismatic Christians into the Roman fold offered a more satisfying form of triumph.
Tommaso himself had traveled to Constantinople to work on his Greek, and fell in there with three Franciscans who were planning to become martyrs, inspired particularly by a group of friars who were martyred in Jerusalem in 1391.31 At their request, he composed the Tractatus, which defended voluntary martyrdom, defined as the ideal form of martyrdom. Addressing seventeen questions, Tommaso drew upon patristic authors as well as material from the Franciscan tradition, including Francis, the martyrs of Morocco, and both the Regula bullata and the Regula non bullata. The Tractatus included both broad and specific questions such as What is martyrdom? How should one proceed to achieve martyrdom if one does not speak Arabic?
Like Eulogius defending the Córdoban martyrs, Tommaso engages some of the common criticisms of voluntary martyrdom; chapter 11 addresses “Refutations of arguments which are usually made against martyrdom in this age.”32 Other chapters cover issues relevant to would-be martyrs; the issue of the knowledge of appropriate languages, for example.33 Being able to speak non-Christian languages was not necessary for effective preaching, as one might expect, but it was necessary in order to ensure that one would be martyred. Tommaso took it for granted that the evangelist-martyr must say something to offend or upset their audience in order to be killed. He explicitly saw martyrdom as a way to confront Islam. The goal was not to convert Muslims through preaching; rather, the act of martyrdom itself was to serve as a catalyst for stopping Islam. It would “confound their perfidy.” This was not much different from the fictitious martyr Daniel’s desire to “damn the infidels.” But Tommaso envisioned that his death and that of others would have an impact beyond individuals. Muslims would not be converted by the spectacle of martyrdom; they would be disoriented and made vulnerable to attack. Islam itself would be induced to collapse.
In Tommaso, then, we find the first self-conscious articulation of a distinctly Franciscan conception of martyrdom, one that claimed Francis and the Moroccan martyrs as its founders and shared striking similarities with that of Eulogius on the Córdoban martyrs in the ninth century. Tommaso argued that while Franciscans were not obligated to seek out martyrdom, those who found themselves in infidel lands were, though non-Franciscans had the option of fleeing death. In defending voluntary martyrdom, Tommaso had to cover much of the same ground as Eulogius. Was martyrdom justified without active persecution? How was voluntary martyrdom different from suicide?34 Tommaso’s conception of martyrdom circled back around to its effect on other Christians. While martyrdom “confounded the infidels,” it could also bring the lapsed back to the church, strengthen the faith of the pious, and inspire the defense of the church. Thus, martyrdom was envisioned as war by another means; Tommaso urged his imagined audience of would-be martyrs, “Buckle your swords and together let us go to war, since we are promised an eternal crown for victory.”35
Tommaso apparently composed the treatise in Greek, in order to preserve his arguments from those who might oppose their plan. The Franciscans thus probably did not have permission from their superiors in the order to preach to the infidels and court martyrdom. Tommaso himself was not a Franciscan, nor a cleric of high enough rank to permit him to be a preacher. In sum, their mission was in desperate need of defense. Nevertheless, it would seem that the four achieved their goal, though no passio or account of their deaths survived. An epitaph composed by a fellow humanist is the only surviving testimony to Tommaso’s death; Maffeo Vegio (1407–58) notably did not call the young cleric a martyr:
As I am borne afire with love of Greek eloquence,
As I leave my Italian homes, and dwell in Greek ones,
I, Tommaso d’Arezzo, died in the bloom of youth:
Once the hope of my country, now its very grief
Why do you lament that I fell in a foreign country?
Everyone lives in a foreign country.
You mortals love as strangers in your place.
Here is my country, here the final goal of the long road.36
The survival of the Tractatus itself was a close call. While revealing ongoing Franciscan identification with martyrdom, it was not an influential text. It was translated into Latin, and was brought to Basel by the Dominican John of Ragusa, who had introduced Tommaso to the three Franciscans. A copy of the Latin translation was made by the archbishop of Milan Francesco Pizzolpasso (1435–43); this manuscript was used as the basis for the incunabulum printed around 1492. We have no evidence that any other copies of the Tractatus were made prior to its printing. Just as Eulogius had struggled to draw attention to the Córdoban martyrs in the ninth century, so too did Tommaso’s defense of martyrdom fall on deaf ears.
