The Martyrdom of the Franciscans: Islam, the Papacy, and an Order in Conflict 9780812296778

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The Martyrdom of the Franciscans

THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor Edward Peters, Founding Editor A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

The MARTYRDOM of the FRANCISCANS Islam, the Papacy, and an Order in Conflict

Christopher MacEvitt

u n i v e r si t y of pe n ns y lva n i a pr ess ph i l a de l ph i a

Copyright 䉷 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: MacEvitt, Christopher Hatch, 1972– author. Title: The martyrdom of the Franciscans : Islam, the papacy, and an order in conflict / Christopher MacEvitt. Other titles: Middle Ages series. Description: 1st edition. 兩 Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2020] 兩 Series: The Middle Ages series 兩 Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019030172 兩 ISBN 9780812251937 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Franciscans—History—To 1500. 兩 Martyrdom—Christianity—History. 兩 Christianity and other religions—Islam. 兩 Christian martyrs—Islamic countries. 兩 Church history—Middle Ages, 600–1500. Classification: LCC BX3606.3 .M33 2020 兩 DDC 272—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019030172

To Pamela, my partner in every adventure, and Evander, whose arrival has made every day a voyage to a land of wonder

contents

Note on Names Introduction

ix 1

Chapter 1. “I Acquired the Martyrs”: Bishops, Kings, and the Victory of the Martyrs

25

Chapter 2. “Do Not Fear Those Who Kill the Body”: The Desire for Martyrdom in the Thirteenth Century

46

Chapter 3. “To Sustain the Frail”: Franciscan Evangelization in the Thirteenth Century

69

Chapter 4. “Their Blood Has Been Spilled Everywhere”: Evangelization, Martyrdom, and Christian Triumphalism in the Early Fourteenth Century

93

Chapter 5. “The Infidels Learned Nothing”: Poverty, Rejection of the World, and the Creation of the Franciscan Passio

126

Chapter 6. “For the Damnation of Infidels”: Martyrdom and History in the Chronicle of the Twenty-Four Ministers-General

150

Epilogue. The Afterlife of the Martyrs

181

viii

Contents

Notes

195

Bibliography

247

Index

273

Acknowledgments

287

note on names, translations, and transliterations

Aldous Huxley once wrote that too much consistency is “as bad for the mind as it is for the body.” While he was not addressing the vagaries of spelling conventions, it is an apt summary of my own approach to spelling personal names and names of geographic locations. When translating personal names from Latin, I have generally used the vernacular version of the name most common in the land of the person’s birth: thus, Giovanni for Italians, Jean for those from northern France, Johan for those from southern France. For very well-known figures, such as Francis of Assisi and popes both famous and obscure, I have used the English versions of their names. For the transliteration of Arabic names, I have followed the conventions of the Encyclopedia of Islam. I have left Arabic titles and names from Latin sources in the original; thus Muhammad is spelled a number of different ways, as is qa¯d.¯ı. Names of geographic locations are generally given with both the orthography from the origin text, and the modern name, again with the exception of those that are very well-known; Cairo simply remains Cairo.

Figure 1. Locations of Franciscan martyrdoms in the Mediterranean, Middle East, Central Asia, and India. Map created by Cecilia Gaposchkin.

Introduction

For a man notorious for nepotism, Pope Sixtus IV (1471–84) spent a surprising amount of time thinking about selflessness and sacrifice. They were the premier virtues of the martyr, and Sixtus thought more about martyrs than any of his papal predecessors had for two hundred and twenty years. Sixtus canonized a group of five Franciscan martyrs in 1481, and considered canonizing another martyr in 1479; the last time a pope had recognized a martyr as a saint was in 1253. The five friars—Beraldo, Pietro, Otto, Accursio, and Adiuto—had died in 1220 in Marrakesh, executed by the Almohad caliph for insulting Islam. Not only were the “Morocco Five” the first Franciscan martyrs to be so honored, but they were also the first Christians to be papally recognized for dying at the hands of “Saracens,” as medieval texts called the followers of Islam. Considered for canonization but passed over by Sixtus was Simon of Trent, a two-year-old boy found dead on Easter Sunday (March 26) in 1475. The prince-bishop of Trent, Johannes Hinderbach, accused the Jewish community of torturing and killing Simon in order to use his blood to make matzoh for Passover. He arrested all the adult men of the small community, and executed seventeen of them; two more died in prison and only one adult man survived the tragedy. Such blood libel accusations had been leveled at Jewish communities as early as the twelfth century, and they grew more common in the early modern period.1 Aided by mendicant preachers and humanists, Hinderbach promoted Simon as a martyr and petitioned the pope for his canonization. Sixtus sent Battista de’ Giudici, the Dominican bishop of Ventimiglia, as an apostolic commissioner to investigate the trial of the Jews in Trent. The commissioner came away disturbed by the treatment of the Jews and the excesses of the case. Sixtus summoned a commission to examine the affair; the appointed cardinals decided that the trial of the Jews was legitimate but conversely upheld the centuries-old ban on blood libel trials, preventing Simon’s promotion to sainthood.2 The little martyr was eventually beatified in 1588 by Sixtus V (another Franciscan

2

Introduction

pope)—but his cult was suppressed in 1965 in the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. The would-be saints shared little in common other than their appearance at the court of Sixtus IV, separated as they were by centuries, geography, and their ages at the time of their deaths. What their stories did have in common was the potent appeal of a non-Christian persecutor. Though Christians often conflated Jews and Muslims (along with heretics) as fundamental threats to Christians, the Jewish and Muslim protagonists of the would-be martyrs’ stories were portrayed very differently and provoked surprisingly different responses from the pope, the public, and from the Franciscans. The appeal of the martyr sprang from the flexibility inherent in their stories. The martyr could be a surrogate for any Christian, and the persecutor could similarly represent anyone who oppressed or attacked the virtuous. Each martyrdom was in some way a reenactment of the first martyrdom, the passion of Jesus Christ. But it would be a mistake to see all martyrdoms as endless iterations of the same story; in each, the persons, their manner of dying, and their persecutors are shaped to address contemporary concerns. The account of the martyrs of Morocco was used to address Christian anxieties about Islamic victories over Christians, and also to address concerns more particular to the Franciscan order—the contentious place poverty occupied as a sign of Franciscan piety but increasingly also as a sign of Franciscan heresy. The story of Simon spoke to Christian anxieties about the intermingling of Christians and non-Christians in the domestic and civic spaces of Christian-ruled cities, and their anxieties over economic changes, for which Jews were a convenient scapegoat. Reactions to Simon and the martyrs of Morocco were decidedly different, in large part due to the perception of their persecutors. Enthusiasm for the child-martyr spread quickly from Trent, driven by the archbishop’s eagerness for a new saint and the widespread anti-Semitism to which the story appealed. Just three weeks after Simon’s death, news of the happenings in Trent had been noted in the diary of Corradino Palazzo, who lived more than eighty miles away in Brescia.3 Within months, a variety of texts—often published by newly established print shops eager to produce quick-selling materials—were circulating in northern Italy and Germany. Poems, miracle stories, and woodcut images were swiftly produced, including a full passio composed a startling three weeks after the child’s death.4 By the end of the century, there were more than thirty separate accounts.5 The army of texts rode on the back of a widespread and rabid hatred of the Jews. The blood

Introduction

3

libel accusation itself trafficked in assumptions about Jewish bloodlust for innocent Christians, and the many texts written to promote the little “saint” were vituperative; the Venetian humanist and poet laurate Raffaele Zonvenzoni called upon bishops and princes to “unsheathe your flashing swords; wipe out the nefarious name of the Jews, and drive them out of the whole earth!”6 The pope, in contrast, reacted with considerable suspicion to both the accusations against the Jewish community of Trent and the authenticity of Simon as a martyr. Both Sixtus and Sigismund, the archduke of Tirol and the secular overlord of the prince-bishop of Trent, suspended the interrogation and torture of the Trentine Jews for a time, and Venice forbade preaching about Simon or attacking Jewish communities in their territory; violence seemed to be an understood result of such preaching. Furthermore, Sixtus forbade the production of images of Simon; nevertheless, we have several woodcuts from the period that depict Simon’s torture and murder. His apostolic commissioner, though known beforehand to be no friend of the Jews, was appalled at the treatment of the Jewish community, and communicated that directly to Sixtus.7 He wrote a detailed response to Hinderbach’s presentation to the commission of cardinals, detailing his objections to the trial.8 The martyrs of Morocco inspired no such enthusiasm. The first passio describing their execution was not written until more than one hundred years after their deaths; miracle stories appeared another fifty years after that. It is a sharp contrast to the mere weeks it took for a narrative to be produced for Simon. And while the Jews were imagined to have sought Christian blood to enact nefarious rituals, the caliph who executed the Franciscans acted in a straightforward manner. Insulting the prophet Muhammad and Islam were forbidden by law, and when the friars broke that law, they were punished. The motivation of the Almohad ruler was consonant with historical understanding; Christians were indeed executed for such insults. Why was little Simon (and the fantasy of Jewish bloodlust) so much more popular than the Morocco Five and their persecutor? And given this contrast, why were the Franciscans canonized but the sacrificed child was not? Sixtus’s own status as a Franciscan very likely played some role in this decision; he also canonized the order’s former minister-general Bonaventure, in 1482.9 In the other direction, the pope’s distaste for the treatment of the Jewish community in Trent by the prince-bishop against his expressed prohibition undermined the petition to recognize Simon’s death, as did the extremes of devotion that Simon’s supporters were expressing about him. De’ Giudici reported that the people

4

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of Trent “adored their blessed one as a second Christ and as a second Messiah.”10 But perhaps what tipped Sixtus’s hand was what was happening at the other end of the Italian peninsula from Trent: the conquest of the Apulian town of Otranto by the Ottomans on 11 August 1480.

From Morocco to Otranto, 1220–1481 The conquest of Otranto came as a shock to Italy. While the capture of Constantinople (1453), Venetian-ruled Negroponte (1470),11 and other cities of Greece had made the military aggressiveness and expansion of the Ottomans painfully apparent, the siege of Otranto put Ottoman troops on Italian soil, on land the papacy claimed as its patrimony. Furthermore, the conquest of Otranto indicated the direction the Ottomans were expanding: having captured New Rome (Constantinople), Mehmet the Conqueror had set his sights on Old Rome. The horror of the situation was heightened by the reported brutality of the Ottoman troops; rumors circulated describing the murder of the bishop in his cathedral, and the massacre of some of the town’s citizens outside the city walls.12 The papacy responded in a panic. Sixtus IV quickly negotiated an end to the ongoing war among the Italian city-states that had followed the Pazzi conspiracy against the Medici in Florence,13 and turned his attention toward uniting Christendom against the Turks. Divine aid was marshaled alongside the military forces of Italy and beyond; Sixtus issued a call for crusade, and a Mass was composed, which Penny Cole has called “a moving and poignant cry to God to assist his beleaguered faithful to victory over the Turks.”14 The liturgy evoked the dead of Otranto: “Avenge the blood of your faithful servants which has been shed.”15 The Turkish occupation of Otranto lasted a year. Mehmet II, the terror of the Christian world, died on 3 May 1481, just as the countersiege of Otranto began, led by Neapolitan forces with aid from the Hungarians. A negotiated surrender returned the city to the control of the Kingdom of Naples at the end of the summer (10 September), and the bodies of the murdered citizens of the city were discovered outside the city walls, still unburied.16 The canonization of the martyrs of Morocco was a defiant response to the Ottoman conquest of Otranto. Martyrdom at its heart is about resistance; the acclamation of a martyr is an audacious shout declaiming that torture and death do not stop the righteous; indeed, it only makes them stronger.

Introduction

5

Yet a close reading of the passio of the Moroccan martyrs reveals a set of contrasts between the Islamic and Christian realms which contradicted the triumph that Sixtus’s crusade hoped for.17 The martyrs, of course, were not warriors; they did not defeat Islam through earthly triumph. But in this case, they offered few other forms of victory. The five martyrs converted no Muslims in the course of their time in al-Andalus and Morocco, though several Muslims expressed sympathy for them; one of the caliph’s princes even “loved Christians.”18 Nor did the martyrs display the awesome power of the divine as was common in other martyr accounts from the fourth century onward. Such displays made clear to the audience both within the narrative and to those reading it that behind the seemingly defenseless Christians loomed the awesome power of an almighty God. But the friars, living or dead, performed few miracles in Muslim lands. Their relics only began to heal once they were returned to Christian territory. Curiously, the one miracle that the martyrs did perform in front of Muslims only served to strengthen the sultan’s military power.19 The martyrs had accompanied the Almohad army under the command of a Christian mercenary on an attack on a rebellious Muslim lord, and on their return to Marrakesh, the army was stranded in the desert without sufficient water. One of the friars miraculously provided a spring to assuage the thirst of the soldiers and their beasts of burden, saving the caliph’s army from a painful death. This could hardly be what Sixtus was hoping for in the case of the Ottomans. Perhaps the pope could take solace from the divine punishment meted out to the caliph after the death of the martyrs: he was struck with partial paralysis, and his land suffered a three-year drought.20 The caliph nevertheless recovered, and the drought ended—hardly the sort of victory that God had marshaled for his people in the past.21 What the martyrs were effective in achieving was the separation of Muslim from Christian. A central figure in the story was the infante Pedro, brother of Afonso II of Portugal. Pedro was living in exile at the caliph’s court, and was given the responsibility of minding the friars; hence they accompanied him and the sultan’s army on campaign. A key part of the narrative was the return of Pedro to Portugal; just like the martyrs’ own bodies, the infante could not be left in Muslim hands. What the passio offered was not triumph over Islam, but separation from it—and perhaps the reality of Ottoman troops on Italian soil made that appealing enough.22 The story of the martyrs of Morocco was convenient to the pope in another way: not only could the Almohad caliph be read as the Ottoman

6

Introduction

sultan (who was also a caliph), but the martyrs themselves were proxies for another group of martyred dead—the massacred citizens of Otranto (including six Franciscans). They shared much in common. Both groups died at the hands of Muslims, who were seen from the twelfth century on as western Christendom’s greatest rival and a threat to its very existence. While both groups of martyrs were eventually canonized, each had to wait hundreds of years for recognition.23 The Morocco Five may have been canonized in part to avoid acknowledging those killed by the Ottomans in Otranto.24 The cult of the Otrantines was not authorized until their beatification in 1771, and they achieved full sainthood only on 12 May 2013—their ascension to glory was overshadowed by Benedict XVI’s simultaneous announcement that he would resign as pope, only the second in history to do so.25 If we return again to the court of Sixtus IV, we find that in reality he had three groups of potential martyrs, not just two: the Morocco Five, the citizens of Otranto, and little Simon of Trent. But not all martyrs are equal. Simon was presented as another Christ child: his death came at the same time of the year as did Christ’s (Passover), and his murder was understood to be an expression of the same age-old hatred of what was virtuous and good that drove the Jews of Jerusalem to murder Christ centuries before. The association with Passover connected Simon to the sacrificial lamb, implicitly linking his death to the forgiveness of sins. Simon thus embodied an image of Christians as innocent victims of the hatred of others, hatred that simmered within the boundaries of Christendom itself. From the papal perspective, Simon was no martyr at all. Even putting aside Sixtus’s doubts about whether Simon had actually been killed by a cabal of Jews thirsting for Christian blood, the pope and others at his court believed that one must willingly accept death to be a martyr—and being only two years old, Simon could not have known what that choice was.26 While the Moroccan martyrs also died at the hands of a group who were believed to hate Christians (Muslims), they died outside the boundaries of Christendom, and went willingly to their deaths, imitating Christ in a different manner than Simon the boy. And why did the dead of Otranto go ignored? The bodies of the dead Otrantines were not recovered until a month after Sixtus canonized the Morocco martyrs; the pope may not have been certain that they were willing to die.27 Some accounts related that the citizens were offered the choice to convert or die, and that the archbishop had miraculously remained on his feet after his beheading, toppling over only after the last of the Otrantines had been executed. The earliest accounts, however, suggested that an indeterminate number of people had been killed as part of the sack

Introduction

7

of the city, not for failing to convert, and that the archbishop had died of fear and was not killed by the Turks.28 The pope’s own Franciscan background, when added to the well-established story of their martyrdom, may have led him to choose the Morocco Five rather than wait to establish the sanctity of the victims of the Turks. In the years that followed, Sixtus and his successors also may have feared that promoting the Otrantines would accrue more glory to the rulers of Naples than to the papacy. It is perhaps not surprising to find that the rhetoric of martyrdom still wielded such power amid the struggles for power in Quattrocento Italy, centuries after the putative “age of martyrdom” had ended. What is surprising is the refusal of various groups to acknowledge where that power lay. Stories about Muslim persecutors of innocent Christians turned out not to be very popular in the medieval period. With the exception of a localized cult in Coimbra, none of the dozens of friars in the Franciscan order claimed as martyrs developed a cult in the medieval period. The relics of the martyrs of Otranto received a little more attention; they were installed at Otranto as well as in Naples, and gradually spread out to other southern Italian churches. By the eighteenth century, the martyrs were even credited with converting their Muslim executioner.29 By far the most popular of the three was Simon of Trent. The rapid spread of his cult and the number of sermons, pamphlets, and shrines dedicated to him in just a few years far exceeded anything produced for the martyrs of Morocco over more than two centuries. Of course, Simon had the advantage of dying during the early age of print, and the new technology helped swiftly spread his story. But even more important is the ugly truth that lay behind Simon’s cult: many Christians believed that a fictional conspiracy of their Jewish neighbors to torture and kill a Christian boy for nefarious rituals was a greater threat than that of a caliph killing friars in lands across the sea. Yet Franciscan sources never featured a Jew killing a friar, though the story of Simon demonstrates how easy such a story was to manufacture. The contrast also points out the gap between papal notions of martyrdom and popular ones. Simon of Trent exemplified the “innocent attacked” that generated popular enthusiasm. The papacy instead was keen to promote martyrs of just the opposite character, preferring obedient sons of the church who died in her service.30

Thinking with Saracens Yet the Franciscans clung to narratives about friars dying at the hands of Muslims; indeed, in Franciscan discourse, “death by Saracen” came to rival

8

Introduction

or even surpass other definitions of what made a martyr. Of the roughly fifty martyrs commemorated in the late fourteenth-century Franciscan account of the order, the Chronicle of the Twenty-Four Ministers-General of the Franciscan Order (Chronica XXIV generalium ministrorum ordinis fratrum minorum), two-thirds of them were killed by Muslims. The centrality of Islam to Franciscan conceptions of martyrdom becomes even more apparent when we realize that many of the martyr narratives were largely invented; Franciscan authors were free to choose the antagonist they wanted—and Franciscans almost always chose Muslims. Franciscans recounted stories of their martyred dead for a variety of reasons, but the effect of their narratives has been threefold: to further push apart Muslims and Christians by promoting narratives that essentialized Christian salvation and Muslim damnation; to articulate a new Franciscan piety built on the humility of the martyr rather than the poverty of the friar; and to recast Christian understanding of martyrdom, taking what had been primarily understood as a conduit of divine blessing and power to the human world, and making it instead a gesture that offered little hope of divine intervention. These three effects were linked; in denying the possibility of the salvation of Muslims and downplaying the role of miracles in martyrdoms at their hands, Franciscans aligned Islam with the world of suffering and desire, and Christianity (particularly as expressed through Franciscan virtue) with the divine realm of salvation. This, of course, was an ancient dichotomy, fundamental to Christian cosmology and essential to the monastic and ascetic values that underpinned the Franciscan enterprise. But it was also a rebuttal of an enduring belief in Christian triumphalism, which allowed Christians to believe that God— through the martyrs, saints, and the Virgin Mary—protected God’s adopted children, cured them of illnesses, defended their homes from attack, and smote their enemies on the battlefield. Martyrdom as told by the Franciscans stood in implicit contrast to crusade and its central hope: that Christians might be worthy of victory in a holy war against Islam and recapture Jerusalem and the Holy Land. The logic of Franciscan martyrdom in effect responded to that endeavor: Christians should seek their true homeland in heaven, not in an earthly city where the temporal power of Islam appropriately dominated. Partes infidelium, as late medieval sources frequently called Islamic lands, would remain separated from partes fidelium until the Final Judgment. Franciscans nevertheless were eager partisans of crusading endeavors, serving as preachers, collectors of funds, and authors of proposals for new

Introduction

9

crusades. The contrast makes the Franciscan martyrdoms all the more startling: Why deny in one context what you are fighting vigorously for in another? But the greatest significance of the martyrdoms was for the friars themselves. The Franciscans are often presented in both popular and scholarly imagination as intrepid evangelists, venturing beyond the boundaries of the known world to preach the word of God. But the martyr narratives did little to bolster this image; the martyr-friars preached, to be sure, but they generally failed to convert anyone. Instead, the narratives served to reassure friars anxious in an age when the order faced challenges on many sides: accusations that they failed to follow Francis’s vision of evangelical poverty faithfully, or conversely, that some followed it so assiduously that it led them into heresy. Martyrdom stories thus functioned primarily to supplant poverty as the emblem of Franciscan piety. The values the martyrs represented were uncontroversial, and could appeal to different factions within the order, namely the rigorists, who advocated for the centrality of poverty to Franciscan practice, and conventuals, who argued that the friars ought to be bound primarily by their vow of obedience. The rigorists (also called spirituals) could see in the martyrs those who died out of their commitment to poverty, and for the conventuals the same martyrs could represent devoted obedience to God. Franciscans were associated with martyrdom from the foundation of the order. The desire for martyrdom was one of the characteristics which made it evident to readers of Francis of Assisi’s hagiography that he was indeed a saint. By the fourteenth century, one Franciscan bishop could boast “There is no kingdom, no language, no nation where the Friars Minor are not, or have not been, preaching the faith of Holy Mother Church. And their blood has been spilled everywhere, beginning in Morocco all the way to India.”31 The Franciscan order emerged in the early thirteenth century as part of a burst of new religious communities in an era of religious, cultural, economic, and political expansion. The order began as a small informal community of men gathered around Giovanni di Bernadone, the son of a cloth merchant in Assisi, who earned the nickname of Francesco as a result of his father’s business trips to France. Francis and his followers were mendicants, vowed to individual poverty like generations of ascetics before them, but also distinctively vowed to communal poverty. They aspired to the austere life that Christ and his apostles had lived, carrying “on their journey neither purse nor pouch nor bread, nor money in their belts” (Luke 9:3). After meeting Francis and his followers, Jacques de Vitry rejoiced that in addition to

10

Introduction

monks, hermits, and canons, “the Lord in these days has added a fourth form of religious life, the embellishment of a new order, and the holiness of a new rule”—the friars.32 Praising their simplicity, love of poverty, and contempt of worldly vanity, Jacques expressed his delight that “even the Saracens and people in the darkness [of unbelief] admire their humility and virtue.”33 Like monks, the friars made vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, but unlike monks, they did not live in cloisters, but roved from place to place, urging penitence in vivid sermons, first in Umbria, but then spreading throughout western Christendom and beyond.34 There were two distinct Francises of Assisi, and each shaped a part of the order in his image. One Francis was the itinerant preacher, who (again in the words of Jacques de Vitry) “has not so much added a new way of living as renewed an old one, the form and condition of the primitive Church.”35 Following the model of the early apostles, this Francis aspired to bring sinning Christians back to the warm embrace of a forgiving God by preaching in Italian churches and piazzas. This Francis was of great use to the institutional church; Pope Innocent III quickly gave him permission to form a new community when Francis visited Rome with his eleven early companions in 1209. According to Francis’s hagiographer Thomas of Celano (writing at the end of the 1240s), Innocent had a dream the night before he met Francis, in which he saw “a small, scorned man” holding on his back the crumbling basilica of S. Giovanni in Laterano, the cathedral church of Rome and the seat of the papacy.36 And indeed, the Franciscans proved immensely useful to the popes. In addition to encouraging pious behavior among the laity, Franciscans soon took on the role of confessors in many regions, as well as preachers of crusades, ambassadors, and even bishops and cardinals. The Franciscans who followed in the footsteps of this Francis helped support and expand the power of the church, and consequently came to have the wealth and prestige of the institution behind them. For these friars, poverty was a malleable quality that distinguished the order generally, but should not impede its ability to engage with the world. The other Francis was not one of Jacques’s dynamic new apostles; he was a hermit. This was how Francis began his saintly life, and how he ended it. Once the order had been established and grew beyond a small fraternity of brothers who all knew each other, Francis preferred to live in quiet retreat in places like La Verna, a hermitage in the mountains north of Arezzo. This Francis avoided crowds and attention, and sought to separate himself from the material world of ambition, desire, and distraction so that he could focus

Introduction

11

on imitating Christ in all aspects of his life. Francis even wrote a rule for hermitages, and many of his earliest disciples followed him in living a greater part of their lives in seclusion. For Franciscans who followed this life, poverty was the primary virtue on which all others relied. But, of course, there were not two Francises, but one who seamlessly melded the two roles: as his hagiographer Thomas of Celano recalled, “It was his custom to divide the time given him to merit grace and, as seemed best, to spend some of it to benefit his neighbors and use the rest in the blessed solitude of contemplation.”37 It was not easy for his friars to do the same, and few Franciscans beyond the first generation ever managed to combine both roles successfully. Martyrdom was one of the strands of piety that both versions of Francis drew upon, and it was woven throughout the early history of the order. Francis the preacher desired to evangelize among the infidels, and made three trips to Muslim lands in an attempt to fulfill that desire. The stories of his journeys, and particularly of his visit to Egypt in the midst of the Fifth Crusade and his subsequent meeting with the Ayyubid sultan al-Ka¯mil, have become a central part of Francis’s image, re-created in frescoes and cited even today by popes as a model of interreligious dialogue. But his journeys, according to Thomas of Celano, were also driven by the desire for martyrdom. However, Francis did not die under an infidel sword. Instead, he died years later at one of his beloved hermitages, surrounded by his “little brothers.” In his final years, he had been afflicted with painful illnesses, and his hagiographers believed he suffered from the added extra agony of the mystically induced stigmata, the wounds that Christ himself suffered at the Crucifixion. Thomas of Celano suggested that the stigmata were a superior form of martyrdom; instead of dying as Christ died, Francis was called to suffer as Christ suffered. If the preacher desired martyrdom, it was the hermit who received it (mystically). But it was more than the model of Francis (or of the five martyrs of Morocco) that made martyrdom so important to Franciscans; the values of martyrdom were woven into the fabric of the order. Above all else, the friar was to be humble, forswearing anything that might lead him to focus on the self. He was called to sacrifice his ambition, his desires, his physical comfort, and even his life out of love for God. Martyrs were the very first saints of the Christian tradition, and the fount from which the cult of the saints and their relics first emerged. The martyrs and their stories suffused western Christian culture and values; people were named after them, their deaths were commemorated daily, their aid cured the sick and gained forgiveness for the sinner. The Franciscans were therefore tapping into a set of

12

Introduction

cultural values and stories that resonated throughout institutions, communities, and families. Franciscan chronicles recounted the stories of dozens of friars who had died in Islamic lands. Guglielmo de Castromaris, for example, died in the city of Gaza, in 1354. About him we know little else; how he came to be in Gaza, how old he was, whether tall or short, round as we imagine jolly friars in the style of Friar Tuck, or thin and spare like a tree branch. His name survives for one reason only: he died a martyr. Only one account preserves his name, written some twenty years after his death; it informs the reader that the friar was “preaching the faith of Christ and denouncing the law of Machomet”— Islam, which was the faith of most of the citizens of Gaza. An unnamed king took offense, and, alternating threats and bribes, urged Guilielmo to deny his faith and become a Muslim. Guilielmo resisted, and the king had him executed.38 Guglielmo’s attack on Islam earned him this brief citation in a chronicle written in France some twenty years later, but little more.39 As far as we know, Christians did not call upon him to intercede for them in heaven; no relics were preserved to foster his memory in Gaza or in Castromaris, a small town near Naples where Guglielmo was from; nor was he ever inscribed officially as a martyr recognized by the church. Those rolls were already full. Christian martyrs by the fourteenth century numbered in the tens of thousands, if not the hundreds of thousands; Jacques de Voragine claimed that there were five thousand saints for every day of the year (except, for some reason, January).40 Remove his name, the date, and the place of his death, and Guilielmo’s story is interchangeable with many of the other Franciscan martyrs. Guglielmo, his fellow friar-martyrs and the stories about them are a puzzle to us. Did Guglielmo even exist? Did he actually die in Gaza? Did anyone notice? Did he choose to die, and if so, why? We have no answers to these questions; Guglielmo and his brothers in martyrdom are fictional characters, even the few whom we can prove actually existed. In martyrdom it is the story that matters, not its historicity—the author, not the subject. Who cares enough to tell the story? And what need does the story fill? We do not even have access to the experience of the Franciscan martyrs for whom we have reliable historical evidence. A few letters survive from friars, but they were written before they knew they were going to die, and cast little light on whether they chose martyrdom, or why. No prison diary a` la Perpetua has survived to tell us how the friars themselves understood their deaths. Furthermore, the history of martyrdom and martyrology has remained curiously

Introduction

13

unwritten for the high Middle Ages, so our understanding of the significance of martyrdom in this period is limited. Although the association between Franciscans and martyrdom is long-standing, it has not been the subject of a monograph; this book is the first to address it. It is also the first to take martyrdom in the late Middle Ages as its primary subject. Stories recounted about martyrs not only give meaning to death suffered through religious persecution, but also give meaning to the world around the martyrs—that is, for the community who preserved their memory. The acts of testifying, suffering, and dying become a passio (a narrative account of the martyrdom) only through a series of interpretive choices by a narrator, who casts the actors, constructs the scenery, and provides a script.41 Franciscans wrote that script in a number of ways, but generally they chose one that was at odds with the dominant narrative in medieval martyr-writing. Since the fourth century, Christians had depicted the martyr in death as a victor who demonstrated the superiority of heaven over earth, Christians over infidels, and virtue over vice. Furthermore, that victory was made manifest on earth by the conversion of onlookers, by the spectacular miracles that accompanied the martyr’s death and appeared at the tomb afterward, and by the flocks of the faithful expressing their devotion there. Franciscan stories of martyrdom defied that tradition in a number of ways, as we have already seen in the passio of the Moroccan martyrs. The martyrs generally failed to convert anyone, either through their teaching or through the example of their patient suffering. While some miracles accompanied the friars’ suffering and death, they were the kind that indicated divine approbation for their sacrifice. Miracles which demonstrated that the martyrs were conduits of divine power—healing miracles, miracles of punishment— were few and far between. Their martyrdoms failed to have the transformative effects that make martyrdoms more than just executions. Hagiography has been described as “a narrative linguistic practice that recounts the lives of the saints so that the reader or hearer can experience their imperative power.”42 But the Franciscan martyrs displayed few of the miracles or healing power that Christians expected of their saints. Rather than being a tool of conversion, Franciscan martyrdom, at least in the narratives preserved within the order, achieved the opposite—it emphasized the separation of Christian from Muslim, rejected the possibility of transforming one into other, and presented Islam and its political authority as a permanent feature of the present world. The notable exception was the four Franciscans martyred in Tana, India, in 1321: but as Chapter 4 illustrates, their depiction was shaped by the

14

Introduction

perception of India as a “pagan” land, not a “Saracen” one—despite the fact that the friars were killed by the Muslim rulers of the city. The Franciscan passiones are preserved in a number of different sources. Some are anonymous accounts, and others were written by fellow friars who traveled through the area where the martyrs died. None were eyewitnesses. The Dominican Jordan Catala de Se´ve´rac traveled to India with the Franciscans who died in 1321 in Tana, but he was in a different region when his companions were beheaded. An anonymous account in a manuscript in the British Library claimed to be written by a companion of the martyrs of Morocco of 1220, but the account as it now exists betrays too many fourteenthcentury characteristics to be contemporary with the martyrs. Another letter purports to have been written by a martyr awaiting death in Ceuta in 1227, but the letter and the martyr-author seem to have been a creation of a late fourteenth-century Franciscan.43 Most of the martyr accounts were preserved in brief narratives within Franciscan chronicles, particularly the late fourteenthcentury Chronicle of the Twenty-Four Ministers-General of the Franciscan Order. None of the passiones give voice to the dominant trends in piety of the fourteenth century. Although imitatio Christi had been understood as fundamental to Francis’s spirituality by his hagiographers and by the order at large, and although the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw a marked increase in texts that directed readers to meditate on the wounds of Christ and those of the martyrs, the Franciscan accounts evinced no such interest in doing the same with the martyrs of their own order.44 Francis’s life was believed to have conformed to Christ’s, though he did not die a violent death—but those of the friars who did suffer bloody deaths were not accorded the same status. The stories of Guglielmo and his brothers were not just stories of martyrs; they were also stories of missionaries, or perhaps better called evangelists. “Mission” and martyrdom were part of the bedrock of Franciscan values. The friars were above all else preachers, whose role was to call the world—both Christian and infidel—to penitence and faith in Christ. While Guglielmo (if he existed at all) may have died as a result of preaching in Gaza, the author of his brief passio did not bother to record the message he preached or whether he had any success as a preacher. Missionaries were just as much a literary creation of communities as martyrs were. They figured most prominently as founders, convenient explanations for how a community became Christian, transmuting the messy and generations-long process of conversion into a rapid, decisive transformation orchestrated by a single charismatic figure. The story of evangelization had been entwined with martyrdom since

Introduction

15

the early Middle Ages, but until the thirteenth century, that had been a story of success. The stories of earlier missionaries had sometimes described them as dying as a consequence of their preaching, but nevertheless they converted whole nations. Franciscans, in contrast, had little interest in their brethren who labored in Muslim communities. This may be in part because (papal rhetoric notwithstanding) friars who spent time in Islamic lands rarely focused on converting Muslims. Instead, most of their efforts were devoted to ministering to Latin Christians—merchants, mercenaries, captives—and in some areas, bringing eastern Christians into submission to papal authority. We must be cautious when speaking of missions. The word “mission” is a modern term; the concept itself is also modern. Medievalists often speak plainly about missions, as if the category needed no discussion or historical contextualization. This is most clear in the division modern historians make between mendicant efforts among less-than-pious Christians and heretics, generally referred to as preaching, and preaching to non-Christians, usually called a mission, a distinction medieval authors did not make.45 In Late Antiquity, the word “mission” was commonly used to describe the sending of Christ and the Holy Spirit into the world. In medieval European vernacular languages, the term missio was first used in secular contexts, meaning a delegation or an expedition.46 Nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars have taken for granted that a “Franciscan concept of mission” existed, rooted in the medieval origins of the order but flowering most fully in the early modern era. Bert Roest has exposed the ahistorical claims of this teleological and theological construct.47 In fact, medieval Franciscans had neither the concept of the “missionary” nor an interest in the activities of such persons; their chronicles were mostly silent on the subject, particularly when it came to friars evangelizing in Islamic lands (see Chapter 3).48

Christian Confrontation with Islam In stories about death, killers loom large. Martyrdom accounts are no different. Popular medieval martyrdom accounts present three primary persecutors: Muslims, Jews, and heretics (tyrants of all backgrounds are given special prominence). The three were frequently conflated with each other, and were seen as determinedly hostile to Christendom, seeking to undermine it and destroy it in whatever way possible. Franciscan martyr accounts prominently feature Muslims, while a few identified heretics as persecutors. None that I

16

Introduction

am aware of mentions Jews, although the order enthusiastically spread the cult of Simon of Trent.49 Why do Franciscan martyrdoms focus so unrelentingly on Islam? The papacy was clearly far more interested in martyrs killed by heretics, and contemporaries seemed more interested in figures who died at the hands of Jews than of Muslims. Even stories of martyrs murdered by pagans would at least have had the possibility of demonstrating success in evangelization, as the example of the martyrs of Tana make clear (see Chapter 4). Muslims were seen as a great threat to Christendom, and thus the stories of the martyrs were part of an arsenal with which Christianity confronted Islam. While stories of Christians killed by Muslims were not widely popular outside the Franciscan order, the image of the Saracen as persecutor was. In many late medieval depictions of early Christian martyrdom, the persecutors of the Christians were transformed from pagan Romans to Saracens: see, for example, the late twelfth-century reliquary of Saint Valerie from Limoges, or the miniature of the martyrdom of Saint Vincent in a late thirteenth-century book of devotions.50 But the figure of the Muslim appealed to the Franciscans for reasons particular to the order as well. From its earliest days, the fraternity of the lesser brothers with their devotion to absolute poverty was set in contrast to the wealthy and venal clerics who were seen to have corrupted the purity of Mother Church. Jacques de Vitry made this comparison explicit, complaining after a visit to Rome, “They [the Papal Curia] were so occupied with worldly affairs, with rulers and kingdoms, with lawsuits and litigation, that they hardly let anyone speak of spiritual things.” His one consolation was meeting the Franciscans.51 In the “Sacred Exchange between Saint Francis and Lady Poverty,” a thirteenth-century Franciscan allegory, Lady Poverty and Lady Persecution were separated by the Constantinian peace of the church; Christians as a result began to make war on each other and to compete in accumulating wealth. At the meager feast that Francis and his friars set before her, Lady Poverty marvels, “Who has seen in past generations such things as these?”52 The implication was that Franciscan devotion to Lady Poverty returned the church to the purity of her apostolic roots, which had been betrayed by the accumulation of wealth by popes, bishops, and ecclesiastical institutions. The problem with this opposition is clear: in contrasting themselves to a hierarchy corrupted by wealth, the Franciscans were following in the footsteps of many other reformers in criticizing the financial endowment of the institutions of the church. Such critiques generally led to accusations of heresy and persecution. Yet the Franciscan focus on poverty made such contrasts

Introduction

17

inevitable, even if the friars did not directly criticize ecclesiastical wealth.53 Islam became a useful replacement for the institutional church. It could represent the most important quality the Franciscans defined themselves against: that of a wealthy and powerful institution whose values were focused on the things of this world, rather than on God. This reflected medieval attitudes toward Islam as a religion, as well as caricatures of the prophet Muhammad.54 Thus, the denunciations that the friars leveled against Muhammad and Islam during the course of their martyrdoms were intended to show that the friars stood in opposition to what the pseudo-prophet and his religion stood for in the Christian imagination—the indulgence of the senses most broadly, but also a relentless focus on cupidity. To Christians, Islam represented the earthy pleasures of this world: sexuality, food, and even the more refined pleasures of wealth—silks, sumptuous furnishings, and baths. It was both Christianity’s demonic doppelga¨nger and what Elaine Pagels might call its “intimate enemy.”55 Islam could even represent the preaching orders themselves. The thirteenth-century “Romance of Muhammad” describes the story of the birth of Islam in a setting of meadows and castles reminiscent of the French countryside, and features a Muhammad who is crafty, intelligent, and moneyobsessed—just the sort of accusations that aggrieved nobles and clergy launched in the thirteenth century against the friars (and, of course, also against Jews).56 In some senses, Islam became the mirror that allowed the order to confront its own worldly aspect and desires. Military and religious conflict also played a part in the appeal of martyrdom as a form of victory over Islam. “Islamdom” was distinct from other primordial threats that western Christendom perceived in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Muslims were every bit as dedicated to the overthrow of all things virtuous and true and therefore Christian as Jews, heretics, and the ultimate assailant, Satan. But unlike those other enemies, Muslims lived in particular places, whose boundaries could with some imagination be delineated, placed in particular geographic spaces separate from Christians, and the martyrological drama could be imagined acted out in that space. Jews and heretics, in contrast, had no space that properly pertained to them alone. The stories of the suffering and deaths of the martyrs were a way for Franciscans to negotiate their complex attitudes toward Muslims and all they represented, reconciling their continuing existence with Franciscan concepts of evangelization and conversion. Islam was Christendom’s great rival for domination of the Mediterranean and control of the Holy Land. The Franciscan polymath Roger Bacon,

18

Introduction

for example, thought that Christendom confronted four great issues in the thirteenth century, two of which related to Muslims—the conversion of nonChristians and the defense of Christendom against those who could not be converted.57 Martyrdom solved both. According to the traditional logic of martyrdom, death was most meaningful as a sacrifice that brought salvation to infidel onlookers. For the thirteenth century, that meant Muslims. Likewise, martyrdom was an expression of victory—but on what terms? Thirteenth-century Latin Christendom directed enormous resources toward crusades against Muslims. At least four major crusades were launched against Islamic powers over the course of nearly seventy years: the Fourth Crusade (1202–4), which was intended to attack Egypt but conquered Constantinople instead; the Fifth Crusade (1217–21), which did attack Egypt unsuccessfully; the Seventh Crusade (1248–52), during which Louis IX mounted a second attack on Egypt and was captured; and the Eighth Crusade, Louis’s last crusade to Tunis (1270); as well as a number of smaller campaigns. None of them succeeded militarily against their Muslim enemies. Although crusades in Spain were generally more successful, by 1238, Christian Spain and the last remaining Muslim kingdom on the peninsula, Granada, had settled into an uneasy coexistence with little territorial gain on either side. Alongside enthusiasm for crusading, and often linked to it, was the hope that the conversion of large numbers of Muslims to Christianity was imminent.58 A number of different sources fed this expectation. One source was the writings of Joachim of Fiore, an abbot and biblical exegete in southern Italy whose interpretation of providential history suggested that the Jews, pagans, and Muslims would soon convert as the world entered a new “era of the Spirit.” In the crisis that would mark the transition from one status to another, Christendom would come under attack. Victory would come, not through force of arms, but through the spiritual triumph of successful preaching particularly led by new ‘spiritual men’ who would be leaders of a revitalized church. The emergence of the two mendicant orders, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, who took as their principal task preaching the Word of God and by the 1240s were sometimes identified as the viri spirituales of Joachite prophecy, further raised hopes that a new age was about to begin.59 Even the papacy hinted at an impending apocalypse: Gregory IX issued a papal bull in 1235 calling for renewed efforts at converting the infidels. The opening line of the bull by which it is known (Cum hora undecima, “in the eleventh hour”), evoked a powerful sense of apocalyptic urgency.

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Was it possible that Christians might overcome Islam through conversion? Louis IX’s crusade to Egypt in 1248 inspired one poet to proclaim that the king “will be able to conquer Romania easily, baptize the sultan of Turkey, and thereby free the world.”60 Raymond of Penyafort, the Dominican master-general (1238–40), wrote to his successor, John of Wildeshausen (1241–52) concerning the conversion of Muslims in Spain that “at the time of the present writing the gate is now open to nearly inestimable fruits, provided the harvesters do not abandon their task; and even now many of them, especially in Murcia, have been converted to the faith both secretly and openly.”61 Louis IX’s crusade to Tunis in 1270 was in part motivated by the hope of converting the sultan and the city’s population to Christianity.62 Although the conversion of Muslims had become central both to the ideology of crusading and to the mendicant orders, very little was done to pursue it on a practical level. Robin Vose found little evidence of such activities among the Dominicans in the Crown of Aragon in the thirteenth century, despite the fact that large populations of both Jews and Muslims had come under Christian domination at that time, giving the mendicants ample opportunity to preach to captive populations. Instead, Vose found that “when they took notice of local non-Christians at all, it was because they were concerned that fluidity of religious identity and experience should be more strictly limited and controlled.”63 The story of the Franciscans is similar; little attention and few resources were given to evangelization of Muslims, and stories about Franciscans and the Muslim world were more focused on marking out the difference between Christian and Muslim than on crossing those boundaries. By the end of the thirteenth century, the dream of the rapid conversion of Muslims was beginning to fade.64 Humbert of Romans, another mastergeneral of the Dominican order (1254–63), was unusual in placing conversion of Muslims at the forefront of his order’s mission when he first began his generalate.65 But by the time he wrote his Opus tripartitum for the Council of Lyons (1274), he was far more pessimistic about the possibility of conversion. He noted that Muslims did not in fact seem at all interested in converting to Christianity; rather, conversion generally went in the other direction.66 Crusading and evangelizing, however, continued to appeal to western Europeans, and expeditions of both sorts were often planned and sometimes even carried out. Even in the later thirteenth century, there were those who believed passionately that the total collapse of Islam, religiously and politically, could happen at any moment. William of Tripoli, a Dominican

20

Introduction

preacher in the Latin East writing a treatise on Islam, the Notitia de Machometo (c. 1271), believed that after a victory over the Franks, the Muslims themselves would be wiped out by the Christians. This victory would mark the end of the “age of the Saracens,” a third of all Muslims would become Christian, and the remainder would die in the battle or subsequently in the desert.67 His work inspired a successor, often identified with William himself, who wrote a treatise on Islamic history, the De statu Saracenorum, which described the religion in surprisingly positive terms. Yet, he too indicated that it was doomed to extinction soon. Although he repeated William’s prediction about the extirpation of Muslims at Christian hands militarily, he emphasized how willing Muslims were to become Christian even in his own day; he boasted that he himself had converted over a thousand.68 The Mamluk conquest of Acre in 1291 destroyed many of these hopes; the Dominican Riccoldo da Montecroce, who was in Baghdad when the city fell and saw the city’s slave markets flooded with Acre’s residents, wrote angry letters to God, bitterly noting that neither the saints Francis or Dominic, nor Louis IX of France and all the crusaders had been able to destroy “the beast,” as he called Islam.69 Likewise, Thadeus of Naples, writing just months after the city’s conquest in Messina, mourned that Palestine under Islamic rule had become a cruel stepmother to her Christian offspring.70 Both the Notitia de Machometo of William of Tripoli and the De statu Saracenorum of his successor were read and copied in fourteenth-century Europe; four manuscripts of the Notitia survive from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and ten manuscripts of the De statu from the same time. Christians in the fourteenth century thus had a number of different texts to consult on Islam. Alongside the earlier accounts that defamed Muhammad and Islam or suggested that Muslims were idolaters, there were now a number of accounts that made it clear that Muslims were monotheists, and often implied that in one way or another Muslims were part of divine providence, and that their defeat and conversion would come only at a vital moment in the unfolding of God’s plan for the world. They were not simply God’s means of punishing errant Christians, but a far more significant group, like the Jews in their apocalyptic significance. Islam had become like sin itself: impure and corrupting, yet inescapably a part of the fallen temporal world. Franciscan martyrdom accounts led to the same conclusion; evangelization among the Muslims was doomed to fail until the moment God appointed. Martyrdom thus became war by other means, as Sixtus IV hoped to exploit in 1481.

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Alongside many other treatises, chronicles, and theological works, the narratives of Franciscan martyrdom in the fourteenth century provided western Europeans with a new script for understanding the place that Saracens and the partes infidelium (as the sources often called Muslim territories) occupied in their world. In this sense, the stories of Franciscan martyrs fulfilled the same role that early Christian martyr stories played: to create a sense of Christian identity in contradistinction to a created pagan, Roman one.71 But the new passiones differed from early Christian examples in that they downplayed the possibility of conversion and worldly triumph. The martyrdom accounts reflect a particular interest in the response of resident Christians to the martyrs, but ignore the reaction of Muslims, whose conversions were the ostensible goal of the Franciscans.

Martyrdom and Poverty For many in fourteenth-century western Europe, the Franciscan martyrs embodied a variety of sometimes contradictory values. The friars’ heroic resistance to Muslims dramatized widespread feelings of anxiety about Islam as both a military and religious threat. Yet using martyrdom as emblematic of Franciscan virtue was tricky. Not all Franciscan martyrs who died for their faith suffered at the hands of the infidels. In 1318 four Franciscans were burned at the stake by their own leaders for heresy; the executed friars and others like them, known as spirituals, believed that the institutional order was no longer faithful to the Rule of Saint Francis, particularly concerning issues of poverty, and that to fail to honor the precepts of the rule placed their own souls in mortal sin. They preferred to die poor than live in sinful plenty. Other Franciscans and beguines considered the four to be martyrs and saints, and inquisitions that followed treated belief in those Franciscans as martyrs as a sign of heresy. A divided Franciscan order began to develop rival lists of martyrs, each embodying what they believed to be the essence of Francis’s teachings. Further controversy erupted when Pope John XXII subsequently declared that belief in the absolute poverty of Christ and the apostles was heresy; the foundation of Franciscan piety was thus entirely undermined. No longer able to distinguish themselves on the basis of poverty, martyrdom became the sign of Franciscan zeal. The signification of martyrdom thus became unstable; the persecuting Saracen qa¯d.¯ı (judge) could easily be read as

22

Introduction

the persecuting pope. Angelo Clareno, one of the leading spirituals, made this connection clear in his chronicle: when another Franciscan opposed the imprisonment of Tommaso di Tolentino in Italy, the protesting Franciscan was punished with “Saracen-like cruelty,” “detained in accordance with that law that so resembled an Mahometan law.”72 This fluidity of martyrdom was in part why the papacy canonized no martyrs between 1253 and 1481; martyrial defiance of authority was not the model of sanctity the papacy sought to promote. Pious obedience was a far more appealing virtue. The popes, it turned out, only liked martyrs who died defending the institutional church, such as the Dominican inquisitor Peter Martyr (d. 1252), the last martyr to be canonized before the martyrs of Morocco. He achieved saintly status in 1253, a record 337 days after his death. But that flexibility is also what made the martyrs so useful to Franciscans in the fourteenth century. Conventuals and spirituals alike could admire them. Martyrdom is always a claim of authority, usually by someone who does not have any. The appeal of the martyr’s story is that it offers a language of power in a situation when one feels stripped of it. For Franciscans, the sense of powerlessness came from a number of different sources. The first was the crisis over poverty within the Franciscan community, and the second was the larger crisis that Christians felt in the face of a militarily powerful and resurgent Islam. Yet, at the same time, the Franciscans were a well-connected religious order, with convents throughout the Christian world, whose friars regularly served as ambassadors, inquisitors, bishops, and cardinals. It is perhaps not a great surprise to find that their martyrs were not widely recognized as representing the powerless. Yet the stories of the Franciscan friars fascinate us for a number of reasons: they both reinforced and challenged the ideology of the crusades, were competitors in a Christian debate over the possibilities of spiritual achievement, fulfilled and denied apocalyptic prophecies, and represented and defied essential Franciscan values. It was a heavy burden for those who Francis called upon to be “miserable servants.”

Structure of the Book Chapter 1 offers an overview of Christian martyrdom from its origins to the High Middle Ages, examining the ways in which passiones and acta (the sufferings and deeds) of the martyrs served different functions as Christian communities grew from small groups on the margins of Roman society to

Introduction

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being intimately linked to political power, first of the Roman emperors and then of medieval kings. The martyr stories with which thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Christians were most familiar had their roots in accounts written in service to bishops, emperors, and kings, creating a triumphalist rhetoric of martyrial victory on earth and in heaven. Chapter 2 explores the desire for martyrdom, which was prominent in texts about Franciscan saints in the thirteenth century, most notably Francis himself. In contrast to earlier eras, however, Francis’s desire for martyrdom was not a direct reflection of his sanctity; there was in it an element of self-will that contradicted the values of Franciscan humility. The emphasis on the desire also shifted attention away from the stories of Franciscans who died in the thirteenth century; no passio of the martyrs of Morocco was written to commemorate them in the century following their death. In Chapter 3, I turn to the evidence of Franciscans who worked among Islamic populations; like the martyrs, they received little attention in the thirteenth century. Despite the ideological importance of preaching to infidels for Franciscans—it was written into the official rule of the order—the order did not demonstrate much interest in converting Muslims. The primary efforts of friars in Muslim lands were devoted to Latin Christians living there: mercenaries, merchants, and captives. Franciscan attitudes toward martyrs changed dramatically in the beginning of the fourteenth century, when the first complete Franciscan passiones were written. Chapter 4 examines the context of the first such martyrdom, that of four Franciscans who died in Tana, India in 1321. The speed with which accounts of their death spread was a result of the crisis the order was experiencing over poverty; Pope John XXII had declared that the Franciscan belief in the complete poverty of Christ and his apostles was a heresy in 1323, just as the story of the martyrs reached Europe. Part of the appeal of this story arose from the fact that one of the martyrs, Tommaso di Tolentino, was a spiritual, and the account could be read as a criticism of John XXII. The appearance of the Tana martyrdom and the controversy over poverty led to the composition of more Franciscan passiones in the 1320s and 1330s, including the first complete account of the martyrs of Morocco, explored in Chapter 5. Not all martyrdom narratives addressed poverty, as the different versions of the Tana martyrdom show. The largest collection of Franciscan martyrdoms is preserved in the late fourteenth-century Chronicle of the Twenty-Four Ministers-General of the Franciscan Order, written as the order once again faced fracture over how Franciscans should practice poverty, the subject of Chapter 6. The chronicle

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Introduction

offered martyrs and mystics as the models that could draw together the opposing factions. The popularity of the chronicle ensured that martyrdom remained central to Franciscan identity in the following centuries; it remains the source for most accounts of medieval Franciscan martyrs to this day. It is a truism of the study of ancient martyrdom that the rigor of the martyr permits the laxity of the church as a whole.73 For Franciscans, martyrdom became a substitute for the rigorous pursuit of poverty, which had become perilous when John XXII declared belief in Christ’s poverty heretical, and which had become inconvenient in an order firmly enmeshed in a world of property and politics. The martyrs knitted together a fractured order and provided a demonstration of piety that could replace the strict practice of poverty. And they succeeded in articulating a mode of symbolically overcoming Islam that both denied Muslims the solace of conversion and accepted the reality of their temporary power and presence.

chapter 1

“I Acquired the Martyrs” Bishops, Kings, and the Victory of the Martyrs

When Francis of Assisi warned his brethren that a devotion to humility and submission to God’s will could lead to a painful death, martyrdom was already a thousand years old, and was woven into the fabric of Christian theology, liturgy, and piety. Martyrdom was in many ways the ultimate Christian act. In willingly offering their lives, the martyrs imitated Jesus himself, and after death were crowned with glory and were seated among the first-ranked in heaven. Martyrdom expressed in the most inescapable terms the superiority of heaven over earth, the preference for the eternal over the temporal, spirit over flesh, the divine over the demonic—in short, the death of the martyr was not an expression of defeat, but of complete triumph over the world and its challenges. The Christians of first-century Rome rejoiced that “when Paul had borne witness (μαρτυρσας, marture¯sas) before the rulers, he was set free from the world.”1 Martyrdom was a claim of power by those with none, a smashing of the chains that held the Christians captive to all that enslaved them. The first stories of martyrdom allowed early Christians to confront the overwhelming power of the Roman Empire, rendering its control over the body to be of no account, and transforming the martyr into a conduit of divine power far greater than what the emperor and his minions could muster, power that extended over death and corruption. This is the story that both Christians and scholars of religion have told about martyrdom for a very long time. It appeals to us for many reasons: it fulfills the desire to understand what the earliest Christians believed and how they viewed the world; it provides a triumphal response to tyrants and

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oppressive regimes; and it gives agency to victims of violence. And to some extent, this is an accurate summary. But Christians did not remain powerless for long, and the cult of the martyrs was as much a product of bishops seeking to build up their authority in a wealthy church supported by the Roman emperors as it was of early Christians living under the threat of persecution. The bishops’ use of the martyrs, as Lucy Grig argues, “was not just a matter of harnessing the mysterious pre-existing charisma of the martyr. The martyr had to be ‘made.’ ”2 The martyr as miracle worker and glory-filled vehicle of divine power was particularly a creation of a Christianity that had already triumphed over its perceived opponent. When Christians read about or heard of martyrs smiting their persecutors with boils or with a feculent explosion of their bowels, it was because paganism was already dead—at least in the eyes of the triumphant Christian community. The martyr was a victor in a war that had already been won. The triumphalism of the martyr account that became standard in medieval Christian communities stood in contrast to the earliest stories of the martyrs, which focused far less on manifestations of divine power. Instead, they set their sights on the more human display of defiance, exemplified by the bold assertion of Christian truth before nonChristian judges and tribunals. Third-century Christians did not imagine victory over pagan Roman authority happening in this world; they sought only to valorize opposition to it. The significance of this distinction comes in how we understand the miracles ascribed to the martyrs. Traditionally, they have been read as an expression of resistance to persecution by a powerless community. We should instead see in them the confidence of a victorious one. The Franciscans, strangely enough, found themselves narrating their martyrdoms much as early Christians had. The language of martyrdom was appealing because it allowed members of an increasingly wealthy and powerful institution to cast themselves as humble, abused, and despised on earth but in glory with God in heaven. Franciscans had a long and rich tradition of martyrological thinking to draw upon, and the religious imperative to use it. Yet Franciscan attempts to harvest the power of the martyrs or “to make martyrs” did not match that of the bishops of old. Although a powerful and influential institution, the Franciscan order was beset by internal division and crises in the fourteenth century, which contributed to the friars’ sense of their own oppressed status. Fourteenth-century Franciscans operated in a world where the papacy had effectively monopolized the power to make martyrs, and was disinclined to do so on behalf of the Franciscans. Contemporary

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Christians may also have found it difficult to imagine Franciscans as despised and oppressed. So why did the Franciscans choose to abandon a millenniumold tradition of triumphal martyrology to go back to the qualities found in the earliest accounts? Friars chose to narrate the passiones of those who died in Muslim lands precisely because Christianity had not triumphed over Islam. Like Rome in the perception of early Christians, the earthly power the Franciscan martyrs opposed was not yet defeated, nor could its defeat be effectively encompassed within the martyrdom narrative. And when we remember that Islam sometimes served as a cypher for the institutional church, it is not surprising that Franciscans did not imagine its disappearance within their own dispensation.