The Martyrs of Morocco in the Sixteenth Century and Beyond
Although the martyrs of Tana were more popular in the fourteenth century, the martyrs of Morocco became the best-known Franciscan martyrs by the fifteenth, in part due to the prominence Arnaud had given them. They were canonized in 1481 in response to the Ottoman conquest of Otranto, as discussed in the introduction. Not only were the Moroccan martyrs the only friar-martyrs canonized before the nineteenth century, they were also the only Franciscan martyrs with a functioning cult. Their relics at the monastery of Santa Croce in Coimbra enjoyed regional popularity into the modern era.37 Papal recognition allowed them greater visibility within the order; a martyrology from the Franciscan convent in Milan had a long account of the martyrs, which was probably written shortly after their canonization,38 and on a sixteenth-century list of martyrs from the Greyfriars convent in London, the Moroccan martyrs are first.39 The Observant convent in Kamenz (now in Saxony, then in Bohemia) depicted the martyrs in an altarpiece with Francis, Bernardino da Siena, and Christ in the center. Around the time of the martyrs’ canonization, Benedetto da Maiano included them on the pulpit of the church of Santa Croce in Florence; their panel was the only one of the five that was not devoted to Francis himself. Yet, despite their new prominence, the martyrs in some senses remained secondary. Benedetto included Anthony of Padua in the martyrdom scene, though he of course was not present in Marrakesh when they died. This was as reminder of the martyrs’ role in leading the saint to the Franciscan order.40 Even at the moment of death, their significance lay in relation to another’s sanctity.
Their centrality in the history of the order also continued; the late seventeenth-century Observant Cronicken der drey Orden, for example, recounted their passio and repeated the Chronica XXIV’s approving encomium from Francis: “Now I can say I have five brothers.”41 By the later sixteenth century, the martyrs had become an essential element in the history of the Franciscan order from its earliest days. The works of three historians in particular gave the martyrs a prominent place: Marco da Lisbona’s comprehensive history of the order (c. 1557);42 Arthus du Monstier’s enormous Martyrologium francescanum (1638);43 and most of all the Irish Franciscan Luke Wadding’s multivolume Annales minorum,44 a collection of primary sources connected to the order. These works provided the material from which most general histories of the Franciscan order have been written up to the present. A play was even written about the Moroccan martyrs in Dutch in 1783; clearly based on the account from the Chronica XXIV, the dramatis personae include the five martyrs, the members of the Portuguese royal family (Urraca, Sancha, Pedro), and of course the Miramolinus.45 Some friars even followed in their footsteps to Morocco; the Observant Andrea da Spoleto died in Fez in 1532.46
The canonization of the five martyrs also allowed for the development of liturgical offices for the martyrs, three of which survive from the late fifteenth century. A Franciscan breviary from 1492 allows us to see what the martyrs represented for the order once they had received papal recognition; it focuses on the broader values of martyrdom. The antiphon for Vespers praises the martyrs as imitating Christ, and highlights papal attention to the martyrs, represented by Honorius III, under whose papacy they died, and Sixtus IV, who promoted them to sainthood.47 The language of the “Ad Magnificat” echoes with the ancient tropes of martyrdom, proclaiming, “O the purple of the victors, the consoler in torture, strong and athletic, reddened by warfare!”48
A second office is more specific and follows the narrative of the martyrdom, mentioning, for example, the friars preaching openly in Marrakesh. It explicitly references the friars’ desire for martyrdom, which the other office avoids.49 A third office emphasizes the triumph of the martyrs, declaring “The Lord has restored a marvelous victory, when he honored the familia of the friars by victory.”50 Some of the secondary figures of the martyrdom also receive acknowledgment here; the infante Pedro is praised, Saint Anthony of Padua’s relationship to the martyrs is mentioned, and Coimbra is acknowledged as the home of the relics of the martyrs. Unsurprisingly, this office is preserved in a breviary from the Augustinian convent of Santa Croce in Coimbra, where the relics of the martyrs lay. In these offices, they are just known as “the five martyrs”; no other marker of their identity was needed.
The Martyrs Meet Modernity
Very little work has been done on early modern Franciscan martyrdom. The advent of European colonialism in Asia and the Americas gave the Franciscans and other religious orders an urgent new mission of evangelism, and one targeted largely toward populations that in Christian categorization were pagans, rather than monotheists such as Jews and Muslims. It was commonly believed that pagans were more susceptible to conversion than monotheists. Along with mission came martyrdom, though with a strikingly different ideology than was used in the medieval accounts. For the most part, pagans did not need to be confounded; “pagandom” was not conceived of as an entity to be destroyed as Islam was in medieval sources. Instead, martyrdom was a possible outcome of successful evangelization, and often converts were martyred alongside the friars. The desire for martyrdom receded as the possibility for conversion increased. This triumphant notion of mission and martyrdom has often been read back into the medieval sources. Nevertheless, the order never embraced their martyrs to the degree historians often imagine.
Best known of the early modern Franciscan martyrs were the martyrs of Nagasaki (1597). The twenty-six dead included Franciscans and Jesuits, Europeans as well as Mexican, Indian, and Japanese converts. Their deaths were celebrated not only as a Christian victory, but as a specifically Spanish and Franciscan one. The Jesuits had claimed Japan as part of their missionary territory since they had been the first to evangelize there under Saint Francis Xavier. They consequently discouraged the cult of the Nagasaki martyrs despite Jesuits being among the dead; they were outnumbered by Franciscans, whose intrusion they resented. Six Franciscans died (four of whom were Spanish) and seventeen of the Japanese Christians who died were lay members of the third order of Saint Francis. Likewise, the deaths of friars involved in missions in the Americas were used to bolster Spanish imperial claims, and were tied back to the long history of Franciscan martyrdom.51 Forty-nine out of one hundred friars who served in New Mexico in the seventeenth century were killed in the course of their duties, many during the large scale Pueblo revolt of 1690.52 Spanish soldiers often avenged the dead friars, leading to a reimposition of imperial rule. Even so, the Franciscans murdered in New Mexico were never commemorated as martyrs, even within the order, though the language of martyrdom was sometimes used.