Suffering and Dying in Early Christianity Martyrdom is now synonymous with death, but its original connotations were with the messy business of living. The classical Greek word martys (μ ρτυς), meaning witness, conjured up the world of the law courts in the Hellenistic world in which Christianity was born.3 The earliest followers of Jesus used it in a similar sense; they were witnesses testifying to the ultimate trial of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. Only a hundred years after the death of Jesus did the word begin to signify testimony not just of words but also of acts, particularly the act of dying voluntarily.4 Early Christians saw suffering and dying as central to their salvation. One of the earliest martyrs, Ignatios, bishop of Antioch (d. c. 108), proclaimed: “I love to suffer.”5 Paul, the author of the earliest texts written by a follower of Jesus, emphasized that through his suffering, death, and resurrection, Jesus defeated Sin and Death, and by sharing in that suffering his followers would also triumph over them.6 Paul’s own suffering served as a sign of his authenticity as an apostle, and he clearly saw suffering and dying as meritorious acts that enabled Christians to share in Christ’s own suffering and death, and united them with God in their true home, heaven. He did not, however, speak of those who died as martyrs, nor did he ever make clear what kind of suffering and death was necessary to participate with Christ in eternal life.7 To be a follower of Jesus, then, was to suffer. Only through sharing in Christ’s suffering and sacrifice could Christians then participate in his resurrection and eternal life in heaven and become, like him, sons and daughters of God. This did not mean that Christians needed to be crucified

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in order to achieve resurrection, but that through a variety of ways, both physically and metaphorically, suffering led to salvation. Martyrological themes were woven into both Hellenistic Jewish and early Christian literature, including what would become the canonical New Testament. The Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles portray both Jesus and Stephen as martyrs avant la lettre—their violent deaths transformed them into heavenly beings.8 In the Gospel of Mark, the earliest of the gospels, Jesus called upon his followers to “take up the cross and follow me,” an invitation which, in the light of Jesus’ subsequent crucifixion, suggested that Jesus’ followers would also have to die violently to follow him. Furthermore, Jesus warned that preceding the return of the Son of Man, his followers would be persecuted, tested, and tried by suffering, and only through their endurance would they earn salvation.9 The stories of torture and execution of Eleazar and the mother with her seven sons in the Hellenistic Jewish account 4 Maccabees reveal that the combination of suffering and salvation were not exclusively Christian. For Christians of the second century, a martyr’s death was not simply an expression of fidelity; it was a sacrifice, and therefore, like the offerings of animals at the temple of Jerusalem or Jesus’ own death, it conveyed blessings upon the community in whose name the martyr died.10 The author of the Second Letter to Timothy, writing in the name of Paul, declared that “I am already on the point of being sacrificed; the time of my departure has come.”11 Death, the pseudonymous Paul made clear, is life for Christians, for in living in the body Christians are separated from God, and in death they will be reunited. The early martyrdom of Polycarp spoke of his death as “martyrdom on the Gospel model,” a model established by Jesus himself.12 In the third century, Origen reminded his fellow Christians: “God once said to Abraham: ‘Get out of your land’ (γ). Perhaps it will be shortly said to us: ‘Get out of the earth (γ) altogether.’ ”13 By paralleling Abraham’s journey to the Holy Land with the passage of the Christian to heaven, Origen imbued life and death with a series of implicit and explicit values. The Christian’s birthplace, earth, was linked to Abraham’s birthplace, Ur. By following God’s command, Abraham was blessed by God. Abraham was brought to Canaan, which God gave to Abraham’s offspring; the Promised Land for Christians is heaven. Origen’s biblical parallel then suggests that for Christians to remain attached to the land of their birth (earth) would be to refuse to obey the command of God, while traveling to heaven (dying) brings the Christian to the land God has promised and to God’s blessing and reward. To make the

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point clear, Origen added: “I think that they love God with all their soul who with a great desire to be in union with God withdraw and separate their soul not only from the earthly body but also from everything material.”14 The book of Revelation elevated martyrdom even further, showing martyrs to be a central part of God’s providential plan. The last book of the New Testament to be written and the last to be accepted as canonical, the book of Revelation described the vision John received of the coming tribulations that will precede the return of Jesus to the earth to confront his satanic rival. Just as Jesus had warned his followers in the Gospel of Mark, the time before his return would be a time of suffering. In his vision, John saw “the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne”; this was not just a testament to the martyred dead, for John further understood that “they were told to rest a little longer, until the number of their fellow servants and their brethren should be complete, who had been killed as they themselves had been.”15 The number of Christians who had been killed was not simply a function of earthly persecution, but a part of God’s plan; the number was predetermined, and Jesus would not return until their number was complete. As read by the living, this must surely have functioned as a comfort to those whose loved ones had been killed, and even as an incitement for Christians to die, in order that they might be numbered among the predestined saved and might hasten the return of Jesus. Given this evidence, why do scholars claim that it is only in the fourth century that “martyrs are made”? Early Christian texts are replete with martyrological significance, but the martyrs themselves played a relatively small role. It is only in the fourth century that the individual figure of the martyr took center stage. Nevertheless, the surviving pre-Constantinian accounts of martyrdom give us the names and brief accounts of the martyrdoms of dozens of Christians. These accounts range from the brief and narratively spare to the rhetorically and imaginatively complex, and are difficult to date and categorize. Most accounts survive in ninth-century manuscripts at the earliest, and while they describe martyrdoms that may have occurred as early as 108 ce, the accounts themselves have been read, edited, and copied by generations of Christians. Scholars often implicitly assume that a new genre of literature dedicated to the martyrs, known as acta or passio, emerged in the second and third centuries: acta was a term that linked the martyrdom to a quasi-official transcript of a judicial hearing, and passio evoked the suffering (from Latin patior, to suffer) of the martyrs, a meaning that lingers in the name given to the ultimate account of suffering, the passion of Jesus Christ. The earliest

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acta et passiones, however, were preserved within other genres, not as distinct pieces of literature. The Acts of Ptolemaeus and Lucius, for example, were contained within the philosophical treatise the Apologies of Justin Martyr (d. ca. 165), and many others have been taken from the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius of Caesarea.16 The work of scholars from the seventeenth-century Bollandists to their twentieth-century successor Hippolyte Delahaye has culminated in collections that gather together the acta widely accepted to date from the earliest period; particularly valued have been those that may date from the period before the first empire-wide persecutions of Decius (c. 250).17 These collections (those of Musurillo and Bastiaensen being the most widely cited) have profoundly shaped the way martyrdom has been studied.18 They present their readers with a corpus that fulfills the desire for the earliest and most primitive acts of the martyrs. Excluded from such assemblages were accounts of figures like Thecla, who was widely popular in Late Antiquity and was praised as the “the protomartyr” despite having died peacefully, protected by God and having little discernible historical status. Also excluded were the apostles, most of whom were also believed to have died as martyrs. Their apocryphal narratives emphasize that status; however, such accounts, while contemporary with other early martyrological sources, have been deemed too tainted with fictional details to be included among the “true” acta and passiones.19 Yet this distinction suggests that the acta were somehow transcripts of historical events, rather than heavily fictionalized narratives that were often written at a great remove from the events they purport to describe. Few of even the earliest martyr acts can be read purely within a preConstantinian or pre-Decian context. Indeed, it is not clear whether we even have the tools to determine what is early and what is later. Historians have often relied on characteristics of the narrative, such as the presence of miracles and narrative complexity to judge, but it is unclear whether these are reliable markers. Scholarship has narrowed the field down to just seven acta that could be dated to the middle of the third century or earlier, suggesting that they were in fact the transcripts of the trials themselves.20 But Gary Bisbee has compared the form of the earliest acta to preserved transcripts of other Roman trials, particularly two of the presumed oldest acta, those of Justin and Polycarp, and found that neither can be called copies of an official record (commentarius). About Polycarp, Bisbee simply concluded, “If the author of the Martyrdom of Polycarp did possess a commentarius of Polycarp’s trial, which is doubtful, the commentarius-form would have been inimical to his intent.”21 E´ric Rebillard has recently published a new collection of early

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martyrdoms, based not on uncertain claims of authenticity, but on two criteria: the martyrdom occurred before 260, and the text is independently attested by either Eusebius or Augustine. The result is a slightly expanded collection of eleven texts, which still excludes the apocryphal acts of the apostles.22 The result is that our understanding of the values and significance of martyrdom in early Christian communities has been skewed by an overemphasis on “what happened” rather than on how martyrdom was actually discussed and valued in those communities. Third-century accounts of martyrdom did not dramatize suffering and death—instead, they dramatized the choice of the martyr to confront the authority and power of the persecutor. Alison Elliott noted that “the climatic center of the passio was not the moment of death but the interrogation scene in which tyrant and martyr face each other in public in the courtroom.”23 These confrontations exist in one form or another in nearly all the early accounts. Sometimes they were framed around the power of the martyrs to identify themselves as a Christian against the various labels of the Roman authorities, sometimes around religious differences, but they all allowed the martyrs to speak in their own voices—that is, as given by the composer of the martyrdom. The martyrs could thus articulate their own beliefs and selfidentification in a way that framed the confrontation with imperial authority on the terms that the author or community wished to use to highlight their difference from the Romans. One of the most common contrasts the martyrs sought to elucidate was between the God “who made the heavens and the earth”24 and the pagan gods, variously dismissed as only made of stone, or as images of dead men, or as demons.25 The martyrs also compared the temporary suffering of their coming torture and deaths with either the eternal torture of the damned in the afterlife,26 or contrasted it to the eternal salvation they were winning. Apollonius argued that Christians offer “a pure and unbloodied sacrifice . . . on behalf of the spiritual and rational images that have been disposed by God’s providence to rule over the earth,”27 in contrast to the bloody sacrifices offered to the irrational idols of the Romans. The debate for Maximilian was between serving Christ and serving the world; having been sealed by baptism, he could not accept the lead seal that would induct him into the Roman army.28 Julius the Veteran had the opportunity to explain his beliefs about Jesus to the prefect Maximus, who thought it foolish to follow a dead, crucified man over the living emperors,29 while Phileas taught his torturer about the resurrection of the body.30 Most accounts tended to use a shared language of sacrifice and

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justice.31 Such disputations grew less central as the passiones were rewritten in Late Antiquity and the early medieval period, but they reemerged in Franciscan texts as friars grappled with describing a confrontation with a worldly power they could not overcome.

Acquiring the Martyrs: Bishops and Power in Late Antiquity Once Christianity became legally established and imperially patronized under Emperor Constantine (312–336), Christians in the Roman Empire generally no longer faced the threat of (or the opportunity for) martyrdom. Perhaps more importantly, imperial and aristocratic wealth and influence began to flow into Christian communities, making them socially and physically visible for the first time. The martyrdoms that did occur in this period, such as those in Persia or among the Donatists of North Africa, generally did not become part of the martyrological tradition of the Latin church.32 By the late fourth century, the connection between the martyrs and their community began to be mediated through the figure of the bishop, particularly in the Latin West. Where once they symbolized the resistance of the citizen of heaven to the demonic powers of the earth, the martyrs now became the conduit of episcopal power, emblematic of the growing institutional reach of the church; the bishop became the prote´ge´ of the martyr.33 As Ambrose, bishop of Milan proclaimed: “Because I do not merit being a martyr, I acquired the martyrs.”34 The bishop could deploy the martyrs to build up the reputation of the local community, fight heresy,35 and teach doctrine.36 The signal virtue of the martyrs became not defiance of worldly authority, but obedience.37 In this, the bishops were mimicking the use of martyrs as signs of imperial power; the martyrs became important in the city of Rome, for example, only after Constantine and his successors had built lavish shrines in their honor. As Jean Guyon has argued: “It is not the basilica that was created for the martyrs, but rather it was the basilicas that created the martyrs.”38 As the martyr became a bulwark of institutional authority, the martyr’s once fierce expression of free will and personal identity were replaced by expressions of obedience and charity.39 Ambrose could imagine them as his bodyguards: “Let everyone know the kind of defenders I need, those who can fight back but are not wont to attack.”40 Large, mosaicked basilicas were built over martyrs’ tombs and places of death, their passiones read aloud in public liturgies, their virtues offered as models in sermons, and their mortal

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remains publicly collected, adored, and exchanged as precious relics.41 Bishops were central in all these activities. Martyr stories in the post-Constantinian era elaborated on earlier narratives or were composed afresh. The passiones of the martyrs became longer and narratively more elaborate, the descriptions of suffering and torture more detailed, and the miracles more astonishing. The description of gruesome torture was rooted both in the Christian tradition, which valorized suffering as following the example of Jesus, and also in one of the assumptions of Roman law: that torture produced truth.42 The more extreme the torture, the more assured one was of the truth being asserted—thus the martyrs’ testimony to the ultimate truth, the word of God, narratively required the most extreme torture to match the superlativeness of the truth revealed. Authors of fourth- and fifth-century passiones also showed greater interest in demonstrations of divine power, both during the martyrs’ suffering and after their death. Even early stories made clear that God intervened on earth for God’s friends. Whereas God once simply bore the pain of the martyrs, in later accounts the wounds of the saints miraculously heal, swords fail to sever holy heads, and the flesh of the martyrs becomes impervious to flame. The martyr Romanus continued to lecture the judge on the superiority of Christian belief to Roman superstition even after his tongue had been surgically removed;43 the sword of the executioner could not penetrate Saint Cecilia’s skin after three attempts; Sergius ran nine miles in boots lined with nails, and upon arrival told his persecutor, “Your punishments are not bitter to me, but are sweeter than honey from the comb.”44 Not only did God protect the holy flesh of the martyrs, but in the post-Constantinian accounts God punished those who tortured them. Persecutors died gruesome deaths. Furthermore, the conversion of those who viewed the martyrs was also a sign of the martyr’s triumph; those who gathered to mock the martyrs as they died praised them instead—a feature that appeared in pre-Constantinian accounts as well, but is noticeably lacking in later Franciscan accounts. These miracles mark a profound shift in martyrological thinking. Whereas the triumphal death of the martyrs once demonstrated their superiority to the material world and their return to their true home in heaven, the emphasis on miracles made clear that the rightful place of the martyrs was both in heaven and on earth, a point that was vital to the cult of martyr relics promoted by bishops. Victory was achieved not only through leaving the world, but also by punishing those who had persecuted the martyr. This, of course, was a reflection of the fact that the martyrs were triumphant on earth.

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The readers or audience of the passio had the dominance of Christianity confirmed; the triumph of the martyr over her persecutor prefigured the triumph of the church over paganism. As the cross became a symbol of Christ’s victory over death and a sign of imperial victory over the enemies of the Christianized Roman Empire, martyrdom became a stand-in for imperial victory over the enemies of both church and empire. This post-Constantinian type of martyrdom became the dominant model for medieval Christians, one with which Franciscans were familiar, yet chose to reject.45 As martyrs and their passiones became part of the foundations of the emerging institutional church, the desire to be a martyr became one of the signal virtues of the newest heroes of the Christian community—monks. Living lives of perfection that in an earlier era might have culminated in martyrdom, ascetics in the post-Constantinian era were lauded by their admirers and hagiographers as having the “desire for martyrdom.” Most famously, Anthony of Egypt desired to die as a martyr, at least in the imagination of his hagiographer, Athanasios of Alexandria, “but he was not willing to turn himself in.”46 He went so far as to disobey the command of the governor of Alexandria that all monks should leave the city, yet he was not arrested or punished. Like Francis of Assisi much later, God preserved him for a greater purpose, but part of the lesson intended by Athanasios, an archbishop much concerned with the maintenance of proper authority and hierarchy within the Christian community, was that God chose the martyr—the martyr could not make the decision to die. Obedience to God’s will marked the saint, rather than fulfillment of the saint’s own spiritual goals. The trope of desiring martyrdom was a successor to an older debate about voluntary martyrdom. The topsy-turvy logic of martyrdom could lead to its logical conclusion: Christians volunteering for death. Ignatius of Antioch, on his way to Rome to be executed around 108 ce, insisted that the Christian community there not intervene on his behalf. He begged the Roman Christians to “spare him” so that the beasts of the arena might become his sarcophagus.47 Saturus, one of the companions of Perpetua, also voluntarily handed himself over to the Roman authorities for execution.48 In contrast, the martyrdom of Polycarp mentions another would-be martyr named Quintus, who “forced himself and some others to come forward voluntarily,”49 but then was persuaded by the magistrate to sacrifice to the gods. Self-selection of the martyr in this case led to damnation, not salvation.50 Yet, in the same account, Germanicus was praised for “forcibly pulling” the animal who would kill him onto himself. The martyrdom of the archbishop of

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Carthage, Cyprian, put it plainly: “Our discipline forbids anyone to surrender voluntarily.”51 Volunteers for martyrdom nevertheless were common; the martyr Euplus came to the prefect’s chamber to shout “I want to die; I am a Christian,” waving a gospel-book to boot.52 Such figures were generally not seen as suicides, a concept that did not exist in antiquity as a negative or pathological act. Stories of extreme martyrdom could, however, be an effective means of criticizing other Christians. As Ismo Dunderberg has argued, “All kinds of Christians could be unfavorably disposed towards martyrdom, if it was experienced by someone not belonging to their own in-group.”53 The martyr Montanus urged that heretics should understand the blessing of the martyrs to be a testament to the authenticity of Catholicism.54 The desire for martyrdom (unachieved) became an attribute of sanctity and orthodoxy, rather than a statement about a desire to die. Yet, amid persecution and death, martyrdom could have an interior significance separate from physical suffering and death. For Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–c. 215), martyrdom was central to a truly Christian life, not just death. Indifference to the material world and a continual reflection on death made the true martyr, not bloody suffering and a public execution.55 Martyrdom was the “extension of a virtuous way of life” that every Christian should seek.56 Christians frequently spiritualized or interiorized martyrdom, a gesture that allowed the language of martyrdom to expand beyond physical death. But it also severed the vital connection of the martyrs to the community who proclaimed their glory. Martyrdom might exist in the life lived in purity, but it was a private martyrdom, unseen, unsung, and unremembered.57 Thirteenth-century Franciscan discourse on martyrdom often embraced this perspective as part of the tradition of withdrawal and eremeticism. Martyrdom was not necessarily about death, but about preparing the individual for mystical union with God.

Martyrs in the Early Medieval World By the seventh century, the stories of the martyrs and their festivals provided the annual calendar for Christian communities from Ireland to Mesopotamia. The Coptic calendar began with the Diocletianic persecution of 284 ce, and even in Ireland where there were few martyrs or martyr cults, the rhythm of the year marched to the meter of the martyrs.58 So widespread was the

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influence of martyrial culture that one historian has spoken of the “unstoppable momentum of martyr cult.”59 Collections of martyr accounts, both martyrologies and passionaries, circulated and became essential items in monastic libraries.60 Although bishops attempted to make the cult of the martyrs a handmaiden to episcopal authority, both lay and clerical enthusiasm defeated their attempts to monopolize them. Gregory the Great famously saw “the moral risks of devotions to figures as defiant and as violent as the martyrs.”61 Martyrdom was nevertheless the ne plus ultra of sanctity; the accounts about figures as important as Ambrose needed to explain why the saint was not also a martyr, or alternatively had to show a strong desire to be one.62 If the creation of the cult of the martyrs was in part driven by the need to build up the institution of the church and cement episcopal authority, in the early Middle Ages we see kings (alongside continuing episcopal involvement) deploying the martyrs as a way to extend royal authority. Under the aegis of the Carolingian Empire, martyr cults became part of an imperial policy of Christianization, expressed most brutally in Saxony. Carolingian ecclesiastical councils enjoined that churches should be sanctified by the placement of relics in the altars of newly consecrated churches. While Christianization in northern Europe did produce some martyrs, such as Boniface, for the most part northern France and Germany were a landscape barren of martyrs and the sanctified landscape they produced.63 Relics thus needed to be imported from lands that had long been Christian—that is, the Mediterranean world. The church building, the community that worshipped in it, and the surrounding landscape were all sanctified through the martyr—and furthermore, the legitimacy of Carolingian imperialism was also guaranteed by substituting the “charisma” of Rome and the papacy for the sacral kingship of the deposed Merovingians.64 For much of northern Europe in the early medieval period, sanctity was tinged with a distinctly foreign hue.65 Of the sixty recorded relic translations to Saxony between the eighth and tenth centuries, one-third came from Rome; the remainder came from Francia.66 Again, the martyrs became the foot soldiers of institutional power. As Janet Nelson explained, “The Franks now see themselves as the special custodians of the martyrs—and the martyrs as the special custodians of the Franks.”67

Evangelization and Conversion The hagiographers of the Carolingian era forged what became an enduring link between martyrdom and evangelization,68 a link Franciscans both

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exploited and undermined. The connection between the two can seem natural in the modern imagination. The first great Latin theologian, Tertullian (c. 155–c. 240), famously claimed that blood was the seed of Christians, but he did not mean that martyrs were evangelists.69 It was the heroic death of the martyrs that was inspirational, not their preaching. We see a shift beginning in the fifth or sixth century, with martyrs converting their persecutors with not just fortitude and miracles, but also through preaching. But the martyrs were not preachers prior to their arrests; it followed upon persecution. Thus, the apostolic model was turned on its head; whereas the apostles preached Christian truth, and therefore were persecuted, the martyrs were persecuted, and then preached, their words restricted to the courtroom or the torture chamber.70 Nevertheless, Christians and scholars of Christianity have long seen Christianity as a distinctive religion because of the assumption that Christians seek to convert through preaching. Yet we have little evidence of preaching as a primary means of conversion in Antiquity or the Middle Ages. Preaching was often a contributing factor in conversion; Augustine found that Ambrose’s sermons on the Hebrew Bible removed many of his doubts about Christianity, while several hundred years later, the young Jewish merchant Judah was impressed by the sermons of the bishop of Mu¨nster. But in both cases, it took something else to tip the protagonists into the full embrace of Christianity. For Augustine, it was bibliomancy (the reading of the Bible at random for guidance), while for Judah it was the prayers of two pious female recluses.71 While few sources record any historical individuals becoming Christian through preaching, many record stories of effective preachers, and in many cases, they were also martyrs. Jesus, of course, was the model: he preached, converted many, and was killed for his message. The canonical Acts of the Apostles continued that story with Peter and Paul, whose deaths were implied but not described. Other acts of the apostles were written in the second and third centuries, describing the successful preaching and travels of the apostles, often featuring ascetic themes and concluding in martyrdom. The earliest martyrs, in contrast, were not preachers (though later tradition saw the apostles as the first of the martyrs). Nevertheless, many early passiones featured the conversion of onlookers (often guards or soldiers), astonished by the martyrs’ fortitude and divine glory shining forth. The once disparate roles of preacher and martyr became in some respects fused in the Carolingian era, and martyrs became central actors in a story in which Christians embarked on the conversion of the known world. The

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Christianization of northern Europe was often conceptualized as a continuation of a process begun by Constantine (and his mother Helena). But the spread of Christianity under Constantine was linked to something else— Christian military victory in the world. Early medieval stories of the saints emphasized the power of Christ in this world, not just in the next. The saints healed the sick and crippled after their death; Christ punished those who stole Christian holy books, and rewarded those he favored with victory in battle, even if they were not yet Christian. Olaf, the pagan king of the Swedes, and his army sought divine guidance after a significant defeat in his war with the people of Curland (now part of modern Latvia); they cast lots but could find no god to help them. In desperation, they turned to Christ, who gave them victory.72 This kind of triumphalist narrative, which drew upon earlier Christian models, could then proudly portray Christianization as a kind of supra-imperial set of victories by Christ, the apostles, and the martyrs. In the words of the anonymous ninth-century Saxon author of the account of the translation of the relics of Saint Vitus: After the passion and resurrection of our Lord Savior, after the triumphs of the apostles and victories of the martyrs, at length the King of Kings and the Lord of strength then returned peace to his church after the enemies of peace were vanquished, so that those very kings . . . whose ancestors killed [the martyrs] visited their tombs. And this victory of Christ, though it leapt among the Romans first, pierced the tribe of the Lombards and more gloriously undertook to triumph in Francia, attacked the Spanish, besieged the British, subjected the tribe of the English; and the Saxons themselves, who were kin of the English, bowed their necks with devout mind, [though] admittedly compelled.73 Here, then, earthly victory and heavenly victory are not really different from one another, nor is one superior to the other—spiritual victory is simply the antecedent to worldly triumph. But even in the Carolingian world, martyrdom was contested and placed in opposition to evangelization. The paradigmatic missionary-martyr of the Carolingian age was Boniface, whose passio and cult served as a model for generations of saints and their hagiographers.74 Born in Anglo-Saxon England as Winfrith, he was posthumously hailed as the “apostle to Germany” and was proclaimed a martyr after dying in 754 while evangelizing among the

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pagan Frisians; nevertheless, Boniface spent the greater part of his career reforming the church and Christianizing the already baptized.75 His tomb at the monastery of Fulda became a popular pilgrimage site soon after his entombment. Yet the great Carolingian scholar (and fellow Anglo-Saxon) Alcuin rejected the linking of martyrdom and mission embodied so prominently in Boniface. Ian Wood has argued that Alcuin strove in his vitae and sermons to minimize the centrality of martyrdom in hagiographic discourse, and to elevate the status of preaching. Thus, in the vita of Willibrord, Alcuin passed over the martyrdom of one of the saint’s companions in a single sentence without ever naming the victim,76 and argued about Willibrord himself that “God preserved him for the salvation of others, so that he might be honored by the greater glory of preaching than if he had been crowned by martyrdom alone.”77 Nor did Alcuin attribute to Willibrord even the desire for martyrdom. Alcuin was not alone in valuing evangelization over martyrdom; in many ways he was following the model established by the Venerable Bede, who had been the teacher of Alcuin’s own teacher. The beating heart of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People was evangelization, as Walter Carruthers Sellar and Robert Julian Yeatman satirized in 1066 and All That: “The conversion of England was thus effected by the landing of St. Augustine in Thanet, and other places, which resulted in the country being overrun by a Wave of Saints.”78 Bede’s heroes were often saints but rarely martyrs—indeed, his bishops and evangelists were noticeably willing to flee when their budding communities no longer enjoyed royal favor. Mellitus and Justus, sent from Rome to help Augustine in his efforts, fled from the East Saxon kingdom after the death of their patron, Saebert; they settled in Francia, deciding “by common consent that they should all return to their own country and serve God with a free conscience, rather than remain fruitlessly among these barbarians who had rebelled against the faith.”79 Similarly, Paulinus, bishop of York, fled back to Canterbury and became the bishop of Rochester after the death of his king, Edwin. The heroic dead in Bede were not the evangelists, but the kings; Oswald of Northumbria is the most obvious example. Bede claimed that the site of his death at the hands of infidels became a place of miraculous healing and veneration, and his holy fame spread far beyond England.80 Bede saw Christianity working not in opposition to the world as the ancient logic of martyrdom suggested, but in concert with royal and imperial power. Thus, martyrdom and mission were part of the same inexorable process of Christian victory, and martyrdom could as easily be the attribute of kings as of saints.

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Martyrs in Muslim Lands It is lamentably easy to forget that the history of Christianity for its first thousand years was a story in which Europe played a minor role. The cities and lands with the largest Christian populations came under Muslim rule in the course of the seventh century, including the ancient centers of Christianity—Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Antioch. Just as early Christians had used martyrdom as a way to tell stories in which Christians were victors despite the humiliation of Roman persecution, so too did Christians under Islamic rule use martyrdom to make sense of Muslim military triumph over Christians, and the subsequent relegation of Christians to second-class status. But Christians had a protected status under Islamic law as dhimmis (those under the protection of a dhimma, a treaty) that was quite unlike their position outside the law in the Roman Empire in the pre-Constantinian era. Christians were thus rarely persecuted for being Christians; nevertheless, the same law that protected their religious identity also restricted their ability to build new churches, perform public processions, or attempt to win new converts. In response to the sense of defeat and the ambiguous status of Christian communities, a new genre of martyrdom was born, which bore a close resemblance to Franciscan passiones. Neomartyrs, as such Christians are sometimes called, did not die as part of systematic persecution, but as a result of a direct confrontation with the dominant authority initiated by the martyr.81 In some cases, the martyrs were Muslims who had converted or reconverted to Christianity, an act that contravened Islamic law.82 In others, however, they were Christians executed for insulting the prophet Muhammad, such as Petros of Capitolias, a Melkite (Greek Orthodox) priest who was executed in 715,83 or many of the fortyeight martyrs of Co´rdoba, who between 851 and 860 were martyred for breaking Islamic law in the same way.84 A more conventional martyr from alAndalus, though less historically attested, was the child martyr Pelagius. Pelagius (to the extent that he was a historical actor at all) died around 925, killed at the behest of the Umayyad emir (not yet caliph) ‘Abd al-Rah.ma¯n III (912–961). The emir was taken by the thirteen-year-old boy’s beauty, and when he refused to submit to the emir’s seduction and convert, he was tortured and killed. His story took the traditional tropes of the female virginmartyr and applied them to a boy. He was the same age as many of the wellknown female virgin-martyrs (such as Agnes of Rome). Like the martyrs of

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Co´rdoba, no miracles marked his suffering and death, nor did his death inspire any converts.85 The Co´rdoban martyrs are useful to consider in greater detail because they share many qualities with the Franciscan martyrs of several hundred years later.86 The forty-eight martyrs who died over the course of nine years came from varied backgrounds. Some were priests, monks, or nuns; others were layfolk. While most were decapitated for insulting Islam, others died as apostates—that is, they were de jure or de facto Muslims, and were executed for abandoning Islam. Some had never identified as Muslims but were legally so because their fathers were Muslim—yet they were raised in the faith of their Christian mothers as a result of particular circumstances. A few were even visitors from other lands, such as Georgios, a monk from the monastery of Mar Saba outside of Bethlehem in Palestine. The principal advocate for the dead Christians, Eulogius, was a contemporary who had known some of the martyrs personally and who eventually died a martyr himself. Indeed, it was through his composition of their passiones and advocacy for their sanctity that the dead were made known to Christians both in Spain and elsewhere. He was in part motivated to write to counter critics of the dead within the local Christian community, who pointed out that the deaths of the Co´rdobans looked little like those of the martyrs of the Roman era. There were few miracles, and little evidence of the raging persecuting tyrant who made the choice between life and fidelity so stark. The Co´rdoban dead had not only to profess their Christian faith, but also to denigrate the beliefs of Muslims in order to be arrested and executed. Nor were the martyrs subjected to the torture that featured so prominently in earlier passiones. Eulogius responded to the criticisms with various strategies: he cited Gregory the Great, arguing that the lack of miracles was not a sign of a lack of sanctity and showed that voluntary martyrdom had long been Christian practice.87 He promoted the Co´rdoban dead as a different kind of hero than those of the Roman era. The glory of the martyrs shone brightest not through miracles but through their example of stalwart fidelity to Christianity. The martyr was no longer a conduit of divine power, a being who transcended the division between heaven and earth, but a hero whose fortitude embodied the determined resistance of the Christian community to the dark power of this world. The only escape lay in the hope of the bright eternal paradise of the hereafter.

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The parallels to the later Franciscan martyrs are inescapable. They share the lack of persecution, the absence of miracles, and the disinterest in torture.88 But the connection between the two groups of martyrs was not a direct one. Few of the stories of the neomartyrs made it to western Europe in the medieval period; the exception is those of the Co´rdoban martyrs, a number of whom were included in the ninth-century martyrology of Usuard, whose text was among the most widespread martyr collections in medieval Europe, and which became fundamental to the sixteenth-century Roman liturgy of the church.89 Nevertheless, the full accounts of the Co´rdoban passiones were not known until the sixteenth century, when Eulogius’s passiones were rediscovered.90 Rather, the similarities between them arise from their shared context: the promoters of both the Co´rdoban and Franciscan martyrs struggled to gain attention and devotion in a context which many Christians felt did not fit what they expected of the martyrs. Furthermore, they shared the struggle to shape Islam and Muslims into a persecuting force in the eyes of their fellow Christians: this was surprisingly difficult despite the unrelentingly negative portrayal of Islam in most Christian sources. Perhaps more significantly, they were constrained by the reality that a story claiming victory over Islam in this world would ring false; readers in both the ninth and fourteenth centuries clearly knew that Islamdom had not been vanquished, but was as potent as ever. In this way, both needed to depart from the model of martyrdom received from Late Antiquity, and to return (perhaps unknowingly) to the model of the earliest accounts, which generally lacked miracles and did not see the martyrs as earthly victors.

Martyrdom in the Age of Reform By the twelfth century, martyrs had become part of the human architecture of the community, second only to the apostles as one of the pillars supporting the church on earth and numbered among the heavenly court closest to the throne of God. Nor was martyrdom entirely a thing of the past—one of the most popular saints of the twelfth century was Thomas a` Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury, killed at the altar in 1170 by four knights hoping to please King Henry II. His shrine in Canterbury became one of the mostvisited pilgrimage sites in western Christendom during the Middle Ages. The story of Henry and Thomas is a striking one, featuring Thomas as an ambitious and smart young Londoner promoted by a king who sought to remake

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his kingdom. The king made his prote´ge´ archbishop, and then had to face the personal qualities that had made Thomas such an outstanding royal servant turned against him in service of the church. The murder of Thomas in his own cathedral was in some ways an act of violence unremarkable for twelfth-century Europe. Nevertheless, the story of a holy man killed by an angry tyrant for protecting the church was a narrative intimately familiar to Christian audiences. Thomas played the part of the fearless Christian martyr confronting the Roman emperor, who can only rage and rave against those who, their eyes firmly fixed on heaven, defy him. Like the Roman martyrs of old, his place of death quickly became a site of miracles. The making of the martyr involved not only the image of the dead hero, but also the construction of the other participants in the play. In a letter from Guillaume, archbishop of Sens, Henry II became “not so much king of the English as enemy of the angels,” and was compared to Ahab and Herod. In the same letter, Thomas was seen as “freely offering himself as a peace offering to God,”91 evoking the sacrificial language inherent in martyrdom since the early Christian era. Thomas’s martyrdom and subsequent popularity demonstrates two important points: the continued potency of the martyrological narrative in a context far removed from persecution by non-Christians, and the narrowing in the High Middle Ages of the meaning of the word “martyr” to those who died defending the institutional church, as opposed to the older understanding of “martyr” as one dying in defense of personal belief and practice. While the concepts of “saint” and “martyr” had been intimately tied, if not synonymous, in early Christianity, the creation of a formal papal process of canonization by the early thirteenth century had led to a radical decrease in the number of contemporary martyrs who were recognized as saints. Stanislaus, bishop of Krakow (1030–79), was one of the few martyrs canonized in the thirteenth century. Like Thomas, he was killed by his king for zealously defending ecclesiastical independence from royal power. The only martyrs the papacy found suitable for promotion were political and inquisitorial ones, such as the mendicants who were killed by Cathars in Avignonet in 1242.92 Likewise, Nicholas III (1277–80) beatified the Dominican Pagano da Lecco a year after he had been killed by a heretic in Como (1274): Pagano had been the inquisitor of Lombardy, Piedmont, and Liguria.93 Peter Martyr, a Dominican inquisitor killed by a Cathar, was canonized so quickly after his death that it remains a record to this day. In contrast, no martyrs were canonized who died at the hands of Muslims until 1481.

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The language of martyrdom remained potent, even if it did not lead to active cults or recognition by the papacy.94 During the Seventh Crusade, Jean de Joinville hailed as a martyr the bishop of Soissons, Jacques de Castel, who threw himself on the swords of the enemy while Louis IX’s armies were in retreat from Damietta, and Louis himself hoped that his brother, Robert of Artois, who had died in a foolhardy attack on Al-Mans.u¯ra, might also be considered one.95 And Jean had no doubt that Louis himself was a martyr after his death on crusade outside the walls of Tunis in 1270, despite the fact that dysentery, not Muslims, killed the king. The papacy did not agree in any of these cases, and canonized Louis as a confessor, not a martyr.96 The cults of earlier martyrs continued to be widely commemorated and celebrated. The Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine was one of the most widespread collections of saints’ lives in the later Middle Ages. Of the approximately 154 entries on saints, about 97 of them are dedicated to martyrs (62 percent).97 The Golden Legend remains faithful to the Roman martyrdoms of old: miracles and conversions abound. And indeed, the vast majority of the martyrs included died in the Roman era; a small number were martyred in the fourth through sixth centuries by Arians, and only two, Thomas of Canterbury and Peter Martyr, died after 700. Nor was martyrdom limited to the mendicant orders in the thirteenth century. The Mercedarian order was devoted to the redemption of captives, and many of its members died in the course of their duties, such as Peter Paschasius, bishop of Jaen (d. c. 1299).98 Martyrial language could be applied to Peter and others like him, though no formal cult commemorated him. Many Christians used the term “martyr” far more broadly, applying it to victims of assassination or of criminal acts like thievery.99 In many of these cases, “martyr” connoted a particularly pious person or a person of low social status (or both) who died violently, with religious persecution playing little role: an example would be Simon of Atherton, who was killed by his wife in 1211. A short-lived cult developed around his tomb on the Isle of Wight before it was suppressed by local authorities.100 Bertrand, patriarch of Aquileia (d. 1350), was assassinated by Friulian nobles who were angered by his attempts to expand episcopal authority at their expense, and became the focus of a martyr cult as well. Likewise, Erik “Plovpennig” of Denmark was killed by his brother Abel in 1250 in revenge for Erik’s earlier attacks on his brother. Margaret of Louvain was killed by thieves who had attacked her employer’s house; they killed Margaret when she resisted rape and fled.101 Children like Simon of Trent, who were imagined to have been killed by Jews, fit into this

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pattern as well, though these cases also drew upon anti-Judaic and Eucharistic imagery as well as the image of the martyr as a pure innocent. In most of these cases, we find no transformation or miracles beyond healing ones; the martyrs after death were as powerless as they were in life.

Conclusion The Franciscans were thus heir to a long tradition of martyrological thinking, a tradition that was astoundingly flexible.102 It could express a radical eschatological alienation from the world, harbor antiauthoritarian tendencies, or be the tool of institutional consolidation and orthodoxy. Francis’s own writings evoked humility and self-sacrifice as fundamental to his values, but without expectation of divine reward in this world. Franciscans used martyrdom to confront Islam and to bolster their own institutional authority in the face of crisis, accusations of heresy, and factionalization. In order to do so, they abandoned the language and rhetoric of earthly victory that had characterized Christian martyrdom since the fourth century, ceding victory in this world to Muslims as the price of maintaining their own piety and unity.

chapter 2

“Do Not Fear Those Who Kill the Body” The Desire for Martyrdom in the Thirteenth Century

Sultan al-Malik al-Ka¯mil Naser ad-Din abu al-Ma’ali Muhammad (c. 1177– 1238) must have grown weary of martyrs. The Coptic community of Egypt claimed that at least two Copts who had converted to Islam were executed after appearing before the sultan and demanding to be allowed to reconvert to Christianity, a capital offense: John of Phanajo¯it (c. 1210) and a weaver named Asad (c. 1217).1 The two Copts were little known after their deaths: no cult developed around either, and only a single copy of John’s passio survived.2 A few years after Asad and John, another would-be martyr stood before al-Ka¯mil, but unlike the previous two, he was neither a native of Egypt, nor did he end up dead as a result of the encounter. He was Francis of Assisi, and his encounter with the sultan became one of the most famous religious encounters of the Middle Ages, and one of the defining moments of Francis’s life. We cannot know, of course, whether Asad, Francis, or John actually met al-Malik al-Ka¯mil. But what the reception of their stories tells us is that accounts of martyrdom were not always unequivocal demonstrations of piety. It is Francis after all, the only one of the three who did not die a martyr, whose encounter with the sultan became the most widely known. Nor were Asad, John, and Francis unique; in the imagination of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Christians at least, a number of would-be martyrs found themselves before caliphs, sultans, and qa¯d.¯ıs (Islamic judges) around the same time. We are already familiar with the “Morocco Five”: the five Franciscans

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who preached before the Almohad caliph Yu¯suf II (c. 1203–24) in Marrakesh and were executed by him. Their fourteenth-century passio also ascribed their motivation to “the desire for martyrdom.”3 While eventually canonized in 1481 and having a small cult of their relics in Portugal, the five martyrs of Morocco, like Asad and John, never gained widespread popularity. Giles of Assisi was one of the earliest of Francis’s companions, who “went to the Saracens at a certain time out of a desire to suffer martyrdom for the love of Christ,” according to his fourteenth-century vita.4 Like Francis, he survived, and became one of the beloved figures of the first generation of friars. He was beatified only in 1777, and though never canonized, his relics have enjoyed a modest cult in Perugia, where they were placed in a late-antique sarcophagus depicting the story of the prophet Jonah.5 While later generations tied these three near-martyrdoms to around 1220, the accounts ascribing to them a desire to die were written at different moments in Franciscan history. Thomas of Celano connected Francis’s visit to the sultan to a desire for martyrdom just a few years after Francis’s death, and only ten years after his voyage to Egypt. Giles of Assisi was a well-known figure within the early Franciscan movement, but the account of his voyage to convert Muslims and his near-martyrdom in Tunis did not show up until the later fourteenth century. The five martyrs of Morocco were mentioned soon after their deaths, in the vita of Anthony of Padua (c. 1232), but their names, an account of their deaths, and an explanation for their journey did not appear until the early fourteenth century. Thirteenth-century Franciscans evidently preferred their saints to be living pious lives, not dying pious deaths. The life of Francis himself poses a particular challenge. Like the search for the historical Jesus, scholars of Francis have argued vociferously over how to read the hagiographic sources for his life, and which of them provides the best access to the historical Francis, rather than to a hagiographic construct.6 Scholars have generally found the saint’s desire for death to be unproblematic; on the one hand, it was a standard trope in the life of a saint, and on the other, it cohered to Francis’s strong sense of humility and desire to imitate Christ. The considerable body of scholarship devoted to Francis and his desire for martyrdom focuses almost exclusively on his visit to the sultan, and on placing that encounter in the context of the crusades and MuslimChristian relations. Franciscans in the thirteenth century, on the other hand, found Francis’s desire and his failure to achieve it deeply troubling. Franciscan discourse on the desire for martyrdom was part of a tangled web of martyrial thinking that was for the most part a meditation on failure. Francis

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failed to become a martyr; other Franciscans succeeded in dying but failed to be canonized or to achieve the devotion earned by the martyrs of old. The stories of Francis’s journeys to achieve his desire, alongside his own writings on subjects connected to martyrdom, became a vehicle through which Franciscans grappled with the extraordinary ambition of Francis’s vision of a fraternity dedicated to calling the world to repentance in Christ.

“Going Among the Infidels”: Two Paths Francis came before the sultan under much different pretenses than did John and Asad. They were accused of being renegade Muslims; to at least some, it seemed that they had converted to Islam, and their desire to return to Christianity (or deny that they had ever left it) was contrary to Islamic law. Their story was similar to the many stories of the neomartyrs who had gone before them. What was Francis doing before the sultan? Thomas of Celano characterized the saint’s motivation for his journey to Egypt as a “burning desire for martyrdom,”7 but also made it clear that Francis came not to insult Islam or provoke the sultan to execute him, but to preach the Christian message of truth. Francis’s audience before the sultan has become a central moment in the saint’s life in part because it encapsulates so many powerful and at times contradictory elements of Francis’s own religious desires and those of the larger Christian world. At the same time, the story exemplifies the historiographic difficulty of separating the man from the saint. Can we trust Thomas’s explanation for why he went to Egypt? Can we discern what Francis was hoping to achieve? While Francis did not write about his trip to Egypt himself, we do have his own words addressing the place of martyrdom and evangelization in the values of the brotherhood he had established. The choice of Francis to confront al-Ka¯mil in the midst of a crusade has moved many historians to wonder whether the man from Assisi understood his peaceful preaching as a rebuke to the violence of the crusade.8 As I will discuss below, Francis tried to confront the Almohad caliph in similar circumstances following the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa. The saint more likely understood his efforts as working in concert with the crusade. Francis discussed preaching to infidels and Saracens as well as the possibility of martyrdom when he composed the first rule in 1209 (often called a “life-program,” a propositam vitae, rather than a

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formal rule) in response to the initial approval of the order by the pope, but that early rule, if it in fact existed, is now lost.9 The second rule, the Regula non bullata, was written in 1221 to govern an order that had already grown into thousands of friars. In this rule, we can hear the voice of Francis, though he certainly did not compose it alone. The writing of a formal rule for his community was a decisive moment for Francis and his movement. It was a privilege few others enjoyed. The Fourth Lateran Council had banned the recognition of new rules; Dominic de Guzma´n had to employ a modified version of the Rule of Saint Augustine for the Dominicans in 1216. But Francis had the favor of Pope Innocent III, who had given his unofficial support for the order in 1209. The rule was a constitution of sorts, which established the institutional framework of the order, but it was also a code of values that Francis hoped his brothers would live by. By the time the Regula non bullata was composed, the community had grown to such an extent that Francis no longer knew most of the friars, even in Italy. It was in this sense no longer a single community, but a collection of them, and the rule was to be the lodestone that steered them all in the same direction. Francis devoted an entire chapter of the rule explicitly to the question of preaching to non-Christians, particularly Muslims. No other rule placed such emphasis on “going among the Saracens and other non-believers,” as Francis phrased it. The term “mission” in this sense was written into the DNA of the order. The rule offered two possible ways of pursuing such a journey. “One way,” the rule counseled, “is not to engage in arguments or disputes but to be subject to every human creature for God’s sake (1 Pet. 2:13) and to acknowledge that they are Christians.”10 The brothers who thus felt called to work among the Muslims should truly be minores (that is, “little ones”), and embody the principal Franciscan virtue of humility. They should convince Muslims of the superiority of Christianity not through preaching or speech, but through the humble mien appropriate to those who serve a humble and crucified God. No matter where they may be, Francis reminded his brothers, “they have given themselves and abandoned their bodies to the Lord Jesus Christ. For love of Him, they must make themselves vulnerable to their enemies, both visible and invisible, because the Lord says: “Whoever loses his life because of me will save it in eternal life.”11 Following this was an assemblage of New Testament quotations, what we might call a set of Franciscan beatitudes, which includes both Matthew’s injunction to flee to another town when persecuted, and also the injunction “Do not fear those who kill the body.”12

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The rule offered a second way as well: “to announce the Word of God, when they see it pleases the Lord, in order that [unbelievers] may believe in almighty God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. . . . and be baptized and become Christians because no one may enter the kingdom of God without being reborn of water and the Holy Spirit.”13 This second path recognized the link between preaching and conversion; infidels must hear the word of God in order to be saved. This path placed conversion at the center of the friar’s activities, but on a practical level it exposed the friars to the greatest possibility of being killed. Encouraging Muslims to abandon their faith and embrace Christianity was a capital offense under Islamic law; denigrating Islam and its prophets was equally so. Yet it was also the path that took conversion and evangelization most seriously. This would appear to be how Francis conceived of his visit to al-Ka¯mil. Of course, the ambiguous phrase “if it pleases the Lord” left room for all sorts of interpretations. Did insulting Muhammad please the Lord? Did God look with favor upon those who sought out death? The two paths present strikingly different conceptions of what the Franciscan mission was, and what it should achieve, as well as the capacity of “infidels” to achieve salvation. The first path, the path of patient endurance and humility, embodied one vision of who the Franciscans were. The Franciscan way of life itself was the source of transformation; the humility of the friars and their fidelity to the apostolic life of poverty would inspire Muslims to become Christians. This was the way Francis had attracted his first followers and built the early community around Assisi. The second path was hallowed by centuries of Christian tradition, and was imagined as the method that the apostles themselves employed in establishing the earliest Christian churches in the first century of Christianity. But it also considered conversion to be a process that required confrontation, particularly in the context of Islam. The friar cannot “subject himself to every human creature”; he must spur his audience to act contrary to the law and to participate in an act that juridically transferred them from one community to another. While the path did not insist on the need to denounce Islam, such a denunciation was implicit in the necessity to distinguish one tradition from the other. Yet this was the path that allowed the friar to exercise his role as preacher.14 The two paths also imagined the intended recipients differently. The first path placed the friar in the midst of an infidel community; a shared humanity was assumed, and the humility of the friar was to turn the hearts and minds of those around him to a recognition of their sinfulness and a

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desire to make right their relationship with God. The second path, on the other hand, envisioned the Muslims (and other infidels) as separated from the friars by the barriers of belonging. Only by undergoing the ritual of baptism could the infidel join the community and gain access to the salvation the friar had already secured. The penultimate chapter of the rule did not address an issue of organization or behavior as the other chapters did, but was a general admonition to the friars, urging upon them the fundamental Franciscan virtue of humility and tying it to martyrdom. Francis urged his followers to call friends “those who unjustly inflict upon us distress and anguish, shame and injury, sorrow and punishment, martyrdom and death.” In contrast, the friars are urged to “hate our body with its vices and sins.”15 Thomas of Celano described the same love of humility as central to the poverello’s own life. The chapter encourages martyrological thinking in more subtle ways as well. When Francis cited the Gospels—“Everyone therefore who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven” (Matt. 10:32); “And I tell you, everyone who acknowledges me before others, the Son of Man also will acknowledge before the angels of God” (Luke 12:8)—he was not just making a claim for the Christian monopoly on salvation; he was quoting the monastic liturgy for the celebration of a martyr.16 Was martyrdom the ultimate expression of humility? In the Regula non bullata, Francis implicitly suggested that it was so. While the rule did not encourage martyrdom directly, it encouraged a disregard for the fate of the body and a reciprocal elevation of the values of humility and subordination, which we might consider to be the psychosocial building blocks of the martyr’s perspective.17 Despite Francis’s labor in crafting it, the Regula non bullata was rejected by the pope, though approved by the order itself in a general meeting in 1221. To satisfy the pope and the cardinal-protector, Francis wrote a new rule in 1223, which was shorter, more legalistic, and less lyrical, and shorn of many of its biblical quotations. This rule gave the friars no direction on how to conduct missions to the infidels; it only mandated that they receive permission from their superiors before going. The lengthy admonition on humility in the Regula non bullata also largely disappeared in the later rule; a small portion of it was preserved in chapter 10. The language most evocative of martyrdom was removed. Why the shift in tone between the two rules? Certainly, it was part of a greater difference between the two: the second rule generally emphasized hierarchy and obedience, minimizing the emotional language that might lead a friar to his own conclusions of how best to live a

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Franciscan life. But the removal of the language of martyrdom may also have been a reaction to both Francis’s journey to Egypt and the death of the Morocco Five. Nevertheless, the chapter of the Regula bullata that describes friars going among the Saracens, in the opinion of Bonaventure, ministergeneral of the order, “opened the way for those thirsting for martyrdom, teaching them to join themselves to the infidels, leaving their homes.”18 The Regula non bullata continued to be influential; Hugh of Digne (d. c. 1254–57), provincial minister of Provence, used it extensively in his commentary on the rule, as did Angelo Clareno.19 Later commentators discussed evangelizing the infidels in the context of Francis’s injunctions in the Regula non bullata.20 But Francis’s two paths were controversial, even within the order.21 Hugh of Digne, though generally encouraging a rigorist interpretation of Franciscan values, felt it necessary to caution in his commentary on the rule that “the desire for martyrdom is not achieved hastily but rather prudently. We should strive for death for Christ, and should flee what is planned.”22 He further reminded his brothers (quoting Paul) that “Christ sent us not to baptize but to preach,” though Francis explicitly mentioned baptizing in the Regula non bullata.23 Still later, the anonymous Speculum perfectionis (c. 1318) included a brief description of the two paths, stating, “Francis believed that the highest obedience, that in which flesh and blood had no part, was when men should go by divine inspiration among the Saracens or the infidels, either for the good of their fellows, or for the desire for martyrdom, and he judged that to seek this was right.”24 Here, the two choices of the would-be martyr were categorized differently; instead of method, motivation was the means of distinguishing the two paths. The two rules come into even sharper relief when we realize that they were written shortly after Francis returned from Egypt. Do the rules help illuminate what Francis himself was doing in Egypt? If we take the Regula non bullata as our guide, Francis understood his journey as a dangerous one—he was a lamb going among wolves. The saint pursued the second path, the path of preaching and evangelization. While this path enabled the infidel to hear the word of God, it was not only about saving the Saracen; proclaiming the word of God before others helped ensure one’s own salvation as well, as the Gospel citations attest.25 Indeed, the main thrust of chapter 16 of the Regula non bullata was not saving others, but following the via apostolica of the true disciple. Whether one died as a martyr, converted infidels, or simply attested to the truth of God’s word, the friar most importantly ensured his own salvation, for “Whoever acknowledges me before others I will acknowledge

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before my heavenly Father.”26 In this sense, Francis’s mission was indeed analogous to that of the crusaders in whose midst he arrived in Egypt—the greatest victory was the salvation of the self.

Death Denied: Francis as Frustrated Martyr Francis was first described as a frustrated martyr by the friar Thomas of Celano. Pope Gregory IX had asked Thomas, who was from the town of Celano in the Abruzzi and a relative of the counts of Marsi, to write a vita following the saint’s canonization on 16 July 1228, and Thomas finished the vita in 1230, just four years after the saint’s death. It was the first attempt to provide a narrative of Francis’s life and explain the development of the order, and it profoundly shaped how Franciscans understood themselves; it is thus sometimes called the vita prima to distinguish it from other hagiographic material that Thomas composed. Thomas had joined the order about 1215, and as his writings show, he was well educated in theology and the monastic literary tradition. He, too, had been involved in the evangelistic fervor of the early Franciscan movement; Thomas was part of a delegation sent to Germany in 1221—not to convert infidels, but to inspire baptized Christians to a renewed love of God. He returned to Italy in 1223; we know little else about him. Thomas wrote just a few years after the saint’s death, and his account aimed both to promote Francis’s sanctity within the larger church, and to satisfy the desire of his brethren to memorialize their founder. Thomas was the first to list the three attempts by Francis to travel outside of Christendom and to ascribe the journeys to the saint’s desire to achieve martyrdom; like much of Thomas’s vita, these attempts became canonical parts of Francis’s life, recounted in other hagiographic texts and illustrated in depictions of the saint’s life.27 Yet Thomas was quite ambivalent about these endeavors; they were not straightforward evidence of the founder’s sanctity as many have assumed. Thomas devoted an entire chapter to Francis’s “desire to undergo martyrdom,” gathering the stories together out of their chronological context. Nevertheless, he was uncertain of how to characterize that desire. He began in verse, evoking martyrdom as a kind of knightly heroism: burning with divine love, the blessed father Francis was always eager

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to try his hand at brave deeds (fortia), and walking in the way of God’s commands with heart wide-open, he longed to reach the summit of perfection.28 Like an Arthurian knight setting out on a quest, Francis’s desire would lead him to travel to distant lands, to grueling hardship, and to an opportunity to display courage in the face of near-certain death.29 Francis’s desire, however, was repeatedly frustrated. Sometime around 1212, “Francis wished to take a ship to the region of Syria to preach the Christian faith and repentance to the Saracens and other non-believers,” but contrary winds prevented him from reaching his destination. Again motivated by “the burning desire for martyrdom,” Francis later traveled toward Morocco through Spain, hoping “to preach the gospel of Christ to the Miramolin (the Latin version of the caliphal title, Amir al-Mu’minı¯n) and his retinue,”30 but again he was thwarted—though this time it was not an accident of nature that stopped him, but God. Francis was so eager to die on this trip “that he would sometimes leave behind his companion on the journey and hurry ahead, intoxicated in spirit.”31 God, responding to the distant prayers of Thomas and other brothers, struck Francis with illness, forcing him to abandon his journey again.32 In doing so, Thomas claimed that God “withstood him to his face,”33 a biblical phrase that referred to an episode in which Paul rebuked Peter for separating himself from the uncircumcised, non-Jewish Christians. It is a curious choice of language. Its original context gives us further understanding of what Thomas meant by it. Paul used it to describe his own actions in Antioch when he confronted Peter, who thus “stood condemned.” In the community of early Christians, Paul was a bit of an underdog, a recent convert who never knew Jesus during his lifetime, while Peter was one of the leaders of the community.34 By using this quote, Thomas aligned himself and the other friars with Paul, and Francis with the rebuked Peter. But it is God, in responding to the brothers’ prayers, who rebuked Francis. Francis, like Peter, may have been a saint, but this does not mean he never made mistakes—we need only to think of Peter’s denial of Jesus to know that. For Thomas, then, Francis’s desire for martyrdom in this instance was not a sign of sanctity, but a misguided desire that put the saint’s will in conflict with God’s and with his community.35 The rebuke specifically focused on “separation”—in Peter’s case from the gentile Christians, and in Francis’s

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case from his brethren. The greater significance was, however, the separation that Francis’s desire threatened—to separate him permanently from the living. Both Francis and Peter, it seems, suffered from an overly developed sense of purity. Francis’s third attempt (directed toward Egypt this time) followed the chapter meeting in 1219 when the order began to put its dream of worldwide evangelization into practice, and Francis was determined to participate. While Francis finally arrived at his destination, this venture too was a failure, where once again Francis’s desire did not align with God’s. In describing this journey, Thomas did not emphasize Francis’s desire for martyrdom (though he still included it in a chapter dedicated to the subject), but rather his patience in the face of his suffering at the hands of the Egyptian soldiers. Again, however, God did not fulfill his desire for martyrdom, but did allow him to preach before the sultan. Instead of blocking Francis, God redirected him; he was “reserving for him the prerogative of a unique grace.”36 Francis’s final attempt at martyrdom was different from his earlier attempts in two ways: first, in the way that Thomas characterized it, and second, in the reasons for its lack of success. Francis still sought to carry out the “the holy impulse of his soul”—presumably martyrdom—but the achievement Thomas praised was that he “was not afraid to present himself to the sight of the Sultan of the Saracens,” again evoking the notion of chivalric bravery in the midst of a crusade. The hagiographer exulted, “With great strength of soul, he spoke to him [the sultan], with eloquence and confidence he answered those who insulted the Christian law.”37 Thomas emphasized Francis’s power of speaking, casting religious debate as a kind of proxy warfare. The court of the sultan appeared to be full of threats; the soldiers manhandled Francis and his companion, and he “was ill-treated by many with a hostile spirit and a harsh attitude.” By the sultan, however, “he was received very graciously.” The sultan first mistook him for the typical visitor who appeared in his court, and offered him gifts, “trying to turn his mind to worldly things.” Al-Ka¯mil soon realized, however, that a man such as Francis did not want royal gifts; “overwhelmed with admiration, he recognized him as a man unlike any other. He was moved by his words and listened to him very willingly.”38 Nevertheless, the sultan did not convert. What was amiss with Francis’s desires and actions? Why did his endeavors fail to win him either converts or martyrdom, and as such, why did Thomas include them in his hagiography? Thomas depicted Francis’s desire to follow in Christ’s footsteps as two distinct vocations. One was martyrdom,

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which Thomas called “the holy impulse of his soul.” The second was the call to preach. Francis understood this calling when he heard the reading of the gospel passage at Saint Mary of the Portiuncula in which Jesus instructed that his disciples “should not possess gold or silver or money, or carry on their journey a wallet or a sack, nor bread nor a staff, nor to have shoes nor two tunics, but that they should preach the kingdom of God and penance”—a life of preaching which was intimately linked to a life of poverty. Upon discussing the text with the priest, Francis declared, “This is what I want. This is what I seek, this is what I desire with all my heart.”39 When Francis preached, he was filled with the ability to move his listeners in unexpected ways. Thomas recounted that “he used to view the largest crowd of people as if it were a single person, and he would preach fervently to a single person as if to a large crowd. . . . Sometimes he would be filled with such great eloquence that he moved the hearts of his hearers to astonishment.”40 Thomas understood the desire for martyrdom to be more than just a sign of his leader’s sanctity; it symbolized Francis’s spiritual aspirations for himself and for his followers. The apostles, the model for the Franciscans, were believed to have all died as martyrs (with the exception of the long-lived John). Thomas also emphasized that Francis’s religious calling was inextricably linked to persecution and suffering. When the townspeople of Assisi pelted Francis with mud and stones, thinking him mad because of his changed demeanor after his conversion, Thomas commented that “in vain do the wicked persecute those striving for virtue, for the more they are stricken, the more fully will they triumph.”41 Likewise, his father’s rage toward Francis led the saint to “declare he would gladly suffer anything for the name of Christ,”42 and that he was “eager to despise his own life.”43 The name that Francis chose for the order, the Order of the Lesser Brothers, reflected the importance of humility; as Thomas explained, “They were truly lesser, who by being subject to all, always sought the position of contempt.”44 This same logic of inversion had been a crucial part of the logic of the martyr. To be humble was to despise or to consider insignificant one’s own life and self; to die was to give up one’s earthly life and self in the ultimate expression of humility. The early friars’ desire for humility led them to seek “to be where they would suffer persecution of their bodies rather than where their holiness would be known or praised.”45 Martyrdom thus became the ultimate expression of Franciscan humility, and the desire for martyrdom became part of an expression of humility. Yet, in a curious manner, martyrdom as a trope of humility turns the traditional logic of martyrdom on its

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head. For early Christians, martyrdom was the assertion of power from a position of powerlessness. Early Christians revered their martyrs because they allowed them to claim control of the body and spirit when imperial authority sought to strip them of it. Later Christians saw in the martyrs the inevitable triumph of Christianity over those who opposed it. For Franciscans, martyrdom (and the desire for it) was the voluntary surrender of authority over one’s own body, as Christ had surrendered his immortal self to suffer and die. It thus began from a position of power and moved toward powerlessness. Even more paradoxically, martyrdom itself led to “their holiness being known and praised,” and to the divine power that the Franciscans foreswore. The desire for martyrdom was problematic in another way. The hagiographic topos of the desire for martyrdom developed in the fourth century as the opportunity for martyrdom itself began to wither away, at least for orthodox Christians. Its potency came from the fact that martyrdom was no longer an option. In the thirteenth century, pious men did have the opportunity to seek out martyrdom, as the stories of Francis and the Moroccan martyrs attest. What, then, was the significance of the desire for martyrdom when the possibility of martyrdom was in fact at hand? The order could never quite decide. Did Francis go to infidel lands to preach or to die? Perhaps it is a false dichotomy; perhaps Francis sought both, just as the order honored both at different moments. Thomas kept the two desires in tension; even as preaching became the mark of the lesser brothers and part of their apostolic mission, and “was producing choice fruit in abundance,” Thomas insisted that “it did not stifle Francis’s highest purpose, the burning desire for martyrdom.”46 It was easier to keep the desire rather than its achievement in balance with the active engagement with the world that preaching represented. Properly, the desire for martyrdom should be coupled with preaching and transformation of the world—yet Francis in Egypt arguably failed on both counts; he neither gained the glory of martyrdom, nor did the sultan become a Christian through his preaching. Having tempted his audience with the delectable possibility of the conversion of one of the most powerful political leaders in the Islamic world, Thomas concluded his chapter on the desire for martyrdom by switching to a different, seemingly unrelated, topic: “In all this, God did not fulfill his desire, reserving for him the prerogative of a unique grace.”47 What was the “unique grace” that Thomas suggested Francis had been saved for? The stigmata, the physical wounds of the Crucifixion miraculously appearing on his hands, feet, and side, were a wonder that Francis was the

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first to experience.48 If martyrdom was the ultimate expression of the vita apostolica, then the stigmata were the ultimate expression of Francis’s attempt to follow in the footsteps of Jesus.49 Seeking to understand God’s will for him, Francis had once used the ancient method of bibliomancy, as Augustine himself had done; he opened the Bible at random, and read. The book fell open to the story of Jesus’ passion repeatedly.50 Francis then “understood that he would have to enter into the kingdom of God through many trials, difficulties, and struggles.”51 Some time later, he received a vision of a man with wings like a seraph, outstretched on a cross.52 As he contemplated the meaning of the vision, “signs of the nails began to appear on his hands and feet, just as he had seen them a little while earlier on the crucified man hovering over him.”53 The unique grace Francis received from God was to suffer as Christ suffered on the cross.54 At his death, Thomas called the stigmata “signs of martyrdom,”55 again reminding his readers of the link between “the unique grace” and Francis’s desire for martyrdom. Thomas hinted that the proper attitude toward martyrdom was rewarded by a superior form of it—one that did not result in bodily death, but one that metaphysically allowed Francis to participate in the suffering of Christ’s death while still living. God thus denied Francis his desire to be martyred in the manner of the apostles, but gave him a form of suffering that heretofore had only been endured by God’s own son. It is a peculiar irony, however, that the Crucifixion killed Jesus, making him in effect the first martyr (and one who arguably did not desire it, at least according to Luke),56 while the reenactment of the Crucifixion on Francis did not kill him, despite his desire for martyrdom. Thomas presented Francis as a martyr in a third way as well: through the illnesses he suffered as he approached death. Toward the end of his life when he endured a series of debilitating illnesses that eventually killed him, one of his companions asked Francis “what he would prefer to endure: this long-lasting illness or suffering a martyr’s cruel death at the hands of an executioner.” Francis responded, “My son, whatever is more pleasing to the Lord my God to do with me and in me has always been and still is dearer, sweeter, and more agreeable to me. I desire to be found always and completely in harmony with and obedient to God’s will alone in everything.” Nevertheless, Francis admitted, “To suffer this illness, even for three days, would be harder for me than any martyrdom.”57 Thomas thus closed the gap between God’s plan for Francis, and Francis’s own desires. Martyrdom had been Francis’s desire, not God’s will. As he lay on his sickbed, Francis finally surrendered his will and sought only to follow God’s.