The contestations of the Reformation provided another venue for martyrdom, and in this the narratives of martyrdom shared much in common with their medieval antecedents. The martyrs of Gorkum (1572) were the most celebrated of those who died at the hands of Protestants.53 Again, the Franciscans were part of a mixed group of Catholics, including a Norbertine priest and a Dominican. They were arrested when the Dutch city of Gorkum (Gorinchem) came under the control of Calvinist forces. When they refused to denounce Catholic teachings, the nineteen clerics were hanged. In contrast to the Nagasaki martyrs, the martyrographers did not imagine that the death of the friars was going to convert the Protestants who persecuted them or witnessed their death. Rather, their suffering and death were testimony to Franciscan fidelity to the true faith. They were a model to other Catholics, not a means of conversion.
Yet, even in this new era, the papacy was reluctant to promote the martyrs. Between the Council of Trent (1545–63) and 1771, only three martyrs (or groups of martyrs) were recognized; the martyrs of Gorkum and Nagasaki were two, and a third was another Franciscan Fidelis of Sigmaringen (1577–1622), who was killed by Calvinists. The Franciscans thus made up the vast majority of martyrs recognized in the early modern period, a demonstration of the power of the order and also its close association with martyrdom.
In many ways, however, the Franciscan martyrs only gained wide recognition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first martyrs to be canonized where the martyrs of Morocco in 1481, but the Franciscans had to wait nearly four hundred years for another canonization. The next to be officially recognized were the martyrs of Nagasaki who were beatified in 1627, but were not canonized until 1862. Likewise, the martyrs of Gorkum, including eleven Franciscans, were beatified in 1675, but only canonized in 1867 as part of the celebrations of the 1800th anniversary of the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul. The martyrs of Tana were beatified in 1894, and have yet to be canonized. The four martyrs of Jerusalem (1391) were canonized in 1970; their cult was first approved for the order in 1898. The year 1970 also saw the canonization of both John Wall, an English Franciscan executed in 1679, and John Jones, executed in England in 1598, as part of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, canonized together on 25 October. The rediscovery of the Franciscan martyrs in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and their canonization or beatification has led to their recognition far beyond their original cults, if one even existed prior to official recognition. Tommaso di Tolentino had a small cult in his native city in the early modern era and, following his beatification in 1894, also developed a cult in India.
For later generations of Franciscans and scholars of the order, the martyrs (particularly the Moroccan martyrs) became a fundamental and unquestioned aspect of Franciscan piety, present in the earliest days of the order, and manifest throughout Franciscan history. Jerome of Catalonia’s claim that only Franciscans were martyrs moved from polemic to accepted fact. Yet, even as Franciscans forgot their own complicated relationship to martyrdom, the portrait of Muslims and Islam remained static. Even in the early modern period when we can begin to speak properly of Franciscan missions, Muslims in accounts of martyrdom remain intransigent, unpersuaded by preaching or demonstrations of faith to convert to Christianity. The medieval image of Islam endured as implacable and alien to Christianity, even as the order and the church celebrated the evangelization of the rest of the world.
Conclusion
The story of one fifteenth-century friar shows how dominant the association of Franciscans, Muslims, and martyrdom became. Anselmo Turmeda was a friar who was converted to Islam in Bologna, apparently by one of the masters of the university. He traveled to Tunis, and became a loyal servant of the Hafsid sultans there, rising to a prominent place in the court. He was present for the crusader siege of Mahdia in 1390. He died a renowned author among both Christians and Muslims: in Catalan he wrote the Libre dels bons amonestaments, and in Arabic he wrote a refutation of Christianity entitled Tuḥfat al-Adīb fī l-Radd ‘alā Ahl al-Ṣalīb (The gift to the intelligent for refuting the arguments of the Christians). Both circulated widely. Among Muslims, Turmeda’s tomb was revered (it still stands in Tunis today). A story told in the eighteenth-century, Crónica seráfica de la Provincia de Cathaluña, gave his life a different ending, one that shared much in common with some of the other fourteenth-century martyrs, like Stephen of Hungary. The chronicle claimed that Turmeda had, at the end of his life, taken the opportunity of giving a sermon at the main mosque in Tunis to announce his return to Christianity. When he refused to renounce his refound faith, he was executed.54 By the eighteenth century, this fantasy must have seemed the only reasonable conclusion to come to when faced with a Franciscan living under Muslim rule. The Franciscan soul was saved, Islam denounced, and no Muslims converted. The boundary between Christianity and Islam remained firm. Thus, the apostate friar could go down in Franciscan memory as a martyr.