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Francis’s desire for martyrdom was paradoxically both denied and fulfilled. While martyrdom represented the complete humility of the Franciscan way of life, Francis’s desire for it was both an expression of his love of humility, but also of self-will. God did not want Francis to be a martyr (at least in the conventional sense). While he was dying, Francis willingly accepted suffering, but Thomas made clear that this suffering was not what Francis desired, but what God did. Thus, Thomas’s treatment of martyrdom and the desire for it extended far beyond the three journeys of Francis. It was a persistent desire throughout the vita, which far from demonstrating Francis’s sanctity, instead revealed the saint’s lingering self-will, extinguished only as he lay suffering and dying at the end of his life. This vita was not Thomas’s only hagiographic text devoted to Francis. In the decades that followed, Thomas continued to compose hagiographic material about his beloved founder, responding to the changing needs of the order. Perhaps the most influential work of Thomas was not the vita, but his adaptation of the vita for liturgical use. Thomas’s “Life of St. Francis” was written for the whole of Christendom, but the friars soon needed texts to be used in the annual celebration of their saint in their own churches and convents. Thomas himself adapted the vita he wrote for liturgical use, paring down Francis’s life to a few discrete episodes that could easily be read during a church service; a second office was written shortly after by Julian of Speyer, who also drew upon Thomas’s work. The episodes selected had the greatest influence on the shaping of Franciscan identity in the first generations of the order. Many friars did not read the Life of Francis, but all would have attended the yearly celebration of his sanctity. The two liturgies produced immediately after the saint’s elevation presented his desire for martyrdom in quite different ways. Thomas emphasized the importance of martyrdom in the Legend for the Use of the Choir, but gave it a different meaning than he had in the vita. The third reading emphasized the connection between martyrdom and the love of God, proclaiming that “because of his love for the Lord’s name, he loathed the world and wished to be released through the grace of martyrdom and to be with Christ.”58 In the vita, this rejection of the world was precisely what Thomas had critiqued. Francis’s trips to Morocco and Syria were then briefly mentioned; his desire to preach to infidels was sublimated to his desire for martyrdom. Yet the readings also show that in some ways Francis’s desire was misplaced, as Thomas had already hinted at in the vita. Martyrdom was a way for Francis to escape the tumbling world of flesh and desire, and unite himself with God. It was not out of desire to

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fulfill God’s will, for it was evident that Francis’s destiny was to remain in the world to found the order and inspire other Christians. The reading promoted the desire for martyrdom as a sign of Francis’s eagerness for God, but still categorized that desire as misguided. The Divine Office assembled by Julian of Speyer sometime in the early 1230s was also based on Thomas’s vita, and it continued and simplified Thomas’s martyrological argument. Julian referred to Francis as a “martyr by desire” in the Benedictus antiphon, without specific reference to any one of his journeys. Julian also picked up on the links between martyrdom and the stigmata, which Thomas ignored in his office.59 Julian recounted that Francis “desired still to endure anew all the sufferings of body and all the agonies of mind so that every wish of the Divine Purpose might be more perfectly fulfilled in him.”60 Through “prophecy of the book,” that is, randomly opening the scriptures and reading, he came both times to the story of the passion of Christ. Francis was not taken aback by this; “in fact, he who had long yearned to be a martyr . . . disposed himself zealously to be all that he could bear for Christ.”61 Thus, Julian, in contrast to Thomas, showed that the desire for martyrdom was congruent with Francis’s desire to follow God’s will.62 Martyrdom was thus important for Julian for different reasons—not as a part of preaching to Saracens, but the desire itself, alone, was emphasized as a sign of sanctity. In doing so, he granted Francis the title that was so elusive in Thomas; instead of striving for martyrdom and never achieving it, Julian neatly dubbed Francis a martyr, worthy through that very desire which was unfulfilled in Thomas’s account. Most friars’ understanding of the life of their founder was shaped through liturgical commemorations such as these, and thus the desire for martyrdom became one of Francis’s primary characteristics in the early and mid-thirteenth century. The liturgical commemoration of the desire for martyrdom made it a powerful model for his friars to follow. The complexity that Thomas invested in martyrdom was smoothed out.

Martyrdom After Francis The complex Franciscan relationship to martyrdom and the desire for it remained a potent but often subterranean river, spilling into open air only briefly; martyrdom and its values were often alluded to, but rarely were martyrs spoken of directly by name. According to Jordan of Giano (d. 1262), recalling his days as a young friar in Italy from his adopted home in Germany,

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Francis feared the story of the Moroccan martyrs might inspire love of glory rather than devotion to God, declaring “Everyone should glory in his own suffering and not in that of another.”63 While the stories of Francis’s desire for martyrdom continued to appear in accounts of the saint’s life, they were rarely cited as an inspiration in other texts or hagiographies. Franciscans were far more likely to cite the martyrs of Morocco. Ferdinand of Lisbon was moved by the sight of their bodies being returned to Coimbra in 1220 to leave the Augustinian canons and join a Franciscan convent. He too burned with desire for martyrdom and traveled to Morocco to preach to Muslims. Like Francis, he fell ill, and ended up in Italy, where he became the famous preacher Anthony of Padua, the second great saint of the Franciscan order.64 His professed name was taken from Anthony of Egypt, the first ascetic to desire martyrdom but never achieve it. Clare of Assisi and other members of her community were clearly familiar with the story of the martyrs of Morocco as well, and saw the martyrs as embodying the Franciscan virtues they wished to imitate; like Anthony, Clare desired to be a martyr following their example.65 In Thomas de Papia’s Dialogus de gestis sanctorum fratrum minorum (c. 1245), the Moroccan martyrs appear again as the inspiration for Anthony of Padua’s life, but rather strangely in a discussion of Franciscan holy men, the martyrs were not considered worthy of an entry under their own names and on their own merits.66 Likewise, Thomas of Celano briefly mentioned martyrs in the introduction to his “Treatise on the Miracles of Saint Francis,” written some thirty years after his first vita (c. 1252); the martyrs were lined up alongside Franciscan saints as exemplars of the extraordinary accomplishments of the order, but were given no names or identifying characteristics.67 When Bernard of Bessa listed eminent Franciscans at the beginning of his Liber de laudibus, the only martyrs he thought worthy of inclusion were Stephen of Narbonne and Raymond of Carbona, two Franciscan inquisitors killed in 1242 by Cathars. He made no mention of the friars who died in Morocco or other thirteenthcentury Franciscan martyrs, merely noting that “it would take too long to describe each of those who were martyred under the Saracens or heretics.”68 Martyrs were wonderful examples of Franciscan virtue in the abstract, but narratives and names were studiously avoided. The martyrs of Morocco were the first but not the last Franciscans to die preaching the gospel among the infidels, but evidence for other thirteenthcentury martyrs is even more scarce. Scholars have frequently cited the deaths of another group of seven friars who died in Ceuta in 1227; a letter preserved

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in a late fourteenth-century chronicle claims to have been written by one of the Franciscans, Daniel, while in prison. As Isabelle Heullant-Donat has argued, evidence suggests that these friars never existed; they were simply a duplication of the five martyrs of 1220.69 The two friars martyred in Muslimruled Valencia in 1231 were not mentioned until 1335.70 The thirteenthcentury Salimbene called his fellow Franciscan Simon of Montesarchio a martyr; he died in the political struggle between Frederick II and the papacy, but this argument was not picked up by anyone else.71 Strikingly, the papacy made no effort to use these deaths in their propaganda against Frederick II, although (as I will discuss below), the papacy was particularly keen to promote those who were killed as part of the persecution of heretics (which Frederick was accused of being). Other Franciscans sought martyrdom, but like Francis, failed to achieve it. Adam of Oxford (d. c. 1230s), an English friar and scholar who wanted to preach among the Muslims, only made it as far as Barletta in Apulia, and died there. His grave became a miracle site, which was more attention than most friars who had actually died as martyrs received.72 Other thirteenth-century texts reminded the friars that martyrological values represented the ultimate expression of their desire to be minores, as first suggested in the Regula non bullata, but without commemorating specific martyrs. The early Franciscan text “The Sacred Exchange between Saint Francis and Holy Poverty” declared that “the kingdom of heaven truly belongs to those who, of their own will, a spiritual intention, and a desire for eternal goods, possess nothing of this earth. It is necessary for those who do not care for the goods of the earth to live for those of heaven”73 —a concept that went back to Origen, if not earlier. The ideal Christian had nothing to do with earthly life; in “this present exile,” he or she was just waiting to return home to heaven. The text remains mysterious to modern scholars. Some early manuscripts contain the date of July 1227 for the text’s composition; the editor of the text, Stefano Brufani, however, doubted this claim.74 Likewise, some manuscripts offer Anthony of Padua or John of Parma as authors, though we have no conclusive evidence of when or by whom it was written. But it is clear that whoever wrote the “Sacred Exchange” tied martyrdom closely to the core Franciscan values of poverty and humility. The “Sacred Exchange” offers exactly what the title promises—a meeting between the saint and “Lady Poverty,” the embodiment of the virtue of poverty and “the queen of the virtues.” Francis and his brothers sought her out, finding her living alone on top of a high mountain. Lady Poverty recited her

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life to the brothers, which began in Paradise with Adam. Speaking of early Christian martyrs, she told Francis that, “because they were comforted not a little by my words, they willingly accepted the iron tearing at their bodies and enthusiastically saw the sacred blood flowing from their flesh.”75 In a sense, a life of poverty was a drawn-out form of martyrdom, or at the very least a form of training for it; this argument is implicit in texts like the Regula non bullata, but Lady Poverty made the connection directly. The friars learned that Lady Poverty had a sister, Lady Persecution, who “whenever she saw that some had become lukewarm in love, or a little forgetful of heavenly matters, or were setting their hearts on material goods, . . . immediately lifted her voice, immediately mobilized her army, and immediately filled the faces of my children with shame so that they would seek God’s name.”76 After the Peace of Constantine, however, Lady Persecution became separated from her sister, and as a result Christians attacked each other through war and competed in acquiring wealth. When Lady Poverty joined Francis and his companions in a meal, she was astonished to be served only crusts of barley bread and water. Delighting in their fidelity and return to the values of the early Christians, she told the friars that the angels and apostles exulted, and that “the martyrs rejoice in expecting that their own constancy in pouring out their sacred blood will be repeated.”77 Lady Poverty thus taught the friars that poverty, disregard for this world, persecution, and suffering were all entwined values, and that martyrdom was a fitting culmination of a life devoted to poverty. For the author of “The Sacred Exchange,” martyrdom presented none of the conundrums that it offered Thomas. The desire for martyrdom was synonymous with the desire for poverty and humility and thus encapsulated Franciscan values. In tying them together, the “Sacred Exchange” left little room for the Franciscans’ engagement in the world as preachers; Lady Poverty was clearly not a companion of evangelists. Was the call of the “Sacred Exchange” to martyrdom, requiring at least a pro forma commitment to preaching, or a call to strict asceticism and humility that led to death? Poverty is the central virtue, not martyrdom.

Resisting Martyrdom The martyrial logic of extreme humility was sometimes resisted, even in the thirteenth century. The “Legend of the Three Companions” derived in large part from material written down by Francis’s early companions—Leo,

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Angelo, and Rufino—in response to a request by a Franciscan council in 1247 for recollections about Francis and the early order. The legend belonged to a body of literature written after Thomas’s first vita, which was intended to present Francis and his early companions as engaged together in an enterprise of mutual effort, in contrast to Thomas’s first account which privileged the charismatic Francis and his leadership. Furthermore, the “Legend” rejected the hierarchy of Franciscan values that underpinned martyrdom. “The gentle father (Francis) reproved his brothers who were too harsh with themselves, laboring too much in vigils and fasts, and the physical discipline. For certain of them did mortify themselves so severely in order that they might repress in themselves the lusts of the flesh that it seemed that they hated their very selves.”78 This moderation, and the suggestion that hatred of the body was misdirected piety, suggests a less radical dichotomy between the flesh and the soul, temporal life and eternal life, salvation and damnation than was expressed in other sources, such as the “Sacred Exchange,” the Regula non bullata, or even Thomas’s vita prima. Nor did the “Legend of the Three Companions” mention any of Francis’s attempts to preach to the Muslims, or any desire on Francis’s part, or on the part of any of the other friars, to be a martyr. Nevertheless, the account proclaimed: “Such charity did burn within them that it seemed easy to them to yield their bodies to death, not for the love of Christ alone, but also for the salvation of souls, even of the bodies of their brethren.”79 The potential for martyrdom here was grounded in charity, not a desire to be united with Christ—charity that drove the brothers to win the “salvation of souls.” Martyrdom, then, was a potential outcome of preaching, but not a goal in itself. Scholars have read these accounts as part of a yearning for a simpler time in the order, a reaction against the increasing political engagement of the order. But strikingly, these stories from the second generation suggest a Francis who did not desire martyrdom, and who led a brotherhood whose poverty and humility was a way of being in the world, rather than a way to transcend it. They were thus in many ways more compatible with the contemporary activities of the order than earlier accounts like that of Thomas. Thomas of Celano also contributed to this second generation of narratives about Francis and his earliest companions, drawing upon the “Legend of the Three Companions” as well as another similar text, “The Assisi Compilation.” His “Remembrance of the Desire of the Soul,” also called the Vita secunda, focused, like the materials that he used, on the community rather than solely on the saint. Thus, Francis in this account went to Egypt with

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several companions; “they crossed the sea motivated by the fervor for martyrdom.”80 Thomas included the episode not as a part of an extended discussion of Francis’s desire for martyrdom, as in the Vita prima, but as a setup for his presence in the crusader camp in Damietta, where he prophesied the defeat of the crusader forces. The journey was not a sign of Francis’s sanctity, but a sign of the commitment of the early order. Like the “Legend of the Three Companions,” Francis told his companions that “it was just as much a sin to deprive the body without discernment of what it really needed as, prompted by gluttony, to offer it too much,”81 thus promoting a less severe division of the order from the world. Nevertheless, the “Remembrance” preserved one of the earliest descriptions of a Franciscan martyr. He was a lay brother who had joined the order at a young age, and was killed by “the Saracens.” Thomas gave neither his name, nor where he died, nor the date of his death, but preserved his last words to his companion, as he held the Franciscan rule in his hand: “Dear brother, I proclaim myself guilty before the eyes of Majesty of everything that I ever did against this holy Rule.”82 He was not credited with either the desire for martyrdom or the motivation to preach to Muslims. Instead, the narrative made being a Franciscan and following the rule synonymous with being a martyr.

Bonaventure and Martyrdom Martyrdom and the desire for it was thus deeply problematic for thirteenthcentury Franciscans. It suggested both humility and self-will, powerlessness but also a claim to authority, and it often advocated abandoning the world rather than saving it. This problem, tied to so many Franciscan values, was given a theological solution by Bonaventure, whose Legenda maior became the official hagiographical text of the saint; all others—including Thomas’s several vitae—were ordered to be destroyed by a Franciscan council in 1266. Like the “Sacred Exchange,” Bonaventure saw the friars as seeking out persecution; “in different parts of the world many insults were hurled against them as persons unknown and looked down upon, but true love of the Gospel of Christ had made them so patient, that they sought to be where they would suffer physical persecution rather than where their holiness was recognized and where they could glory in worldly honor.”83 For Thomas of Celano, the desire for martyrdom was an ambiguous sign of sanctity, a misplaced desire because of the implications of self-will and alienation from the world. For

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Bonaventure, Francis’s desire for martyrdom was but a symptom of his burning love of charity; “the poor man of Christ had nothing other than two small coins, namely his body and soul, which he could give away in generous charity.”84 Therefore, “he desired to offer to the Lord his own life as a living sacrifice in the flames of martyrdom so that he might repay Christ, who died for us, and inspire others to divine love.”85 With Bonaventure, the desire for martyrdom had become theological, an interpretation that drew upon the values embedded in the “Legend of the Three Companions.” Francis’s desire was no longer an expression of a desire to unite himself with God through death, but a desire to unite humanity to God, thus transforming the desire into another aspect of Francis’s Christomimesis. Bonaventure’s solution knitted together the disparate answers formulated over a half century of hagiographic wrestling with the desire for martyrdom and its complications. Thomas’s Vita prima emphasized the centrality of the desire, while the “Legend of the Three Companions” portrayed it as an expression of Francis’s willingness to die for others, and Thomas’s liturgical legend presented it as a rejection of the world and as devotion to Christ. Each reading was in some way problematic, but Bonaventure’s formulation brought all of them together in one theological construct. Bonaventure retold the story of Francis’s three attempts at martyrdom as acts of charity and removed the sense of failure that hung over them. He thus announced that Francis was being preserved for greater things following Francis’s second attempt at martyrdom, his voyage through Spain to Morocco, rather than at the end of his third voyage, as Thomas had done. Unsurprisingly, he dropped Thomas’s quotation of scripture that God “withstood him to his face.” Furthermore, Bonaventure depicted the saint’s journey to Egypt as a success, showing al-Ka¯mil as being compelled by Francis’s teaching, but afraid to convert due to the reaction of his people. Francis thus did not fail as a preacher in Egypt; it was the fault of the Muslim sultan, who saw the truth but feared to follow it. Francis was thus truly blessed, for “the persecutor’s sword did not take away, and who yet did not lose the palm of martyrdom!”86 Where Thomas’s Francis failed to convert Muslims, Bonaventure described the effect of Franciscan poverty on an anonymous Muslim, who was moved to give alms. Bonaventure gushed, “O ineffable value of poverty, whose marvelous power moved the fierce heart of a barbarian to such sweet piety!”87 Persecution and the potential for martyrdom were not paths toward separation from the world, but means to transform it. In his Legenda minor, intended for liturgical use on the Octave of the Feast of Saint

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Francis, the desire for martyrdom was reduced to a single episode, in which God miraculously sustained Francis and his fellow travelers after his trip to Syria was thwarted. The episode thus demonstrated that “God was always within.”88

Franciscan Mysticism Martyrdom became meaningful as a symbol of Franciscan identity and values in two ways; it signaled separation and even rejection of the world and, at the same time, humility in accepting death. More specifically, it seemed to be the most complete way in which a Christian could follow Christ; martyrdom was the closest one could come to crucifixion, the stigmata being bestowed only by God, not received as a result of human desire. Indeed, Ubertino da Casale (1305) understood Francis’s desire for martyrdom through the language of sacrifice; his body was a holocaust offered up to God. His desire was fulfilled in the stigmata, because like Jesus “mere human hands did not shed Francis’s blood; instead, Jesus with His most holy hands mentally and corporally martyred and wounded him with the pains and wounds of His most holy cross, so that the words of Hebrews might be applied to him: “Like the Son of God, He remains a priest forever.”89 By the later thirteenth century, the call for the Christian to conform to Christ was not through the literal self-sacrifice of martyrdom, but through mystical ascent and union with the crucified Christ. For Bonaventure, this was what Francis had achieved, and the result was the stigmata. The mystical meaning of the desire to die through martyrdom was not the rejection of the world, but a willingness to die for it, combining a love of God and a love of humanity. It was the desire to be free of sin and full of grace. The Bonaventurean desire for martyrdom did not lead to death, but to mystical ascent, and union with the Godhead. Of course, the Franciscans were not the only ones thinking about martyrdom and desire for it in the thirteenth century. The most popular martyr of the thirteenth century was not a Franciscan, but a Dominican, Peter of Verona. He was assassinated in the course of his work as an inquisitor in Milan and came to be known simply as “Peter Martyr.” Innocent IV elevated him to sainthood less than a year after his death; his was the speediest sanctification on record to this day. Innocent canonized five other saints during his pontificate, all defenders of the church like Peter.90 Unsurprisingly, Dominicans also ascribed to Peter the desire for martyrdom. Even the founder of the order,

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Dominic de Guzma´n, had “thirsted for martyrdom” while preaching to heretics in Toulouse,91 and mourned because “he was not worthy of the honor of martyrdom”92—according to two of his hagiographers. Like Francis, Peter was an “alter Christus.” Peter’s murder during the Easter season made the comparison even easier. With Peter, the Dominicans hoped in some way to surpass Francis, who had so ardently desired martyrdom and did not receive it. Peter wanted it, and God gave it to him. For the Dominicans, then, the desire for martyrdom was also about conforming one’s life to Christ; it did not, however, embody the virtues of humility and poverty to the same extent as for the Franciscans. The Dominicans were able to claim for Peter the triple crown—doctor, virgin, and martyr—a claim that was surely intended to counter Francis’s own reputation, and perhaps particularly the stigmata. Francis, after all, could only claim two of these titles (at least before the end of the fourteenth century). Fra Angelico, the Dominican painter of the fifteenth century, even painted them in parallel: Francis receiving the stigmata was paired with the martyrdom of Peter, with their respective wounds matching.93 By the fourteenth century, Peter’s association with martyrdom was so strong that a local Franciscan chronicle from Ireland mentioned his holy death, but never mentioned the martyrdom of any Franciscans.94

Conclusion For the first century of the Franciscan Order’s existence, martyrdom lurked uneasily under many of the community’s values and cherished narratives. Desired but not achieved, praised but criticized, an escape from the world but a sign of a friar’s love for it, martyrdom summed up the many directions Franciscans were drawn toward in their first decades. Subsequent generations of friars brought some clarity to the place the desire for martyrdom should have in a friar’s life. Martyrdom among Franciscans in the thirteenth century was regarded as a sign of sanctity when expressed as a desire, but its achievement excited little interest. Thomas of Celano thus praised Francis for his desire, but insisted that God would not let him achieve it. Other brothers, close to Francis, downplayed the desire for martyrdom, and even suggested that the saint did not approve of the negative attitudes toward the body that shared with the martyrial perspective contempt for the world and the human body. Only in the fourteenth century did Franciscans grow fascinated by their brothers who had died violently and willingly.

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“To Sustain the Frail” Franciscan Evangelization in the Thirteenth Century

In 1260 Vincent of Beauvais produced a revised version of his extraordinary encyclopedia, the Speculum maius (“The Great Mirror”). A vast compendium of all knowledge designed to aid his fellow Dominicans who were unable to attend the University of Paris, it was split into three major sections: natural history (Speculum naturale), theology (Speculum doctrinale), and history (Speculum historiale). The Speculum historiale alone was composed of thirtyone books divided into 3,793 chapters—in the 1473 printed edition, it ran to 1,569 dense pages of double columns over four volumes. Its length is perhaps justified by the fact that it begins with Adam and Eve and concludes with a description of the end of time. The vast majority of Vincent’s history was based on the work of earlier historians and chroniclers—figures like Eusebius of Caesarea, Jerome, Augustine, Cassiodorus, Orosius, Hugh of Fleury, and many others. History did not just happen; God was directing it toward a particular goal, and the chroniclers of Christian history had kneaded the messy history of Christianity into a narrative that displayed that divine destiny. Vincent has held an important place in the history of the Franciscans (though he himself was a Dominican) because his chronicle preserved some of the accounts of the best-known Franciscan “missions” of the Middle Ages—those to the Mongols. The Speculum historiale told of the extraordinary journey and experiences of the Franciscan Giovanni da Pian del Carpine as well as of the Dominican Simon de Saint Quentin,1 both of whom departed in 1245 as part of a three-pronged diplomatic initiative to the Mongols. Giovanni was sent to the Mongol army

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operating in the Black Sea region, led by Baku, a grandson of Genghis Khan. Once he had made it to the army camp on the Volga, Baku sent him on to Mongolia to present himself to the newly chosen great khan, his cousin Gu¨yu¨k. Meanwhile, Simon’s mission was less of a success. He was sent to the army of the Mongol general Baiju, then bivouacked in eastern Armenia.2 Simon and his companions failed to understand the culture of the Mongols and were sent back to western Europe with the demand that the pope submit himself personally to the great khan. Vincent’s blended narrative of the Mongols based on Giovanni and Simon’s accounts was profoundly influential. The Speculum historiale survives in hundreds of manuscripts, and the information that Vincent provided to kings, bishops, and monasteries throughout Latin Europe was the first substantive report about the Mongols, whose sudden appearance and string of stunning victories in eastern Europe and the Middle East had terrified many. At the same time, it also promoted the mendicants as brave adventurers willing to risk death for the sake of Christendom. Giovanni and Simon were in the vanguard of a wave of friars who traveled throughout the Mongol realms for the next century and a half, and their travels and experiences were breathlessly reported throughout western Christendom. The Franciscan chronicler Salimbene di Adam, writing forty years later, vividly recalled the day he met Giovanni, who listened to the brothers read from his book and “interpreted it and explained passages that seemed difficult or hard to believe.”3 The “Mongol mission” was a powerful source of prestige for the two orders. But this chapter is not about the Mongol mission. While it was by far the most famous Franciscan engagement with non-Christians during the Middle Ages, it was by no means the first or the only one. Franciscan evangelizing outside the bounds of Christendom began decades earlier in North Africa; Francis himself and the five martyrs of Morocco were only the first of a stream of Franciscans who traveled to Morocco in the thirteenth century. Their successors managed to remain and survive in the Maghreb (the Islamic West, or Muslim North Africa), establishing the first mendicant presence in the lands of Islam. Yet those Franciscans did not appear in Vincent’s work, or even in Franciscan chronicles. While extended accounts survive of the initial Franciscan missions to Germany, Spain, and England,4 only non-Franciscan sources alert us to even the existence of Franciscans living among the Muslims in North Africa—never mind supplying a narrative of their travels or achievements. Strikingly, Franciscan evangelists who traveled among the Mongols

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once they had converted to Islam were also less well known, though today they have been rediscovered. The letters of Giovanni di Montecorvino, first archbishop of Mongol Khan-balik (modern Beijing), were preserved in a single fourteenth-century Franciscan chronicle that probably only ever existed in two manuscripts (see Chapter 5 for more on this chronicle), and Giovanni himself was forgotten until the Irish Franciscan scholar Luke Wadding (1588–1657), living in an age of worldwide evangelization, reprinted them in his monumental collection of Franciscan sources Annales minorum. Just as Franciscans ignored the martyrs in the thirteenth century in favor of friars displaying the virtue of the desire for martyrdom, so too did they ignore their brethren laboring outside the borders of Christendom. In contrast, the popes saw the friars (Franciscan and Dominican) as useful in extending the reach of papal influence, and as evidence of active Christian engagement with the “problem” of Islam. Thus, the majority of records that survive are from papal documentary sources. Modern historians have followed in Vincent’s footsteps; the early journeys of the friars among the Mongols are a staple of undergraduate teaching and have inspired an entire library’s worth of books and articles.5 The scholarship devoted to the mendicant presence in North Africa, on the other hand, would scarcely fill a single shelf.6 In examining the place of martyrdom within the Franciscan order, it is essential to consider these invisible friars—the ones who, like the martyrs, traveled into the Muslim world, but unlike them, did not die there. The discourse of martyrdom and evangelization are two sides of the same coin; only one is visible at a time, but turn the coin over, and the other emerges into the light. The absence of friars working among Muslims from Franciscan sources is further evidence of the order’s lack of interest in engaging with Islamic communities. Whereas the friars who in the thirteenth century traveled among the Mongols (who at that point were neither Christian nor Muslim) were heroes inside the order as well as outside, their brethren in the Maghreb were ignored. Why this discrepancy? There are a number of reasons. The most obvious is that the journeys among the Mongols offered access to an entire world scarcely known to Latin Christians, and that the Mongols themselves were seen as an immediate and existential threat to western Christendom. But the fact that the Mongols did not follow a monotheistic faith also played a role. If the potential threat seemed high, so did the potential for conversion. The encounter with the Mongols fitted within a long narrative of Latin Christian encounters with threatening non-Christian groups. Christian

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chronicles retold the stories of pagan barbarians of all stripes, from Visigoths to Norsemen, who threatened Christian lands but eventually were converted to Christianity and became part of Christendom. Such spiritual victories, accompanied by military ones, were all part of God’s plan for the world, which led inexorably toward the expansion of Christianity throughout the world, and then to Christ’s triumphant return and defeat of all evil. The ninth-century hagiographer of Saint Vitus could revel in the triumphs of the saints and martyrs over the British, the English, and the Saxons; perhaps thirteenth-century hagiographers would be able to add the Mongols to this list.7 In contrast, no such narrative existed in regard to Muslims. Christians may have conquered some Muslim territory in Spain, but no one could speak of the conversion of whole groups, from the rulers down to the peasants, as was possible in reference to pagans. But perhaps even more important, the Franciscans were uninterested in depicting Islam and Muslims as susceptible to conversion and inclusion in the corporate Christian body. As a result, friars who ventured among Muslims gained little attention from their brethren. Just as the evidence for martyrs who actually died in the thirteenth century is quite thin, we also find on closer examination very few “missionaries.” Evangelizing among infidels was an essential part of Franciscan values, enshrined (as we have seen) in the Franciscan Rule itself; yet those activities were routinely ignored by the order and few Franciscans spent long periods of time in Muslim lands. The same was true of the Dominicans; Robin Vose has argued that “in the medieval period, the Dominican order as a whole did little to consciously or explicitly dedicate itself to any external mission of preaching among non-Christians.”8 Working in Muslim lands required compromise and calculation. It required the friars to think about Islam and Muslims, rather than with Islam and Muslims. Compared to the energy mendicants expended on preaching within Christendom, the effort expended in converting Muslims was minimal. Why? Simply put, Muslims themselves did not matter. They were a vehicle through which Franciscans could demonstrate their particular piety, but their conversion did not demonstrate that piety as effectively as the desire for martyrdom. The popes, on the other hand, did esteem mendicants who worked in Islamic lands, but this does not mean that conversion of Muslims was at the top of their agenda either. The popes sent mendicants to non-Christian territories to fulfill a number of tasks—comfort the enslaved, corral erring merchants, serve as ambassadors, envoys, or spies—and while the work of evangelization was frequently evoked, it was rarely the primary goal. The

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papacy used the mendicants for diplomatic purposes to control Christians living under Muslim rule, and to continue their struggle against Islam in less militaristic ways. As Brett Whalen has noted, popes sent out the friars as part of “the contemporary papal effort to properly regulate, educate, and indoctrinate members of the Christian laity.”9 In one sense, the popes did not need Mongols or Muslims to convert; it was ideologically sufficient that a pope be able to claim that he enabled the word of God to be preached to all the nations. The burden of ensuring that the infidels recognized the truth they were being offered fell to them—and to God.

Evangelization and Martyrdom in the Early Thirteenth Century The Franciscan call to evangelization was directed toward all peoples, both Christians and infidels. The early thirteenth century saw evangelists sent to both partes fidelium et infidelium, and martyrdom was seen as a possible outcome in both realms. Jordan, a friar from the small village of Giano in Umbria, was a member of the mission sent to Germany in 1221, and in his old age he wrote an account of how he and other friars had left Italy and gone out to the nations. Surveying the early efforts of the friars, Jordan saw a history of failure. The first mission in 1217 to Theutonia, as Jordan referred to Germany, ended abruptly in failure when the brothers, ignorant of the German language, meekly answered every question, “ja”—including the question, “Are you heretics?” Stripped and imprisoned for heresy, the brothers soon fled back to Italy, giving Germany a reputation as a cruel and inhospitable land. As a result, Jordan remembered that the friars “did not dare to go there, unless inspired by the desire for martyrdom.”10 If there were any such friars, Jordan did not name them. Likewise, the members of the first expedition to Hungary were robbed of all their clothing, repeatedly; one brother resorted to smearing his underpants with cow dung so that at least these might not be stolen, and he be left totally naked. Eventually they too abandoned Hungary and returned to Italy. It was in this context of failed missions that Jordan mentioned the five friars who were martyred in Morocco, having been sent out from Italy at the same time. Their deaths were just another example, perhaps more glorious than that of the half-naked friar smeared with cow dung, of how the early Franciscan missions “came to nothing,” as Jordan put it.11

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Jordan himself was part of a second, successful mission to Germany in 1221. About ninety friars volunteered, “inflamed by desire and offering themselves for death.”12 Jordan himself was among the audience, and as he watched the friars volunteer, he was certain that he was watching the next generation of Franciscan martyrs being chosen, so he jumped up to ask them their names and speak to them; he regretted that he had not personally known the friars who died in Morocco. One of them, Palmerius, insisted that Jordan should join the expedition, despite his evident fear of German violence. He, of course, survived the mission, which turned out to be a success. From the perspective of the aged Jordan, writing in Germany around 1260, martyrdom might happen to some, but it was not the standard by which Franciscan identity or success should be measured: Jordan clearly thought the accomplishments of the friars in preaching in Germany and successfully establishing convents there was far more of a triumph than dying as a martyr in Morocco. Conceptually, Franciscans made little distinction among non-Christians. If we return to the foundational texts of the order, we find that terra Saracenorum (the lands of the Muslims) was used interchangeably with the broader partes infidelium (territories of the infidels). Both the Regula non bullata and the Regula bullata mention “those going among the Saracens or other infidels” without distinguishing between the two; yet both Francis and the martyrs of Morocco chose to travel specifically to Islamic lands. The Franciscans who were sent to North Africa as evangelists were thus following in the footsteps of their revered founder and the martyrs who had proved so inspirational to the likes of Anthony of Padua. Those going among the Mongols, in contrast, were sent to polytheists whose conceptions of religious ritual, authority, and their relationship to secular power was at times baffling to Latin Christians. When contact began, the Mongols adhered to a syncretic and shamanistic tradition of their own, but as the Mongol Empire fragmented, the Ilkhanids (ruling Persia and Iraq) converted to Islam in 1295 as did the Golden Horde (ruling in the northern Black Sea region) in 1313, and historiography has implicitly narrated western evangelization against the eventual “Muslim turn.”13 Nevertheless, the Franciscans in North Africa and the Mongol Empire faced similar challenges and directed their efforts toward similar goals—and converting the ruling elite (whether animist Mongols or Muslim Almohads) was only sporadically considered. Instead, the friars focused on comforting captive Christians, ministering to Christians in service to non-Christian rulers, and serving as papal emissaries.

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“A Sterile Church Made Fertile”: Or, How to Build a Church among the Muslims In 1237 Pope Gregory IX called upon all the Christians of Morocco to rejoice, for their church, once sterile, was now fertile again; Gregory likened it to Israel returning from Babylonian captivity.14 Mendicants had been hard at work in North Africa for over a decade, and their tilling was bearing fruit. Yet behind the exultant language, Gregory sounded anxious. His rhetoric of renewal implied that the Christian community of Morocco was regaining its ancient size and vitality, an image that was at odds with the reality of a community that was made up entirely of Latin mendicants, merchants, captives, and mercenaries. In the bull, the pope commended his unnamed Franciscan bishop to the Christian community in Morocco, but he clearly suspected that they were not fully in support of the bishop’s efforts. The rhetorical language of the bull makes it difficult for us to know who or what was causing the pope’s concern. Who were these other Christians? Were they merchants, or perhaps the priests who accompanied them from their native cities? Was Gregory thinking of mercenaries who served in the army and associated with powerful Almohad officials, even the caliph himself ? Or were they Christians who were obstructing the bishop’s mission within Christendom? Perhaps the bishop of the newly fertile church was not even in Morocco himself. The papal bull raises a number of questions about the Franciscans’ presence in Morocco and their goals and achievements. What were they doing there? What did the “fertile” church look like? And why did the popes care so much and the Franciscans so little? The third-century North African theologian Tertullian famously claimed that “blood was the seed of Christians.”15 Those who hoped to build up a church with all its institutions in the later Middle Ages were a bit more hardheaded about the process than Tertullian was, believing that living priests and bishops were much more useful than dead ones, even if they died as martyrs. The mendicant experiment in North Africa was the first attempt by the papacy to build an ecclesiastical institution in infidel lands, and the successes and failures of that endeavor shaped the later efforts to do the same in the Mongol Empire. The mendicants were the principal agents of the papacy in both areas, but this was a novelty. The combination of an international religious order working at the behest of a pope who claimed universal dominion made the mendicant evangelization of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries entirely different from the evangelizing efforts of earlier generations.

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Before the appearance of the mendicant orders, evangelization was largely a local affair. With the exception of a few unusual cases, such as Augustine’s mission to the Anglo-Saxons in the seventh century, most evangelists were sent out by bishops and monasteries that neighbored non-Christian communities, not by the pope. Their efforts were sometimes encouraged by Rome, and the creation of new dioceses by the papacy gave institutional support to successful evangelists, but the papacy was not the driving force behind their efforts. For recently conquered areas that had a large proportion of nonChristians, the Cistercians had often been favored in the twelfth century, particularly in the Baltic region.16 In the thirteenth century, the papacy favored the mendicants for this task. To some extent, they succeeded in both North Africa and in the Mongol domains, but those successes were temporary. Nor was their success tied to any large-scale conversions; they were established in places where Latin Christian merchants were most active, and thus the friars served as nodes of papal power, where they might enforce papal policy. New dioceses were constructed on mendicant foundations, and there was no attempt to build institutions on the model of a bishopric within Christendom. While certain aspects of that model would be difficult to transpose, the utter reliance on the mendicants makes clear that the spread of Latin Christian institutions should not be conflated with the establishment of the underlying social components that they would imply within Christendom—a parish community, local forms of financial support, and a clergy drawn from the local population.

The Almohad World Franciscan engagement with non-Christians began in North Africa. As we have seen, Francis’s first attempt to achieve martyrdom led him toward Morocco “to preach the gospel of Christ to the Miramolin and his retinue.”17 “The Miramolin,” as the Almohad caliph was called in western Christendom, was a title that resounded with the frightening power of a threatening foreign lord.18 The word was an attempt to transcribe the title “Amir al-Mu’minı¯n” (the leader of the faithful), which was commonly held by caliphs in both alMaghreb (western Islamic lands) and al-Mashriq (eastern lands); it is still used by the kings of Morocco today. The Almohad caliphate had emerged out of a religious movement begun by Muhammad ibn ‘Abd Allah ibn

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Tu¯mart (c. 1082–c. 1130) in the southern reaches of what is now Morocco, eventually centering on Tinmallal (today Tinmal) in the Atlas mountains. Ibn Tu¯mart encouraged the pious avoidance of alcohol, dancing, and music and emphasized the importance of the oneness of God; he also taught a form of Qur’a¯nic interpretation that conflicted with the Ma¯likı¯ school of interpretation, then dominant in the Maghreb. He even went so far as to declare himself to be an infallible interpreter of the Qur’a¯n; his followers in 1121 identified him as the Mahdı¯, the messianic figure who would come to establish a kingdom of peace and justice.19 His theological teachings had a political impact, and his followers, the Al-Muwahhidu¯n (those devoted to the oneness of God, anglicized as Almohads), soon came into conflict with the ruling Almoravids (Al-Mura¯bitu¯n, those who fight at the ribat, a frontier fortification). ‘Abd al-Mu’min, the first Almohad caliph, captured the capital Marrakesh in 1147, and most of the Maghreb and al-Andalus fell under Almohad sway in the decades that followed. For Castilians in particular, the Almohad domains in al-Andalus were uncomfortably close to their own lands and cities. Toledo, conquered by Alfonso VI in 1085, still lay close to Almohad territories throughout the second half of the twelfth century; raids riding up the Tagus River valley could easily reach the city within a day, and indeed, as late as 1196 the Almohad army ravaged the hinterlands of Toledo for over a week.20 At the Battle of Alarcos in 1195, Abu¯ Yu¯suf Ya’qu¯b al-Mans.u¯r, the “Miramolin,” had crushed the Castilian army. Killed in the battle were the bishops of Avila, Segovia, and Siguenza, as well as the leaders of both the orders of Calatrava and Evora. It seemed that in Spain just as in the Holy Land, the ephemeral rule of Christians over an Islamic land could pass away. But the great power of the Almohads was beginning to crumble around the time of Francis’s attempted visit. The Castilian king Alfonso VIII, who had fled the battlefield at Alarcos in fear of his life, again faced his Almohad foe on the battlefield in 1212. This time, Alfonso marched alongside his fellow Spanish monarchs, the kings of Aragon and Navarre, as well as Occitan nobles and others responding to a crusade proclaimed against the Almohads.21 The Christian armies routed the forces commanded by Muh.ammad al-Na¯s.ir, the son of the great al-Mans.u¯r, the victor at Alarcos. The defeat of the Almohads at Las Navas de Tolosa weakened the control of the dynasty over their empire, and emboldened the Spanish monarchs to seize the greater part of the Almohad possessions in al-Andalus over the coming decades. By

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1248 Granada remained the only Muslim principality in Iberia, and by 1269 the Almohads had lost power entirely. The succeeding Marinid dynasty dominated Morocco for the following two centuries, and though they attempted to reconstitute the Almohad domains, they never succeeded in regaining the lands lost on the Iberian peninsula, with the exception of occasional toeholds in places like Tarifa, near Gibraltar. Francis of Assisi set out on his first attempt at martyrdom for the “lands of the Miramolin” not long after the great battle of Las Navas. Did the rumors of the coming crusade against the mighty Almohads spark his desire to court martyrdom and preach to the Miramolin? Alberic of Trois-Fontaine testified that litanies and prayers were recited in the churches of Rome prior to the battle; Francis might well have heard about the coming crusade in such a way.22 Or had he already heard of the great victory before he left, and sought to take advantage of the possibility of entering the lands of a defeated Muslim monarch, now all the more vulnerable to triumphalist Christian preaching? In either case, he displayed remarkably similar timing years later when he traveled to Egypt, again to confront a Muslim ruler in the midst of a crusade. Though Francis was prevented from reaching his destination, six friars followed quickly in his footsteps: Vitale, Beraldo, Otto, Accursio, Adiuto, and Pietro set out for the lands of the Miramolin in 1219. Vitale had to remain in Christian lands due to illness, but the others continued on to be the first mendicants to reach Morocco, and their deaths inspired the likes of Anthony of Padua, who himself tried to evangelize in Morocco in the early 1220s. We know little of their reasons for going, or what happened during their time in the Almohad lands, but Francis’s own journey must have been a powerful incentive. Their mission ended with their deaths; it was another five years before other friars ventured to the Almohad Empire—and when they came, they were sent by the papacy, the first papally directed effort to evangelize Muslims of the thirteenth century. The friars left Christendom and traveled among the infidels generally for one reason: they were sent, usually by the pope.23 We cannot be certain how much choice individual friars themselves were given in the matter; they may have been willing volunteers, or they may have been given their assignment without much consultation. The popes articulated their intentions through letters directed to the friars themselves and to the non-Christian rulers to whom they were sent, as well as to Christian rulers and bishops who might serve as sources of support for the papal envoys. The letters (sometimes

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referred to as bulls, for the lead seals [in Latin, bulla] affixed to them) were not private communications, but public performances, meant to evoke a virtual papal presence. Mendicants thus became papal avatars in Islamic lands. Papal bulls were certainly of little use in converting Muslims, but quite helpful in the exercise of the various pastoral responsibilities the friars were given over Christians in infidel lands. Others sought the same authority by different means: when the Crown of Aragon attempted to establish an Almohad scion as ruler in Tunis in 1289, part of the treaty with him mandated that the Aragonese king be given authority over the Latin Christian mercenaries and merchants of the city.24 The mendicant presence in the Maghreb represented a first for the papacy as well, though the popes had been writing to the Muslim rulers of the Maghreb for centuries; Gregory VII (1073–85) had written to al-Nas.ir, the ruler of Bougie in Tunisia in 1076 in a letter that has endeared itself to the modern reader by its seemingly pacific ecumenicism.25 Celestine III (1191–98) had sent a priest to Marrakesh and Seville in 1192, but his task was limited to pastoral care of Christians; he was not a papal representative (the pope asked the archbishop of Toledo to send him) nor was he vested with the powers of excommunication as later mendicants were.26 The first surviving letter to an Almohad ruler came from Innocent III in 1199, written to facilitate the work of the Trinitarians, a new order devoted to the redemption of Christian captives. In his letter, the pope emphasized not only the charitable nature of the work, but also the shared benefit it brought to Christians and Muslims alike, for the Trinitarians often traded Muslim captives from Europe for Christian ones in the Maghreb.27 Papal interest in the Almohad domain had intensified in the 1220s as part of a broader effort to exert papal influence on the peripheries of Latin Christendom.28 In 1221 Honorius III (1216–27) issued a call for clerics to participate in a broad campaign of evangelization. The letter, sent across Latin Christendom, did not specify where the evangelists were to be sent, naming only “other provinces” and “the desert of various peoples.”29 Honorius suggested that the bishops to whom the letter was addressed might send Cistercians or other religious, but did not mention either Dominicans or Franciscans explicitly. The letter was sent at the height of the Fifth Crusade; crusader armies had captured the city of Damietta the previous year, and were planning on marching to Cairo. The pope hoped that the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II would soon fulfill his vow and lead the crusade to a victorious end. The summons to evangelization was thus a triumphal call to

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continue the expansion of Christendom; it was not a replacement or alternative to crusade, but its corollary. The bull was issued a year after Francis had traveled to Egypt and the five friars had died in Marrakesh. The absence of the mendicants is puzzling. Was it a reaction to the death of the Moroccan martyrs, or even to Francis’s own journey to Egypt? It is a reminder that, at the very minimum, the mendicants did not yet have a monopoly on evangelization, at least in papal eyes. The friars who came to North Africa encountered many other western Christians. Primary among them were mercenaries in the employ of the Almohads. The predecessors of the Almohads, the Almoravids, had often employed Christian mercenaries as well. Soldiers became mercenaries through a variety of means. Some were captives and were forcibly drafted; others joined freely, often because they were unwelcome in their Christian homelands.30 The Portuguese infante Pedro, one of the central figures in the story of the Moroccan martyrs, was such a mercenary. The brother of King Afonso II, he fled Portugal over disagreements about the royal patrimony and took service with the Almohad caliph. Perhaps the best-documented Christian to serve under the authority of Moroccan emirs was the Catalan lord Reverter (d. 1145), who had been the viscount of Barcelona and lord of La Guardia de Monserrat before he was taken captive in an raid on the Catalan coast around 1120.31 He participated in Almoravid campaigns against the Almohads, and in several Muslim sources he appeared as the “qa¯’id alRu¯m” (commander of the Christians), a figure of some repute and importance. The title probably referred to his authority over his fellow Christian mercenaries. His son converted to Islam, taking the name of Abu¯’l-H . asan ‘Alı¯, and served in turn under the Almohads. When he died fighting in Ifrikiya in 1187, the chronicler Ibn ‘Ida¯rı¯ suggested that he should be considered ¯ a martyr.32 Many other Christians served under both Almoravid and Almohad sultans, though garnering less fame for themselves. Some converted, as did Reverter’s son, but others remained Christian even as they served the caliphs.33 Christian soldiers offered their Muslim employers a number of advantages: they were dependent entirely on the sovereign (as were their Muslim counterparts in Christian courts), and they were trained with distinctive military skills. Their lack of kin and other social connections made them ideal protectors of the royal person. Ibn Khaldu¯n, writing in the fourteenth century, commented that the sultan needed soldiers trained “to fight with firm

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footing”; their ability to form and hold a solid line in battle was widely admired.34 But mercenaries were not the only Christians to be found in North Africa; Latin merchants were also a significant presence in Maghrebi cities. While mercenaries and captives were immersed in the Maghrebi world, merchants often lived apart in a peculiar institution of the medieval world, the funduk. The funduk was a type of mercantile colony, a small section of a city that was set aside for foreign merchants. Merchants of various origins would often have their own funduks, each with all the institutions necessary for its functioning, such as bakehouses, churches, and monasteries.35 Many Mediterranean mercantile cities would thus have contained within them miniature replicas of others: tiny Genoas and Venices jostled inside cities such as Alexandria, Acre, and Tunis.

The Mendicant Maghreb The first mendicants to arrive—and survive—in North Africa came five years after the martyrs’ execution. On 10 June 1225, Honorius sent two Dominicans, Dominic and Martin, to the Miramolin.36 A great deal had changed in those five years. The Fifth Crusade had ended in disastrous defeat, and Honorius had been disappointed in his expectations of Emperor Frederick II’s commitment to crusade; he was still hoping that the emperor would depart on crusade that very month, but it was becoming increasingly clear that the emperor was not going. The papal decision to focus on Muslim North Africa may have been an expression of continued resistance to Islam, in contrast to the triumphalism inherent in Honorius’s earlier call for evangelization. Dominic and Martin were instructed to “convert the incredulous, raise up the lapsed, sustain the frail, console the faint-hearted, and also comfort the strong.” The friars were also encouraged to engage in generic evangelization: the bull gave the friars permission “to preach, to baptize Saracens newly coming to the faith,” as well as to “absolve those excommunicated who cannot access the Apostolic Seat conveniently.”37 The same bull was issued to the Franciscans four months later. But it is clear that it was Christians about whom Honorius worried the most. A bull issued two years earlier to “Christians dispersed in Morocco” reveals some of the context that stoked Honorius’s concern. The pope was

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responding to reports that “when the king of Morocco triumphs over his enemies . . . he compels five Christians, great in religion and in fame, who live under his power to dine with him and eat meat, whether on Fridays or during Lent.”38 The petitioning Christians sought dispensation to attend the feasts and eat meat, which the pope granted. The conundrum of the five anonymous Christians reveals the complexity of living under the caliph’s rule. The five were evidently not captives, but not entirely free either. Their participation at the feasts of the caliph demonstrate both their high status and their importance to him. The five Christians were most likely mercenaries; one could imagine the infante Pedro as their former colleague. The danger of apostasy in such a setting was obvious; the Christians were feasting with Muslims on a regular basis in an atmosphere that would be conducive to establishing bonds of friendship; it is precisely such bonds that were most likely to lead someone to convert from one religion to another. The plight of the five Christians must have been particularly troubling to the pope given the context in which they were led to break their fast: at celebrations of the caliph’s victory and prosperity. Thus, they were not only being led to unchristian behavior, but they were doing so in order to celebrate the triumph of one of Christendom’s greatest enemies. The bulls that followed gave the friars guidance on how to function outside the borders of Christendom. Honorius issued a bull in 1226 on behalf of Dominicans and Franciscans working in Morocco which dispensed them from the requirements of their rule that they neither receive nor spend money. Furthermore, the bull acknowledged that the friars had to compromise in other ways as well, needing to change their clothes, hair, and beards in order to be inconspicuous.39 Notably, these bulls did not encourage the mendicants to think of themselves as potential martyrs, unlike other papal letters about evangelization. Honorius had previously offered martyrdom as one of the possible rewards to the evangelists he sought in 1221.40 In North Africa, in contrast, the pope was clearly more concerned that the friars continue to serve as effective ambassadors rather than risk being killed and alienating the Almohad leadership by openly evangelizing. The friars were directed to behave as the five beleaguered Christians did at the caliph’s court: compromise and blend in.41 Twenty days after he issued his first bull to Dominic and Martin, Honorius reissued it to Dominic as bishop.42 Yet the pope seemed uncertain about this role: in a subsequent bull, Dominic (presumably the same one) was referred to as “rector,” rather than “bishop.”43 Part of the confusion was

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because of a tussle over ecclesiastical oversight. Robin Vose has suggested that Dominic had been made bishop by Rodrigo Ximenez de Rada, the ambitious archbishop of Toledo, in an attempt to claim the Maghreb as part of the Hispanic church. By the following year, Honorius seems to have acceded to Rodrigo’s demands; he issued another bull in February 1226, which placed the clerics in Almohad lands under the authority of Archbishop Rodrigo. The pope urged the archbishop to support the friars caring for the numerous Christian captives in the lands of the Miramolin, and perhaps more importantly, to consecrate another bishop for Morocco, as well as other clerics: one bishop and a few friars could not adequately care for Christians scattered over such great distances.44 Although the bull contained a pro forma reference to the “conversion of infidels,” it is clear that the populations he was concerned for were Latin Christians living temporarily under Almohad rule, either voluntarily or not. The bull notably forbade other Christians from helping to expel the friars from Morocco—the pope recognized that caliphal orders might be carried out by Christian hands. For the popes, the Almohads were both a threat and an opportunity. They feared their military power and proximity to Christian lands, but also hoped that the lands of al-Andalus and the Maghreb could be returned to Christian dominion—by military force or by conversion, and so were eager to engage with the Almohads. The letters and bulls concerning the mendicant orders in the Maghreb, however, were not solely devoted to diplomatic exchange; they were intended to build up an ecclesiastical institution within the caliphate, and the friars were the tools to achieve that goal. Honorius’s concerns in the Almohad domains had a double focus: he sought diplomatic access to and leverage over the Almohad caliph, and he sought to extend papal authority over Christians living in the Miramolin’s domains, Christians who were perceived as being vulnerable to conversion to Islam, by force or by more subtle pressures. The defeat of the Almohads at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in some ways did not make the Almohad regime more hostile to the Christian world that had defeated it; instead, the Almohads’ diminishing power made them more dependent on Christians, particularly mercenaries.45 Caliph Muh.ammad al-Na¯s.ir died not long after his defeat at Las Navas, and his successor was his teenage son, Yu¯suf b. Abı¯ ‘Abd Alla¯h al-Mustans.ir, the executioner of the Moroccan martyrs.46 He died as a young man without direct heirs in 1224, and with his death the Almohad Empire entered an age of conflict between competing members of the Almohad dynasty. Idrı¯s Al-Ma’mu¯n

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(1227–32), an uncle of Yu¯suf and one of the competing caliphs, strategically expanded the use of Christian mercenaries as a way to reduce reliance on the Berber lords who had been the traditional backbone of Almohad support. He also renounced the traditional Almohad teaching claiming that Ibn Tu¯mart was the Mahdı¯, declaring, “There is no other Mahdı¯ than Jesus, the son of Mary.”47 He had been proclaimed caliph in Seville in 1227 as a successor to his brother al-’A¯dil, who had seized power in al-Andalus in the chaos that followed the death of Al-Mustans.ir.48 The fourteenth-century chronicler Ibn Abı¯ Zar’ alleged that Al-Ma’mu¯n had concluded an alliance with Ferdinand III of Castile and thereby acquired twelve thousand soldiers for the price of several border fortresses and the construction of a church in Marrakesh.49 It is unlikely that this alliance existed, at least under these terms50 — but the allegation that Al-Ma’mu¯n promoted Christian interests reflected his reliance on Christian mercenaries. It was in this context that Pope Gregory IX issued his bull celebrating the fertility of the Christian church in Morocco. The pope urged AlMa’mu¯n’s son and successor ‘Abd al-Wa¯h.id al-Rashı¯d (1232–42) in 1233 to convert to Christianity,51 and to listen particularly to the Franciscan bishop of Fez, Agnellus.52 Gregory even threatened the caliph; he warned that should he continue to remain a Muslim, Gregory would forbid Christians to work alongside him. While this was a threat that Gregory could not make good on, it was a reminder to the caliph of how important Christian mercenaries and merchants were to his authority. Agnellus was the first prelate mentioned with a seat specifically located in North Africa, and indeed, was the first Franciscan to be elevated to an episcopal seat. Notably, his see was the city of Fez, as the traditional Almohad capital of Marrakesh was occupied by ‘Abd al-Wa¯h.id’s rival, Yahya.

Workers in the Vineyard The papal bulls concerning the mission in North Africa employed a rich vocabulary of biblical imagery to praise and encourage the friars in their endeavor. They are the first evangelizing bulls of the papacy targeted at a specific Muslim region. The first bull, Vinee domini, issued initially to the Dominicans and then to the Franciscans, began with an evocation of the friars as “custodians” and “workers in the vineyard of the Lord,” language which had long been applied to the apostles and to evangelists generally.53

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The language of the Lord’s vineyard and “workers” is broad, stretching across several different parables in the synoptic gospels. But the vocabulary of the bull does not quote any specific text; the opening line of the bull, “vinee domini” (the “vineyard of the Lord), does not appear in any of the parables, nor are the laborers called “custodies” in any of them. The parable in Mark of the subtenants who kill the emissaries of the owner of the vineyard does refer to “dominus vineae” (Mark 12:1–11), but this reverses the grammar—“the lord of the vineyard,” rather than the “vineyard of the Lord.”54 Matthew’s parable about the owner of the vineyard who hires workers also includes a “dominus vineae” (Matt. 20:8), as well as “operariis” (Matt. 20:2), instead of “custodies.” Rather than a specific biblical reference, the vineyard imagery here evoked a general image of the Lord’s vineyard as the cultivated land that symbolized the church, and those who were sanctified by baptism. Outside the vineyard was the desert (solitudo), the uncultivated land of the infidels which might through the efforts of the Lord’s workers be made fertile and fruitful.55 In a bull of 1233, Cum messis multa, the citation of the Gospels is direct; in its opening line, the bull quotes the words of Jesus: “The harvest is great, but the workers [operarii] are few” (Matt. 9:37, Luke 10:2).56 In both Matthew and Luke, this declaration was followed by the sending out of the apostles by Jesus, who, in a passage dear to the hearts of Franciscans, admonished them: “Take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff” (Matt. 10:9–10). This was one of the passages that Thomas of Celano reported had led Francis to adopt his life of poverty and preaching.57 Here, the source and meaning are clear: the mendicants are the new apostles, being sent out to bring in the harvest of souls before the coming of the kingdom of God. Jesus did not refer to a vineyard here; indeed, this is not a parable but a metaphor. Despite the resonant clarity of its evangelical message, the pope immediately muddles the bull’s meaning by evoking the other vineyard parable (Matt. 20:1–16), in which the lord of the vineyard hired workers throughout the day and paid them all the same wage, even those hired “in the eleventh hour.” The workers in this parable signify something different from the “few workers” of the metaphor; they represent those who are brought into salvation, rather than those working to save souls. In the context of thirteenth-century North Africa, the “few workers” are the Franciscans, but the workers of the parable hired throughout the day are Muslims. The bull thus conflates evangelist and infidel under the same figure of “the worker.”

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What makes these semantic choices all the more interesting is that the meaning of the metaphor and the parable of the Lord’s vineyard is opposite to the way they were generally interpreted in other monastic and papal contexts in the early thirteenth century. Beverly Mayne Kienzle has shown how the image of the vineyard, popularized by Bernard of Clairvaux, was used for and by Cistercians as part of their preaching campaigns against nonconformist Christians in southern France in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.58 Central to the image was the sense of threat, embodied in the verse “the little foxes that are destroying the vineyard,” from the Song of Songs (2:15). In 1229, just four years before Cum messis multa, the Cistercian He´linand of Froidmont (c. 1150–c. 1237) gave a sermon at the opening of a council in Toulouse that described the papal legate in the language of the vineyard. But unlike the workers in North Africa, the legate was not working to harvest the waiting crops, but to protect them against snakes and thorns that would harm the Lord’s vineyard.59 Thus, the dominant image of the Lord’s vineyard emphasized that it was the domain of the saved, “planted by the Lord’s hand, redeemed by his blood, watered by his word, increased by grace and fertilized by the Spirit.”60 Even the Fourth Lateran Council, the great ecumenical council that was one of the crowning achievements of Innocent III’s papacy, was opened with a sermon that used the image of the vineyard under threat.61 A century later, Dante used the vineyard metaphor in the Paradiso to accuse Pope John XXII of “laying waste to the vineyard” (canto XVIII), while John himself used it against rigorist Franciscans, whom he called “little foxes” ravaging the vineyard with “their poisonous gnawings.”62 Whereas the Cistercians and Innocent (who called for reform of the church and a new crusade to recover the Holy Land) used the image of the Lord’s vineyard to describe Christendom as beset by both heretics and Muslims, the bulls to the mendicants in North Africa, in contrast, presented the Muslims as belonging to the vineyard, either as the harvest or as the workers who were (hopefully) about to be hired. Medieval theologians and preachers routinely conflated those outside of Christendom into one malicious identity: Jews, Muslims, and heretics were all one, particularly in terms of the threat they posed. We would thus expect that the imagery applied to the heretics of southern France would be easily transposed onto the Muslims of North Africa without hesitation, particularly given the concerns that the papacy had about the possibility of Christians converting to Islam. But, instead, the bull presents the Muslims as within the vineyard and semantically linked to the evangelists themselves.

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While the language of the “workers in the vineyard” was inclusive, it also represented the optimistic triumphalism of the papacy. Despite the fact that indigenous Christianity had largely been extinguished in North Africa, the popes still saw it as part of the “vineyard of the Lord,” confidently assuming that the church would again blossom there. Such use of the parable and metaphor also ran counter to a later Franciscan inclination to separate and distinguish Christians from Muslims, and most crucially, Christian space from Muslim space. These bulls to the mendicants not only created a scriptural understanding for the inclusion of Muslims in North Africa, but the reissuing of them for other evangelizing efforts also made them a standard element in papal rhetoric about all non-Christians, heretics, and schismatics. Cum messis multa, for example, was sent out fifteen days later to Franciscans in “the lands of the Georgians, the Saracens, and other infidels.”63 The language of evangelization developed in papal bulls in North Africa also began to incorporate an apocalyptic tone, which became more explicit when they were deployed for evangelists in the Mongol world. First issued in 1235 to a Dominican in Syria, the bull Cum hora undecima was reissued four years later to the Franciscans working among the “Saracens, pagans, Greeks, Bulgarians, Cumans, and other infidels.”64 The bull became “the standard bull of mission privilege”65 for the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and it elaborated the eschatological importance of the mendicant mission to convert infidels, drawing upon a rhetoric of mission that had been developed in the context of North Africa. The famous first line of the bull referred back to the same parable in the Gospel of Matthew that ran through the North African bulls; the “eleventh hour” (Matt. 6:20) was the last hour of work of the day, when the last workers to be hired were brought to the vineyard. They were “the last who will be first.” The bull Cum messis multa from 1233 had already employed the phrase “the eleventh hour,” but Cum hora undecima took the implicit eschatological themes of that bull and further developed them in relation to mendicant missions among the infidels. As Brett Whalen has pointed out, “When Christians thought about mission, eschatological expectations were not far behind.”66 The mendicants were evangelists completing the work the apostles had begun, and their presence in so many parts of the world was the culmination of the divine mission of the church, given by the resurrected Jesus.67 Like its predecessor, the bull gave greater weight to dealing with excommunicated and lapsed Christians than to converting infidels. While its apocalyptic urgency was new, Cum hora undecima simply extended the same

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privileges to evangelists working throughout the world that Honorius had first offered to the mendicants working in North Africa in the 1220s. The bull as reissued in 1245 for the expeditions sent to the Mongols added a long list of peoples outside of Latin Christendom to whom the bull was extended—almost all of whom were schismatic Christians, not infidels. Of the nineteen groups mentioned, only three were clearly non-Christians (the Saracens, the pagans, and the Gazarians, who were Goths of the Crimea). The Mongols themselves were not explicitly included until a bull of 1253.68 Perhaps most significantly, Cum hora undecima extended a plenary indulgence to evangelists working in infidel lands, equating their work with that of the crusades. As Benjamin Z. Kedar has argued, crusade and mission had been tied ever closer together since the Second Crusade.69 The extension of the indulgence to evangelizing mendicants was thus a logical result of a century of papal policy and crusading rhetoric. The consequence, however, was to invert the dynamic of salvation. The goal of the evangelist was to save the souls of the unbaptized, those who had never had the proper opportunity to hear the words of the Gospel and gain eternal salvation. The recipient of an indulgence, on the other hand, was a sinner who himself needed the saving balm of redemption. However strange this inversion may seem, it was one that was already familiar to Franciscans. In the Regula non bullata, Francis had told those preaching among the infidels that “whoever acknowledges me before others I will acknowledge before my heavenly Father (Mt. 10:32).”70 The salvation of the friar was assured by the work of evangelization, even if the non-Christians’ salvation was not. It was a small step from this to an indulgence.

Crusades in Defense of Caliphs? The last bishop who might have been resident in Morocco during the thirteenth century was the Franciscan Lope, appointed in 1246.71 By this time, the popes had grown accustomed to a quasi-alliance with the Almohads; now fighting for them was not a sin but a battle for “the Catholic faith and Church.”72 Conversion, even rhetorically speaking, was not the priority. As Michael Lower has pointed out, Innocent IV’s appointment of Lope “bore all the hallmarks of crusade promotion”73 —but a proxy crusade intended to bolster Almohad stability, not destroy it. The pope appealed broadly to kings and bishops to support Lope, offering a crusade indulgence to those in the

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friar’s entourage. Another bull was issued in 1247 concerning a certain Friar Bernard, whose reputation had apparently been impugned by the accusation that he was a bastard. The pope dispensed him from any liabilities if the rumors were true, so that he “be worthy to be advanced to the episcopal dignity in African lands.”74 We have no evidence that Bernard ever did become a bishop. The pope probably intended for Bernard to join Lope, so the growth of the Moroccan church was still on the pope’s mind. As an ambassador, Fr. Lope was not a success, in part due to a change in Almohad leadership. The caliph al-Sa’ı¯d, who had benefited from the alliance with the papacy and Christian mercenaries, was killed in battle in 1248, along with his son and heir.75 Lope failed to establish the same relationship with his successor, Caliph Murtad.a¯, as the papal letters of 1251 show.76 This was not entirely Lope’s fault; Murtad.a¯ seems to have chosen to reject the strategy of his immediate successors in relying on Christian mercenaries, and instead returned to an alliance with the Berber lords who had long been the foundation of Almohad power. By 1252 Innocent IV had abandoned hope of renewing the alliance and was urging a crusade against Morocco by Castile,77 and Lope himself was participating in preaching for the crusade in 1255—clearly he had left Morocco.78 Now the Moroccan church was not envisioned as flourishing under the Almohads, but only able to be constructed in the wake of their demise; the pope called upon Lope to establish bishoprics in any areas liberated from the Muslims by the Castilians,79 but Lope probably never returned to Morocco, the crusade never took place, and no new bishops were appointed.80 By the time of Clement V (1305–14), it was clear that no proper chapter had ever, or would ever, exist in Morocco; the Moroccan church, inasmuch as it ever existed, was once again sterile.81 The Moroccan church of the early thirteenth century could claim a number of achievements: the first mendicant elevated to the episcopacy, the first Latin bishop established under an Islamic ruler, the development of an entirely new strategy of evangelization, and the spread of papal authority beyond the boundaries of Christendom itself. The benefit to the papacy is obvious; but what was the motivation for the friars to participate? This is a little more difficult to discern. The friars must have had both Francis and the martyrs in Morocco in mind as they worked in the Maghreb. But we cannot be certain whether they saw them as models for their own efforts, or they represented a path to be avoided. Certainly, they did not directly emulate either. The larger Franciscan order did not consider their efforts as linked to their predecessors’, at least in prestige. None of the friars who worked in

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North Africa were commemorated or even mentioned, even as hundreds of other friars were praised for their piety in various chronicles and lists of the holy dead. Why would the activities of the friars be so systematically ignored, and why would brothers like Lope—working on papally sanctioned projects of evangelization and crusade—not be praised and esteemed within the order? Several reasons come to mind. The friars were engaging in papal business rather than the affairs of the order. They thus left little trace within the institutional character and memory of the order itself, and whatever convents were established in North Africa did not survive to commemorate them. Secondly, the friars failed in their mission. They did not establish a renewed institutional church, nor did they convert Muslims. This in particular explains why in retrospect they were ignored, but does not explain the ignorance or deliberate blindness of their contemporaries. But the most important reason may have been that the order could not present someone like Lope as an example of Franciscan values. As we have seen in Chapter 2, the hagiography being produced in the mid-thirteenth century ran in the opposite direction of his career—toward withdrawal rather than engagement, toward mysticism rather than preaching, toward prayer rather than diplomacy. The thirteenth-century catalogues and lists of holy Franciscans were a deliberate attempt to ignore the work in which the order actually engaged: to craft a different image of the order than the one the activities of engaged friars such as Lope and Agnellus suggested. Furthermore, the papal rhetoric and ideology behind the Moroccan church acknowledged Christians and Muslims as living together in a commingled world, where Christian soldiers attended Muslim feasts on Christian feast days, where friars compromised their strict rules about handling money in order to function within a Muslim society, and where Muslims were imagined as part of the Lord’s vineyard, not as part of the forces endangering it. This perspective ran counter to the emerging Franciscan attitude on Islam, which sought to separate Christian from Muslim, not to blur boundaries.

Where Are the Martyrs? What, then, are we to make of our two competing sets of Franciscan rhetoric about Muslims? On the one hand, we have Francis, Anthony of Padua, and Clare of Assisi all eager to humble themselves by dying under a Muslim sword, and thus reap the glory of martyrdom. Yet they failed to achieve

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martyrdom, and spent little to no time in situations that might have allowed for the completion of their desire (though arguably Clare never had the freedom to make that choice). The Franciscans who lived among the Almohads and the Mongols, on the other hand, did spend considerable time in infidel territory, and were at risk of death. We do not have firsthand accounts from mendicants in Morocco,82 but those from the friars among the Mongols provide some sense of how the possibility of martyrdom was perceived by those who were not seeking it. Giovanni da Pian del Carpine did not cast his mission as one of evangelization, but rather as one most akin to espionage; he wanted to go to learn information that would help Latin Christians protect themselves against a Mongol attack.83 He emphasized the possibility of death he faced, evoking the language of martyrdom: “We feared we might be killed by the Tartars or other peoples, or imprisoned for life, or afflicted with hunger, thirst, cold, heat, injuries and exceeding great trials almost beyond our power of endurance”—and, indeed, Giovanni assured his readers, this was the case, “in a much greater way than we had conceived beforehand.”84 But Giovanni clearly did not desire death, and did all he could to avoid it. While Giovanni recounted the death of Michael of Chernigov, a Russian prince, who had refused to bow before an image of “the first emperor,” in the language of martyrdom,85 Giovanni himself diplomatically avoided such issues that might lead to death. Though he was reluctant to participate in a purification ritual that required him to pass between two fires, he acquiesced “as not to be suspected of [harmful] things.”86 Likewise, Giovanni and his companion “were instructed to genuflect three times on the left knee before the door of the [chief ’s] dwelling”;87 earlier, Giovanni had informed his reader that they have “idols of felt made in the image of man, and these they place on each side of the door of the dwelling.”88 Giovanni was thus willing to perform the rituals that Michael of Chernigov refused. It would seem that the Franciscan felt that his duties as an ambassador overrode whatever religious scruples he might have had about idolatry. We do not have the same sort of first-person accounts from North Africa, but there, too, compromise was a necessity. Friars like Agnellus and Lope needed to keep their opinions on Muhammad and Islam to themselves and to loosen the strictures of the rule concerning handling money and wearing a habit in order to fit in and be effective at the Almohad court. Later Franciscan chroniclers suggested that a number of Franciscans were martyred as part of the establishment of the network of convents and bishoprics in both the Maghreb and among the Mongols. But thirteenth-century

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sources (largely papal) do not mention martyrs, and rarely even acknowledge the possibility of martyrdom. It is only in the fourteenth century that Franciscans dying under the Muslims gained the attention of their contemporaries, and drew them to search for martyrs in earlier generations, real or fictionalized. For example, the Franciscan Anthony of Armenia is reported to have died in Selmas in 1284 under the rule of the Muslim Mongol Tegu¨der Ahmad, in an account that only appeared in a sixteenth-century chronicle.89 This is not evidence that no friars died as a result of their activities in nonChristian lands. It simply shows that neither the papacy nor fellow Franciscans found such deaths (if they happened) noteworthy or evidence of any particular qualities that should be associated with either evangelization or the friars.

Conclusion The thirteenth century saw the establishment of mendicant communities in infidel lands from Marrakesh to Mongol Khan-balik. These communities engaged in a number of activities, the foremost of which was ministering to Latin Christian merchants, mercenaries, captives, and slaves. The Franciscan presence in both the Maghreb and the Mongol lands reveals the sidle with which the friars approached Islam and the possibility of evangelization of Muslims. In both areas, Muslims were sometimes allies in the construction of Christian institutions—whether through alliance with the Almohad caliphs or through a shared belief in one God and opposition to polytheist competitors in Mongol lands.90 In both cases, however, the example of Francis as evangelist to the Saracens was curiously absent. The hidden history of the Franciscans in the Maghreb puts the lie to the claim that the centrality of martyrdom for Franciscans was grounded in the ideology of “mission.” Quite the opposite—the martyrs represented the impossibility of conversion, the intransigence of the Muslims, and the impenetrability of the border separating Christians and Muslims.

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“Their Blood Has Been Spilled Everywhere” Evangelization, Martyrdom, and Christian Triumphalism in the Early Fourteenth Century

The four friars had not sought martyrdom. They knew that their beliefs were not shared by those around them, but they hoped that God might turn the others’ hearts to believe in the glorious truth the four treasured. Brought before the court for one purpose, they soon realized they were there for quite a different one than they had thought—they were to be judged by men who saw them as a threat. When asked about their beliefs and practices, they could not lie; to do so would be to deny God and condemn themselves to eternal punishment. As they perhaps feared beforehand, they were found guilty, without having had the opportunity to accomplish what they came to the city to do. After their execution, people began to speak of them as martyrs, beloved of God, a belief that only further angered those who had judged and executed them. The four friars could be Johan Barrau, Guilhem Santon, Deodat Miquel, and Pons Roca, burned at the stake in Marseille on 7 May 1318, after having been condemned as unrepentant heretics by Michel le Moine, the Franciscan inquisitor of Provence. Their heresy: belief that the friars, having vowed to follow the Franciscan rule, must live the same life of absolute poverty as Jesus and his apostles, and that not even Pope John XXII, who in his bull Quorundam exigit (1317) had ordered the friars to accept their superiors’ rulings on how best to observe their vow of poverty, could remove from them the obligation

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to own nothing. Anything else would endanger their eternal salvation. The friars’ refusal to renounce their beliefs before even the pope himself was admired by others who shared their belief in the importance of poverty and spoke of the four dead friars as martyrs. The death of the martyrs soon assumed a polemical edge; their admirers referred to the church who killed them as “the great whore . . . drunk on the blood of the martyrs” (Rev. 17:6). As others were executed as heretics in the decade that followed, their names were also added to the roster of God’s martyrs. Yet these martyrs did not desire death as their founder Francis had; they died because they could not reconcile their religious beliefs with the demands of the dominant order—in this case, the orthodoxy espoused by Pope John XXII.1 The four friars killed in Marseilles in 1318 were only the first to be punished; other Franciscans were burned at the stake, as well as dozens of beguines, lay followers of Francis.2 Within ten years, even the minister-general of the order, Michael of Cesena, who had participated in the condemnation of the four friars, had fled the papal court in Avignon out of fear that he might meet the same fate. However, this narrative could just as easily have described four other Franciscans: Tommaso di Tolentino, Jacopo di Padova, Pietro di Siena, and Demetrios, who died in Tana, a port city on the northwestern coast of India near the modern city of Mumbai just three years later, on 9 April 1321. The persecutors in this case were Muslims—yet the elemental forces the friars faced were the same. Pride, avarice, and love of self were the weapons the friars feared most, not the swords and burning pyres their killers employed. The two groups of friars had something in common besides their Franciscan robes and their violent deaths: Tommaso di Tolentino (and perhaps his companions) shared with the friars of Marseilles the same conviction about the importance of fidelity to a strict practice of poverty—that is, they were spirituals. The deaths of these two groups of friars at opposite ends of the world might be a coincidence. What was not a coincidence was the emergence in these same decades of the first narratives and depictions of Franciscan martyrdom. While friars had been martyred in the thirteenth century, no passio survives narrating their suffering and death before the 1320s. The early fourteenth century also saw the beginnings of a pictorial tradition of the passio of Franciscan martyrs, found in the churches of Tuscany. Martyrdom, rather than the desire for it, had become a charged subject for the order in the early fourteenth century. Italo Calvino once wrote that “the language of sexuality makes sense only if it is placed at the top of a scale of semantic values. When

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the musical score needs the highest and the lowest notes, when the canvas requires the most vivid color: this is when the sign of sex comes into operation.”3 The same thing might be said about the language of death, voluntary or otherwise, in the Franciscan scale of values. Notably, the only Franciscan who was canonized in the fourteenth century, Louis of Toulouse, was not driven by “desire for martyrdom” as his thirteenth-century predecessors had been. In an era of violent conflict within the Franciscan order, the desire to be a martyr no longer seemed so saintly. Central to understanding the Franciscan fascination with martyrdom is the context in which the first passiones were written and circulated. The accounts were a response to at least two crises of the early fourteenth century, one inside the order, and the other outside. Most immediately, the passiones must be read in the context of the controversy over poverty among conventual Franciscans (those who trusted in obedience to hierarchical authority), rigorist spirituals, and a heavy-handed pope (John XXII), which led to spirituals being burned at the stake for heresy, and the leadership of the order (though avowedly not spirituals) escaping the papal court in Avignon and labeling John himself a heretic. Just as the “desire for martyrdom” was not a simple sign of sanctity in the thirteenth century, Franciscans found accounts of actual martyrdom equally complex in the fourteenth. Early fourteenthcentury stories about martyrs allowed Franciscans to think about a variety of overlapping dilemmas. For conventual Franciscans—those who accepted the concept of poverty as malleable and believed that the hierarchy of the order should determine its significance—rejection of the world through stories of martyrdom demonstrated their rejection of material goods in a way that did not conflict with papal bulls mandating their ownership of the goods they used. For spiritual Franciscans, martyrdom demonstrated the corrupt materialism of the institutional church, and their own corresponding purity. For both, Islam and Muslims were not really the issue. Instead, “Saracens” represented their own worst selves: the worldly, politically powerful, and wealthy self that mocked all that the Franciscans valued—yet was increasingly the true face of the order. The passiones spread outside the order, however, in response to another crisis, this one ongoing and slow-burning: the failure of western Christendom in its struggle to overcome Islamdom militarily and spiritually. The Franciscan accounts gave western Christians a new set of stories in which conflict between Christians and Muslims could be played out, perhaps to a more satisfactory conclusion than through crusade or preaching. Christians, in the

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thirteenth century, as we have seen, paid little heed to mendicants working among Muslims, preferring the adventures of friars venturing among the Mongols—or the pious who may have desired martyrdom but did not linger for long in Islamic lands. By the 1320s, the effort to convert Maghrebi emirs and Mongol khans had come to naught; no ruling emirs in North Africa had converted, and the Ilkhanids had opted decisively for Islam. Christians still held out hope for conversions in the empire of the Golden Horde, apparently ¨ zbeg (1313–41) was a stalwart Muslim. And despite unaware that the khan O continuing optimism about the possible conversion of Mongol princes, the passiones that appeared in the 1320s were empty of Mongols as either persecutors or potential converts. It is only once the Mongols were routinely understood to be Muslims that they began to show up in martyrdom accounts. Franciscans (and others) chose to tell the stories of martyrs as a way to recast Christian identity and the conflict with Islam, “a search for Western identity through the medium of the Islamic world,” as Suzanne Conklin Akbari characterized similar efforts.4 The stories accomplished this in two ways, but both required decoupling martyrdom from successful missionizing among Muslims. The first sort of martyrdom occurred on the peripheries of the Islamic world, where the “Saracen” could still play the role of persecutor, but where the observing population was not Muslim. This allowed the accounts to link Islam to violence, torture, and hatred of Christianity, but to sidestep the reality that Muslims did not convert by using the non-Muslim population as the sympathetic witnesses to the martyrs and their glories. The second kind occurred among Muslim populations, but abandoned traditional tropes of martyrdom such as miracles, celestial signs, and divine punishment of the persecutors, thus reshaping Christian expectations of martyrdom narratives. This second group of passiones shared much in common with the earliest martyrdoms of the pre-Constantinian period, and with the neomartyrdoms written by Christians under Islamic rule. Victory over Islam in this sphere came at the price of Christian triumphalism. In other words, Franciscan martyrdom abandoned the world to the Saracens. While the conflict over poverty provided the powder, it was the account of the death of the four friars at Tana in 1321 that sparked widespread Franciscan enthusiasm for their martyrs.5 Although several passiones emerged at around the same time, the story of the Tana martyrs appeared more often, and appeared in close proximity to the broader explosion of interest in Franciscan martyrdom in the 1320s and 1330s. The account of the martyrs of Armenia (1314), for example, had appeared several years earlier, but showed

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up in fewer manuscripts in the 1320s and 1330s—and few if any of those manuscripts can be given a date earlier than the appearance of the Tana passio. In the next two chapters, I will focus on four such accounts from the early fourteenth century in which the Tana passio was recounted: the transcribed letters contained in the Nero A IX manuscript in the British library (1320s), the chronicles of Paolino da Venezia (c. 1329), the Relatio of Odorico di Pordenone (c. 1331), and finally the world chronicle of friar Johannes Elemosina (1335). These four accounts share a set of intertwined but often conflicting views of Islam, the world, and the place of the Franciscans within it. The Tana account of stalwart friars facing Saracen persecution and dazzling pagan peoples with their piety assuaged deep anxieties, and provided Franciscans with an appealing way of shaping the Franciscan community, and therefore an ideal Christian one—one explicitly defined against Islam. Such a course was effective within the order, for a time. However, few outside accepted the Franciscan claims of humility and patient suffering at Saracen hands.6 None of the Franciscan martyrs show up in non-Franciscan accounts in the Middle Ages, though certainly non-Franciscans knew of the martyrs and read the Franciscan narratives. The ideology of martyrdom had so thoroughly suffused European culture that it was the internal enemy—the heretic, the Jew, the murderer in the woods—who exemplified the elemental threat of evil, and it was the child, the maidservant, even the faithful guard dog who exemplified the patient suffering of Christ.7 While the cult of the ancient martyrs continued, contemporary martyrdom followed less on the model of the Roman martyrs and more on that of the Massacre of the Innocents—the not-evenbaptized infants of Bethlehem killed by Herod in his attempt to murder Jesus. Contrary to modern expectations, the story of a friar killed by a Muslim tyrant did not conform to contemporary conceptions of martyrdom—nor did it conform to contemporary notions of Franciscan holiness. Franciscan martyrdom accomplished a further goal: it moved the spirituality of the order away from the dangerous realm of mysticism. Bonaventure and others had made desire for martyrdom part of the mystical ascent of the ideal friar.8 The desire expressed the friar’s inner orientation, but was not tied to engaging in active preaching or dying for the faith. In the fourteenth century, mystical texts, experiences, and claims became both a more common sign of sanctity as well as a more common sign of heresy. Martyrdom, in contrast, had been intertwined with Christian conceptions of sanctity for a thousand years, and thus was an unassailable orthodox sign of closeness to God. Given the tenuous position that Franciscans found themselves in the

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aftermath of the events of 1318, the order was rightly concerned about being perceived as a hotbed of heterodox beliefs. A long list of valiant martyrs could help blot out the stain of heresy.

The Crisis over Poverty The controversy over poverty was so calamitous for the Franciscans because the order had long claimed that they uniquely imitated the absolute poverty of Jesus and the apostles. Of course, the order was struggling to define what it meant to follow apostolic poverty; this struggle had divided the order by the dawn of the fourteenth century. David Burr, one of the foremost scholars of the spiritual Franciscans, has argued that this controversy became significant only around 1270. Earlier, friars had debated and disagreed over a variety of issues: poverty, the status of priests, and the place of theological training in the order. At the heart of many of the issues was the role that Franciscans should play in the world, but the debates prior to 1270 did not map onto any clear division within the order; each controversy had different adherents on each side. After 1270 the concerns of these various groups began to coalesce into a group we can with some reasonableness call “the spirituals,” who focused on a stricter interpretation of the Franciscan rule, particularly around issues of poverty.9 In tracing this movement, we face the same challenge that we have already faced with martyrdom: the sources about the thirteenthcentury advent of the rigorist movement were all written in the fourteenth century, in a quite different atmosphere. Franciscans wrestled with two related concerns: How could the friars live the life of poverty that Francis had enjoined them to live and yet fulfill the demands of preaching and the other ecclesiastical obligations the Franciscans had taken on? Second, what were the consequences of not following the rule of poverty to its greatest extent? Francis had made clear in its opening lines that the rule was essentially “to observe the Holy Gospel.”10 This elision of Gospel and Rule was further complicated by the vow Franciscans took “to observe the rule throughout my whole life.”11 In the thirteenth century, Franciscans and Dominicans feuded over how regular vows were made and what such vows entailed; Thomas Aquinas argued that there was a significant difference between the orders. His own order, the Dominicans, vowed to live according to their rule, which meant that when a Dominican transgressed the rule of the order, he was not transgressing his vows. The Franciscans’ vow to

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observe the rule, Aquinas suggested, meant that any transgression of the rule was a transgression of their vow, and therefore a mortal sin, although some Franciscans argued against this distinction.12 Furthermore, if the rule was equivalent to the Gospels, any transgression of the Gospels was then mortal sin as well. So theoretically a friar who felt lust would have been committing adultery of the heart—a venial sin for most Christians, but a mortal one for him because of his vow. Nicholas III (1277–80) intervened with the bull Exiit qui seminat (1279), which attempted to defuse the ambiguities of the Franciscan vow with respect to poverty. The pope ruled that the precepts of the Gospels should be followed as precepts, and the counsels as counsels—that is, the rule and the vow to follow it did not convert ordinary sins (lustful thoughts, for example) into mortal ones.13 The bull, however, accomplished much more than this clarification. Nicholas proclaimed that “renunciation of poverty over all things, individually and in common, is meritorious and holy. Christ, showing the way to perfection, both taught this doctrine by word, and strengthened it by example.”14 As Sean Kinsella has pointed out, “The language of Exiit was so strong an endorsement of the position of the Franciscan order on poverty that the order itself suppressed the fullest dissemination of the bull for fear of the backlash and uproar which would result from the other religious communities.”15 The bull was intended to end disputes over poverty and the Franciscans, and for nearly forty years, the church accepted Exiit qui seminat as definitive. The Franciscan rule directed the friars to follow a large number of practices, from daily prayers to the central vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity. Because Franciscans vowed both individual and corporate poverty, they developed a particularly rich vocabulary concerning material objects. One central distinction was between ownership (dominium) and use (usus). Franciscans could use things, but not own them, a conceit aided by the willingness of the papacy to own (have dominium over) the things the Franciscans used. But how could they use them? By the late thirteenth century, Franciscans were “using” a great number of books, liturgical implements, clothes, food, and buildings—and to many, Franciscan “use” sometimes did not look much different than the way the wealthy owned similar objects. Many agreed that such use was not faithful to Francis’s vision, but how could one distinguish proper use from improper? Rigorist Franciscans argued that the vow of poverty required that friars practice usus pauper, roughly meaning “poor use,” or “the restricted use of

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goods.”16 Clearly, this was a fuzzy notion: What distinguished usus pauper from a less-restricted use of goods? More specifically, if the Franciscan vow of poverty did demand usus pauper, what was the consequence if a friar used goods like a rich man rather than a poor one? If it was considered a mortal sin (as violation of the vow of chastity would be, for example), then much of the order would be constantly in fear of committing a mortal sin through everyday activities. Spirituals approached the topic from a variety of perspectives, but generally urged a more rigorous interpretation of poverty, believing that Franciscans risked damnation if they did not adhere to it. The conventuals, their opponents, argued that the hierarchy of the order should determine appropriate use for their communities; it was not up to individuals, who ought to follow their vow to obey their superiors. The election and resignation of Celestine V in the course of five months in 1294, and the subsequent election of Boniface VIII (1294–1303), instigated anxiety within the church and the order about dissident groups, and the spirituals were prime among them. Pierre Jean Olivi (1248–1298), a leading figure in the spiritual movement, worked to maintain a strict understanding of poverty that still accommodated the exigencies of the world.17 Olivi argued for a satisfying solution: because it is an indeterminate vow (i.e., fuzzy), violation of usus pauper is usually a venial sin, unless the violation is so obvious as to be beyond any reasonable understanding of “poor use.” Although this explanation of usus pauper seems quite reasonable (and Olivi argues for a quite generous interpretation of what constitutes a baseline usus pauper), a commission of seven theologians in 1283 censured Olivi’s positions on a number of subjects. We do not know, however, exactly which ones and for what reasons. He later received prestigious appointments in Florence and Montpellier, and his views, while not embraced by the leaders of the order, were seen as within the accepted range of opinion. Nevertheless, after his death his works were condemned and burned in 1299—but at the same time, a cult was growing around his tomb in Narbonne. The papacy of Clement V (1305–14) seemed to offer an opportunity to put the debate to rest: the pope requested papers arguing each side of the debate,18 and then issued his own bull, Exivi de paradiso (1312), which ruled that neither belief in usus pauper nor rejection of it could be deemed heretical. The order would just have to be big enough to encompass both views. Clement promised to chastise leaders who judged the spirituals harshly, but also argued that the spirituals needed to trust their superiors. For a few years following, Clement’s compromise seems to have worked. In Tuscany, a group

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of spirituals did seize several convents from their superiors, and had to flee to Sicily, but in southern France the newly elected minister-general, Alexander of Alexandria (1313–14), assigned convents in Be´ziers, Carcassonne, and Narbonne to the spirituals. The death of both Clement and Alexander in 1314 put an end to this truce, and the sixteen persecutors Clement had deposed for excessive harshness soon returned to their former positions. Both the conventuals and the spirituals hoped for the election of a new minister and pope who would support their respective positions. The new minister was Michael of Cesena, whose affiliation with the conventual position was wellknown. The spirituals had greater hopes for the new pope; surely he would hew to the line established by his predecessor, Clement V? He did not. Instead, John XXII issued the bull Quorundam exigit (1318) to put to an end to questions about the usus pauper debates.19 The friars were obliged to follow the instruction of their superiors when it came to the practice of poverty; it was not up to them to decide what constituted “poor use.” The narrative that follows is known largely through spiritual sources, and therefore makes a monster out of John XXII and angels out of the friars.20 The pope called upon the spirituals in Narbonne to obey their conventual superiors and summoned to Avignon sixty-two friars who had appealed against them. John asked that they choose representatives to present their position to the papal court. When they came before the pope, he repeatedly arrested each spokesman who stepped forward to speak on their behalf, including Geoffroi de Cournon, who was not closely associated with the spirituals. The remaining friars were remanded to the custody of the order without their defense ever having been heard. The conventuals in charge of the order then interrogated the spirituals; twenty-five of them refused to accept the bull, for various reasons. The twenty-five were handed over to Michel le Moine, a Franciscan inquisitor who had been one of the sixteen superiors removed from office by Clement V for excessive severity toward the spirituals. A council of thirteen scholars ruled that refusal to follow the bull constituted heresy; as William Chester Jordan has noted, “The deck was stacked against the men whose views the commission was to assess.”21 Twenty of the friars recanted under the interrogation of Michel, and one repented at the very last moment. Four were sent to the stake, the four mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. Within a year, some friars had reconsidered their submission and left “not the order but the walls, not the habit but the cloth,” finding John to be “not a shepherd but a devourer.” According to one tradition, they not only left the order but

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also left Christendom behind and lived “among infidels”—whether as exiles or evangelists we cannot say.22 Lay supporters of the spirituals were also targeted. Three such beguines were burned at the stake in Narbonne on 14 October 1319, a year and a half after the friars. As inquisitors were pursuing the spirituals and their supporters, John XXII continued to consider the question of poverty, ownership, and the claims of the Franciscan order to embody the highest level of evangelical poverty.23 John issued Quia nonnunquam on 26 March 1322, which reopened the conversation about evangelical poverty suspended by Nicholas III fortythree years earlier. As Patrick Nold put it, “Henceforth, anyone, be he prelate or master of theology, could freely contradict and impugn what had been previously determined by the Church.”24 The spirituals were persecuted for pursuing the concept of evangelical poverty too far, but to John XXII and others within the church, it seemed that the very notion that the Franciscan order uniquely belonged in the select company of those who have followed true poverty—perhaps limited to the prelapsarian Adam and Eve and Christ and his apostles—was itself heretical. Yet, according to even the most conservative conventual Franciscan, the order followed Christ and his apostles more perfectly than anyone else, including the pope and the Dominican order, which had long criticized the Franciscans on this point. Franciscan poverty always contained an implicit critique of the endowed church, which was evident even in the earliest days of the order. The Franciscans knew this well, yet spiritual and conventual alike could not conceive of abandoning this central value. In 1322 the Franciscans met for their annual chapter in Perugia and reaffirmed their belief in Christ’s poverty as permitted by Nicholas III in Exivi, begging the pope to keep the discussion closed.25 It was during the tense conversation in the papal court before the promulgation of Quia nonnunquam that we find poverty and the order’s history of martyrdom explicitly tied together. John XXII announced to the group gathered before him that he was eager to hear their opinions on Christ’s poverty. Jerome, the Franciscan bishop of Caffa, gave a long speech in support of evangelical poverty, citing his own capture by Muslims as part of his credentials. Jerome averred that if the belief in Christ’s poverty was heretical, “I never saw such an error against the faith of Christ in the court of any heretic, pagan, or schismatic.”26 In recounting his unfamiliarity with poverty as a heresy despite his wide travels throughout the Mediterranean and Black Seas, Jerome was exploiting the widespread assumption that heterodox beliefs draw upon previous heresies; there is nothing heretically new under the sun.

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Furthermore, Jerome insisted, the Franciscan order had been the “vine of Christ” and extended throughout the known world, conforming to Jesus’ command to preach. “There is no kingdom, no language, no nation where the Friars Minor are not, or have not been, preaching the faith of Holy Mother Church. And their blood has been spilled everywhere, beginning in Morocco all the way to India.”27 When the pope suggested that others, such as the Dominicans, had also died as martyrs in foreign lands, Jerome made clear what he thought of that—“With all due respect, Your Holiness, never has a single preacher (i.e., Dominican) nor indeed any religious, died for Christ among the infidels who was not a Friar Minor”—and proceeded to list nine martyred Franciscans who had recently died.28 John was not impressed by Jerome’s arguments and claims, but for Jerome and the anonymous narrator at least and likely for many others, the martyrdom of so many Franciscans provided cogent proof of their orthodoxy. Jerome was referring to the first and the most recent martyrs: those of Morocco in 1220 and those of Tana in 1321, whose narratives were just in the 1320s beginning to spread throughout western Christendom. If we take Jerome’s speech at face value, then this would be the earliest reference to the Tana martyrs, made less than a year after their deaths, and just months after the first report was written about them in India, but timing alone makes this unlikely.29 While we do not know who the anonymous narrator of this encounter was, we have no evidence to suggest that he was present at the papal palace for these discussions. He composed his account sometime after 1338, a decade after the events occurred. In contrasting the Franciscans to the rival Dominican preachers—whom Jerome suggested were too timid to preach to infidels and schismatics and risk discomfort and death—poverty was intimately tied to the Franciscans’ willingness to die, and was proof of their orthodoxy. Indeed, just as apostolic poverty was a distinctive Franciscan attribute, Jerome claimed that martyrdom among infidels was similarly unique to the friars minor. After further consideration and discussion, John issued the bull Ad conditorem in December 1322, announcing that the pope would no longer take possession of the things that Franciscans used. The Franciscans now, by default, owned everything that was in their possession—which was a large amount of books, food, and property. Never has any institution been less pleased to receive such an enormous endowment. A year later, he ruled on the question of the poverty of Jesus and his apostles in the bull Cum inter nonnullos. He determined that Christ and the apostles did own the things

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they used, exercising the ius utendi (right of use) as well as the ius vendandi (right to sell), and to say otherwise was now heretical. The table had turned on the conventuals: they were now faced with the choice of obeying the pope and abjuring the Franciscan understanding of poverty that was fundamental to their identity, or disobeying and facing persecution, the same choice spirituals had faced at conventual hands five years earlier. The Franciscan leadership was summoned to Avignon in 1327. They delayed as much as possible, but eventually showed up in December. They found the atmosphere there threatening, and though they had been ordered not to leave, fled the papal court in the spring of 1328 to take refuge with the Holy Roman Emperor Ludwig of Bavaria, who himself had been excommunicated by the pope. It was in this heated atmosphere of schism, accusations of heresy, inquisitorial trials, and personal and institutional crises of identity that the first full passiones of Franciscan martyrdom were written and circulated.

India in the European Imagination The enthusiasm generated by the account of the Tana martyrdoms was in part due to the potent blend of exoticism, religious fervor, and apocalypticism that western Christian sources associated with India, as well as the tumult in the Franciscan order. Many of these associations can be traced back to antiquity: the natural wonders of the land, associations with Alexander the Great and with the apocalyptic tribes of Gog and Magog, all combined to make India both familiar and alien.30 Alongside the classical stories were apocryphal acts of the apostles’ and saints’ lives, which depicted a world that had been successfully converted to Christianity in ages past. One such story, that of Barlaam and Josaphat, was in fact the life of the Buddha transmuted into that of a Christian saint.31 The thirteenth century brought a new set of fantasies of India. Beginning with stories of the kingdom of Prester John and continuing with increasing knowledge of the Mongol world, western Christians began to imagine the “East” (only vaguely identified geographically) as a Christian world, or one that potentially could become Christian.32 This stood in marked contrast to the Islamic world, about which Christians were increasingly doubtful that large-scale conversions would transform anytime soon, particularly after the fall of Acre in 1291. Why would Muslims convert at the moment of their greatest triumph over Christianity? That thirteenth-century “dream of conversion” of the Islamic world, as Robert

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Burns so memorably called it, was dying.33 The world of Asia, on the other hand, appeared to many to be an evangelist’s paradise. It was largely a pagan world, in the categorization of medieval Christians, and it was a truism that pagans were far more likely to convert to Christianity than either Muslims or Jews. Had not the Roman Empire once been entirely pagan, and yet became the source of Christian light to other peoples? In the mid-thirteenth century, India became a great deal more accessible to Europe than it had ever been before.34 The Mongol conquests of Genghis (Chinggis) Khan (d. 1227) and his successors meant that, for the first time, one ruler controlled a vast territory of central and east Asia, connecting the Black Sea to the South China Sea. A European merchant or evangelist could travel to one of the ports of the Levant or the Black Sea (Ayas, in Armenian Cilicia, for example), and then trek across the whole of Asia, remaining in Mongol territories for the entire journey.35 Those who were particularly favored by Mongol rulers might be given golden tablets that would allow them to use the khan’s own efficient transportation network. Though the Mongols did not conquer India, European travelers who ventured across Asia often transited India as a waypoint on their journey further east.36 A sign of the expanded horizons of western Christians appeared in the reissue of the papal bull Cum hora undecima, a call for Franciscan evangelization of infidels.37 The issue by Gregory IX in 1239 was addressed to Franciscans in the lands of the Saracens, pagans, Greeks, Bulgarians, Cumans, and other nonChristian groups familiar from the Middle East and the Black Sea region.38 When it was reissued by Innocent IV in 1245, the list was expanded to include many other peoples, including Indians and Ethiopians.39 Marco Polo, dictating his account in Genoese captivity after returning from the East in 1295, devoted the third book of his narrative of his travels to India, though where he himself visited is not entirely clear. He claimed to have visited Ciamba (perhaps the Malay peninsula) and named places such as Ceylon, Gujarat, and the Malabar Coast, but never specifically placed himself in “greater India,” as he called the subcontinent.40 Whether he visited or not, Marco (or his amanuensis) clearly had some source of reliable information on India. Among the fabulous stories drawn from antiquity, Marco also noted ethnological facts, such as that “Braamans . . . wear a thread of cotton over their shoulder” so that “they are known by this token through all the places where they go.”41 This was the first reference in European literature to the upanayana thread, bestowed on men of certain castes as a coming-of-age ritual.

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Of course, many other travelers from Europe and the Middle East had been to India; the letters of the Cairo Geniza are full of references to Jewish merchants traveling to, trading with, and even settling on the western coast of India, and other sources give glimpses of extended travel across Asia.42 The Franciscan missionary Giovanni di Montecorvino visited India at the end of the thirteenth century on his way to China, and claimed to have converted a hundred people while he was there.43 The marvelous descriptions of Asia suggested that the world known to the Europeans was but a small appendage on the stupendous body of Asia, a body that might become a Christian one. The passio of the four Franciscans in India in 1321 thus combined two popular genres into one: accounts of the marvels of the East with Christian martyrdom. In doing so, it combined the exoticism of the East with the deep familiarity of the cult of the martyrs, and that unique combination is one of the reasons why the passio of the Tana martyrs was the first such Franciscan account to circulate widely.

The Martyrs of Tana: The First Reports The letters recounting the deaths of Tommaso and his companions traveled back to Europe along the same trade routes that had brought the friars east, arriving in Europe just as the order was in tumult over the meaning of poverty and the challenge of the spirituals. The first letter was that of a Dominican friar, Jordan Catala de Se´ve´rac, one of the many Latin Christians who traveled widely throughout Asia in the era. Jordan evidently met the four Franciscans in the Persian port of Hormuz—a crucial trading city in the Persian Gulf linking India to Aden, the Red Sea, and hence to Egypt and the Mediterranean world—and traveled with them to the western coast of India. When the Franciscans were killed, Jordan himself was out of town, visiting nearby Christian communities and preaching to non-Christians; he mourned that he was not martyred with them.44 When he returned to the city, he took the bodies of his companions to Surat, a port to the north, and six months after the martyrdom (12 October 1321), wrote a letter to the Dominican and Franciscan communities in Tabriz announcing their names and deaths. His letter, however, gave no details of how they died; instead, the letter described the success of Jordan’s own preaching campaign in northern India, and contained a request that his brethren send more missionaries. His report on the four Franciscans was potent propaganda for Jordan’s own mission, but they were not what Jordan thought was most urgent about his letter.45 Jordan’s

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reaction was thus in line with thirteenth-century attitudes toward the martyrs. Their significance was not in their own story, but in what they demonstrated about others. The custodian of the Franciscan convent in Tabriz, Bartholomew,46 added a second letter of his own, which fleshed out the narrative of the friars’ deaths—though his source of information is not clear.47 In his letter, Bartholomew reported a series of events that became standard for the four friars of Tana. According to him, the friars were residing in a Christian household in the Muslim-ruled city, and were “hiding from the Saracens,” but were summoned to court to serve as witnesses to an incident of domestic abuse. Brought before the cady (identified as “the bishop of the city”), the friars were questioned about their faith instead. When the cady could not get them to admit that Machomet was the messenger of God, he threw Jacopo di Padova into a large bonfire. When he survived unscathed, the cady attributed his survival to his coat, which he claimed was from the land of Abraham. Thrown back in, naked and covered in oil, Jacopo again miraculously survived, leading the cady and the melic (the ruler of the territory) to proclaim that the friars were indeed miraculous and true friends of God. The two leaders sent the friars away, but the cady regretted letting them go, worrying that they would corrupt (perverterent) the whole population. They sent armed men after the friars, who beheaded them. Pietro di Siena, who had been away from the house when the friars were first brought to court, was also found, tortured, and executed. The killing of the three friars was accompanied by thunder, lightning, floods, rain, and terrible storms, and the boat that carried the brothers to Tana sank. The melic was crushed by his horse, and sent to hell, all of which led the Saracens and other infidels to wonder: “We have seen such things that we do not know what we should believe.”48 The letters of Jordan and Bartholomew, however, had relatively little circulation. Jordan’s letter has survived in only three manuscripts,49 while Bartholomew’s survived only in one, though it was used later in the fourteenth century by the author of the Chronica XXIV generalium ministrorum ordinis fratrum minorum, and thereby gained wide circulation in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.50

The Letters of 1323 Two curious letters from 1323 provide another route by which news of the martyrs reached western Christendom. Written by friars and merchants who

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were “pilgrims to India” and sent from Caffa in the Crimea to a general chapter meeting of the order in Toulouse (one that did not occur), the first letter gave brief accounts of several Franciscan martyrs and petitioned for greater support for evangelization, while the second rejoiced in successful Franciscan evangelization among the Mongols of the Golden Horde. Brimming with enthusiasm for the possibilities the friars saw around them, the letters shaped the way a generation of Franciscans thought about conversion and martyrdom. Nevertheless, how they influenced the order is not clear, because the letters survived only in a single manuscript now preserved in the Cambridge University Library, bound with a miscellany of fourteenthcentury material, the latest of which is dated to 1377.51 The same hand appears to have copied the texts immediately preceding the letters in the miscellany, including two bulls of John XXII concerning English ecclesiastical affairs, and material relating to the monastery of Bromholm, which shared little in common with the letters from the friars living in the khanate of the Golden Horde. Following the letters in the manuscript are materials more clearly related, but written by someone else: John XXII’s reissuance of the evangelizing bull Cum hora undecima as well as letters to the Mongol khans. The letters are dated to Pentecost, 15 May 1323; they thus followed closely after Jordan’s letter of 21 October 1321 and Bartholomew’s, dated 14 May 1322.52 Each of the letters (Jordan’s, Bartholomew’s, and the Caffa letters) served as a textual detonator, as the news of the Tana martyrdom raced along the routes connecting Tana to Tabriz, Trebizond, Caffa, and so on further west. The first of the Caffa letters even referred to Bartholomew, the custos of Tabriz, as someone who could also attest the news of the martyrs, and suggested that he was currently present with the (nonexistent) general chapter in Toulouse. Just as Bartholomew wrote in reaction to having received Jordan’s letter (and perhaps to the oral report of the messenger who carried it), the writers in Caffa seem to be responding to Bartholomew’s letter and perhaps even a direct encounter with the custos himself. The first letter contained brief reports on a number of martyrdoms that had recently occurred in places widely scattered from Bulgaria to India. These martyrs subsequently show up in a number of different sources, none of which cite the letter directly. The letter also claims that Pope John XXII had been impressed by the accounts of the martyrs. It is a curious claim for a group of friars and merchants in Caffa, thousands of miles from Avignon, to be making in a letter directed to the leaders of the order, who presumably were better informed about events in the papal court. The association of John

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with the martyrs was picked up by other Franciscan chroniclers, though the date when the pope heard of the martyrs varied. Two sets of martyrs were particularly prominent in the letter of 1323: those of Tana and the martyrs of Armenia. The letter followed the story in Tana as given by Bartholomew, though it was related in a hurried manner. Tana was referred to as the city of Diana, and the martyrs are named as “Iacobus Arnulfus, Thomas de Tartario, Demetrius Apulea et Petrus de Padua.”53 The author of the account is clearly dependent on Bartholomew’s letter, and briefly recounts Jacopo’s miraculous preservation in the fire, and the misattribution of his cloak to the land of Abraham; he also asserts that the cady bore responsibility for their deaths rather than the melich. But there are also crucial differences. The names of the martyrs themselves are garbled; Tommaso, the best known of the martyrs and the one most clearly identified with the spiritual movement, is inexplicably made into a Mongol, and Demetrios, who in other accounts is either Armenian, Georgian, or Mongol, is apparently given an origin in Apulia. The story of the martyrs of Armenia was also based on an earlier letter written by a Franciscan custos, in this case of Trebizond, written shortly after the martyrs’ deaths in 1314. (This letter will be discussed further in Chapter 5.) Like the account of the Tana martyrs, this narrative too feels rushed and a little garbled. Following the earlier letter, the 1323 epistle briefly recounts the miracle of the blind man, the punishment of the Armenian priest associated with the friars, and the celestial signs and wonders that occurred after their deaths. The third of the friar-martyrs, however, is identified as Ferdinand rather than Francis, as the letter from Trebizond had specified.54 The letter followed the two passiones with a quick summary of other martyrdoms that had occurred recently: Franco de Burgo, the guardian of Caffa, who died in Tabriz; and Peter the Little (Petrus Parvus), Bertrand de Malacho, Aaron, and Pons, who may have died with Franco or perhaps elsewhere. The letter also mentions Angelo di Spoleto, killed by the Bulgarians. These martyrs subsequently appeared in a number of other Franciscan sources, often in concert with the dead friars of Tana. But, curiously, they never earned full narratives of their own, and many did not make it into the Chronica XXIV, which preserved the greatest number of Franciscan passiones from the later Middle Ages. The conclusion of the letter made a clear argument about how its readers should understand the deaths of the friars. “Concerning their martyrdom and many miracles in the East,” the author proclaimed, “many Catholics and

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infidels publicly testified.”55 Furthermore, “more than a hundred princes, barons, and chiliarchs and their families and innumerable children have been reborn in our faith through the work of the friars in a few years”; their names and statuses would take too much time to detail, assured the author.56 The letter was thus a testament of Franciscan devotion to evangelizing, even unto death, and their success in that endeavor. A second, much longer letter joined the first, and was addressed particularly to the cardinals as well as to the rest of the church, and further elucidated their successful evangelization. The letter began with the Gospel precept that a candle should not be hidden under a bushel, but set up high to give light to all. That light was the faith carried by the friars into the darkness of the northern empire of the Mongols. The author claimed that a third of the empire “has received the light,” but that the friars could only be present in a tenth of it. The letter was thus a plea for more evangelists to be sent to the Golden Horde; the friars had even sent to the pope some of the idols they had seized as proof of their success. The stories of martyrdom should help make their point: “All spiritual men should be made brave rather than terrified by what has been written, namely how many of us and others have died in horrible torture by the Saracens and by the pagans.”57 The friars urged their Franciscan readers to come east; becoming “like the elephant [who] seeing bloody clothes may grow aggressive, you sons of blessed Francis may come in quick support to our aid.” The letter-writers also reached back to the model offered by Francis, “whose example when he presented himself in the court of the sultan out of faith and exposed himself to the fire, although the tyrant, moved by we do not know what spirit, did not permit it.”58 This was one of the few times that Francis’s own journey to Islamic lands was cited as motivation for others to follow. The letter also evoked the values of the primitive Franciscan order as further motivation: “Rather than pull back, take heart and consider preferable the poverty of our food, the worthlessness [vilitas] of our clothes, frugality, roughness, hardness and scarcity.”59 Harking back to the early days of the order, these words would have sounded sweet to the ears of a spiritual—particularly the reference to the vilitas (shabbiness or cheapness) of the friars’ clothing. While shabby habits had been one of the outward signs of strict fidelity to apostolic poverty, Pope Clement V had written approvingly of vilitas in his bull Exivi de paradiso (1312),60 and the constitutions enacted in 1316 after the election of Michael of Cesena also required vilitas.61 It was thus less a sign of spiritual sympathy (although it

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could be that) and more a signal of orthodox rigor, a sign that the Franciscan institution still adhered to the austerity of the days of Francis himself.

Spreading the Tale of the Tana Martyrs: Odorico di Pordenone The account of the martyrdom of the four friars written by the Franciscan traveler and missionary Odorico di Pordenone, who visited Tana just a few years after the martyrs’ deaths, was far more influential than the letters of Jordan and Bartholomew and those sent from Caffa. His account of his travels through Asia, the Relatio, was widely read throughout Europe—both in its original Latin edition and then in a number of vernacular languages.62 A sense of his success in spreading the story of the martyrs can be gotten from another Franciscan missionary, Pascal de Vittoria, who visited Tana. When he wrote home from Almalik (now in western China) in 1338, Pascal did not mention the martyrs of Tana; instead, he drew attention to the more recent martyrdom of Stephen in Saray just a few years earlier, confident that his brethren were already well informed about the martyrs who had died in India.63 While the stream of letters from Tabriz and Caffa may have stoked an interest in Franciscan martyrs, they had relatively little circulation. It was Odorico’s account of the martyrs of Tana that was responsible for a rekindling of Franciscan interest in martyrdom, not in the sense of the spiritual desire for martyrdom, which had been so important in the thirteenth century, but in the act of dying for the faith itself. Furthermore, it engaged the interest of non-Franciscans as well; his account was widely read and translated, and it is likely that it is through him that the Tana martyrs became almost as well known as the Moroccan martyrs of a century earlier. Odorico opened his account by introducing himself: “I crossed the sea and visited the country of the unbelievers (partes infidelium) in order to win some harvest of souls.”64 Despite this introduction, the friar had little to say about any harvesting he had actually accomplished. Instead, he offered an account about a part of the world that fascinated and terrified many western Christians. Odorico probably left Italy sometime between 1314 and 1318, and returned in 1330, thus spending twelve or more years in various parts of Asia. He lived in Beijing for three years (1324–27), and then returned to Europe by an unknown route. His travels began in Constantinople, then continued by sea to Trebizond, and overland across Persia to Hormuz. There, he

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boarded a boat—which Odorico noted was bound together only with twine so that he “could find no iron on it at all”65—that took him to Tana, following a route similar to the one the martyrs themselves had traveled. Odorico did not write down the story of the martyrs in 1324 when he was in Tana, but recounted it orally to his amanuensis Guglielmo da Solanga in 1330 when he returned to Europe. Whatever information he did learn while traveling was mixed together with his (and Guglielmo’s) understanding of what a martyrdom account should sound like, along with some version of the story recounted by Bartholomew. Odorico passed through Tabriz on his way east, but did not mention any interactions with the Franciscans already established there; nevertheless, he probably heard of the story of the martyrs in Tabriz before he even reached Tana. The martyrdoms take up considerable space in the Relatio, and reveal what Odorico thought about his own travels as an evangelist and a Franciscan. They also shaped the views of his readers toward the eastern world and its inhabitants. But the importance of the martyrs was not limited to the account of their deaths; the relics of the martyrs also played a vital role in Odorico’s larger narrative. The friar claimed that he had exhumed the bodies of the martyrs in Tana (unaware perhaps that Jordan had buried them in Surat), except those of Pietro di Siena, whose remains “God had concealed until he should be pleased to reveal them,”66 and brought them with him on the remainder of his travels, their miracles helping him on his way. He eventually deposited them in the Franciscan church in Zayton (generally identified with Quanzhou) in China, which had recently become the seat of a Franciscan bishop. Thus, the travels of Odorico were also the travels of the martyrs and their relics, and the fact that they remained to be venerated in China again spoke to the possibility of the transformation of the East into a Christian world through the piety of the Franciscans. The account of the martyrs sits in the middle of the Relatio, and their passio and the subsequent story of their relics takes up a significant portion of the whole text. It was clearly central to the image of the East that Odorico sought to portray. A century later, the relics still figured prominently in the local cult around Odorico in Udine; the fifteenth-century fresco cycle in the church of San Francesco in Udine, where Odorico is interred, features a scene of Odorico being saved from a house fire by the relics, bundled in a bag under his arm.67 Odorico (and the four friars before him) visited a city that straddled the boundaries between the known world and the marvelous exotic world further to the east. The friar believed that Tana had once belonged to King Porus,

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who had battled Alexander the Great with elephants and lost (though the historical battle took place in the Punjab, in modern-day Pakistan); it was thus part of story that educated Christians had long told and retold, the primal first encounter between an essentialized “East” and “West.” Yet it was also a world of wonder: bats the size of pigeons, rats as big as dogs, and filled with pagans who worshipped fire, snakes, and trees. According to Odorico, the friars had not intended to go to Tana at all; they had been heading to Polumbum, on the extreme tip of India (modern Kollam)68 —a popular route that Odorico himself later followed.69 Once stranded in Tana, the friars found lodging in the small Christian community of the town, which according to some versions was Nestorian. The man and wife of the house quarreled, the husband beat the wife, and the wife complained to the cadi (a judge trained in Islamic law).70 When he asked for witnesses, the wife named the four Frankish “rabbans,” a title given to monks in Syrian and Nestorian churches, living in the house. But the cadi was not interested in the friars as witnesses to domestic violence. Spurred on by an anonymous Alexandrian,71 a figure Odorico introduced to the story, the cadi instead wanted to engage in a little religious disputation with the strangers. The friars, through rational arguments, proved to all who were listening that Jesus was both God and man. Unsurprisingly, this did not please the cadi, and casting about for some stratagem to attack the friars, turned the discussion around, and asked them: “What do you say about Machomet?”72 This, of course, was a trick, transparent not only to the cadi and the friars, but also to the educated readers of the Relatio. It was well known among Latin Christians that it was against Islamic law to speak ill of the prophet Muhammad; to do so was to risk execution. Odorico himself commented somewhat snidely that “this was the custom of the Saracens, when they cannot maintain their cause by argument, they turn to swords and fists.” Tommaso, as leader of the friars, saw the trap and responded, “We have proved to you by arguments and instances that Christ, who was true God and true man, delivered our law to the world.” Turning to Mohammad, Tommaso diplomatically pointed out, “since him Machomet has come and delivered a law which is contrary to it. If you are wise, then you know what ought to be believed about him.”73 The cadi was not satisfied by this reply and again demanded an answer, “What do you say of Machomet?” Tommaso then retorted, “You wish to know my opinion concerning Machomet? I say to you this: that Machomet is a son of damnation and with the devil his

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father has a place in hell, and not only him, but all who observe his law, as pestilent, accursed, false as it is, hostile to God and the salvation of souls.” With that, the cadi had achieved his aim, as the listening Muslims shouted, “Let him die, let him die, for he has blasphemed the Prophet!”74 The crowd sought to kill the friars by exposing them to the midday sun, for the heat in India was so great that “if one should stand in the sun for the space of a single Mass, he will die.” The friars, however, survived six hours in the blazing tropical sun, “cheerful and unscathed.”75 The next attempt was more intimidating; the crowd kindled a large fire in the town’s central square. Jacopo di Padova was first, but he stood on the coals with his arms uplifted in prayer, unharmed. The populace watching knew what this meant and proclaimed, “They are saints! They are saints! It is a sin to do them harm! We see their religion is holy and true!” The cadi, however, insisted that the friar was wearing a cloak from the land of the prophet Abraham, which protected Jacopo from the flames.76 Doused with oil and stripped of his cloak, Jacopo was thrown back into the stoked fire, and again emerged unsinged. Again, the people proclaimed the friars’ sanctity, and this time, the melic of the city agreed, telling Jacopo, “We see that you are holy and good men, and that your religion is good and holy and true.”77 Nevertheless, he advised that they leave as soon as possible, as the cadi would try again to kill them. This miracle, of course, replicated the miracle of the three Hebrew boys in the fire in the book of Daniel (Dan. 3:20–26). And, like Nebuchadnezzar, the ruler of the city saw the miracle as evidence of the goodness of the friars and the value of their religious beliefs. Likewise, the population of the city “were standing about in a state of awe and astonishment, saying, ‘We have seen from these men, things so great and marvelous, that we know not what law we ought to follow and keep.’ ”78 Although the friars did not have the opportunity to baptize anyone, the people and ruler recognized the martyrs as saints and proclaimed their faith to be true. The melic, however, was a weak man, and when the cadi pointed out that the reputation for sanctity that the friars had won would inevitably lead to conversion to Christianity and the weakening of Islam, the melic gave his consent for their executions. The next morning, the executioners unwillingly—“We are reluctant to do it, for you are good and holy men”— cut off the heads of the three friars amid the sound of thunder and flashes of lightning, divine signs of favor.79 The fourth friar, Pietro di Siena, who had been left with their belongings in the house of the Nestorians, was then arrested, tortured, and executed, joining his brothers in martyrdom.

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None of the participants in the murder of the martyrs survived unscathed. The melic was plagued by dreams of the martyrs, “bright and gleaming like the sun,” threatening him with swords: in a confused ecumenical gesture, he built four mosques (mosquetas) in honor of the martyrs, and put Saracen “priests” (sacerdotes) in charge of them.80 This, however, was not sufficient to assuage the anger of God and the saints; the emperor at Delhi had him and his entire family cut to pieces for killing the friars.81 Odorico took the narrative given by Bartholomew and shaped it in significant ways, drawing on and evoking a much different set of expectations around martyrdom than earlier thirteenth-century Franciscan material. Most strikingly, the martyrs never expressed a desire to die; their deaths were the result of the panicked reaction of a worldly authority to their arrival, not the friars’ yearning desire to be one with the crucified Christ. In this, they stand in stark contrast to the thirteenth-century Franciscan saints, Francis and Anthony of Padua most prominently, who burned with the desire for martyrdom. The narrative played with the expectations of its audience; Franciscans and others were familiar with stories of martyrdom of Christians under Muslim rule, and expected Muslim hostility toward Christianity and a harsh reaction to any insult offered to Muhammad or his religion. Yet the setting was India, whose pagans recognized the sanctity of the martyrs, proclaiming it joyously. Odorico made no appeals for missionaries to be sent to the east, but he had no need to; the account shone with the possibilities of Christian evangelization and the transformation that could produce. The differences between Odorico’s account and those preceding his are striking. Like the letter of 1323 the Relatio was suffused with the possibility of conversion, but the letter of 1323 had introduced the four friars as having been killed “for constantly declaring that Machomet was hellspawn and filled with a devil”;82 Odorico in contrast showed the friars as being reluctant to insult the prophet. Odorico emphasized the difference between the categories of “Saracens” and “infidels”—a distinction that was not evident in Bartholomew’s letter—and showed the friars to be more circumspect in confronting Muslim authority. But the potential for transformation was limited—not everyone could be converted. Odorico’s account of the martyrs divided Tana into two groups: the Saracens, who persecuted and killed the martyrs, and “the people.” He explained at the outset that “the people are idolaters, for they worship fire, and snakes and trees too. The land is under the dominion of the Saracens, who have taken it by force of arms.”83 This distinction was absent in the earlier letters. These two groups react in diametrically opposed

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ways: the Saracens persecute, denying the evident truth of Christianity attested by the numerous miracles and the friars’ persuasive arguments, while the idolaters vociferously proclaim the martyrs’ sanctity and the veracity of their faith. Odorico repeatedly emphasized the difference—the people who proclaimed the miracle of the fire were the “populus idolatra.”84 The only exception was the melic, who was Muslim, yet recognized the goodness of the martyrs.

Translating Tana But Odorico’s account did more than give an uplifting account of Christianity’s triumph in a distant corner of the world. It also suggested that exotic Tana was in many ways not as foreign as it might have seemed. In fact, Odorico’s helpful translations—begun in Bartholomew’s letter and expanded by Odorico—allowed Tana to be easily envisioned as a city and community such as one the reader might inhabit. Although the story of the martyrs was filled with exotic detail, like the rest of the account, it was domesticated through the cultural translation Odorico offered. The foreign city with its medan, cadi, and melic became an Italian city, with a piazza, a bishop, and a podesta`.85 The cries of the populace when witnessing the martyrs’ suffering were the same as a Christian crowd when a new saint has been canonized. This series of correspondences suggested that Tana could be like the Christian cities Odorico’s readers knew; all that was required was the completion of the mission of the friars. Odorico saw other aspects of the new places he visited through the familiar lens of Christendom as well. The martyrs, so central to his account, had their parallels in India. In Mobar (probably Malabar, that is, modern Kerala), Odorico found many things familiar to him, but at the same time a little strange. There were Christians there, who were associated with the tomb of the apostle Thomas, but the church was filled with idols, and the Christians (Nestorians) were “vile and pestilent heretics.”86 There were martyrs, too: it was the custom in the area to celebrate the anniversary of the creation of a locally revered idol, “as big as St. Christopher,” which was placed in a chariot and led in procession. Pilgrims would cast themselves under its wheels, “saying that they wished to die for their god.” Once crushed by the chariot, their coreligionists burned their bodies, “declaring that they are holy, having thus devoted themselves to death for their god.”87

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Devotees of the Christopher-sized god had another path to holy death as well; the devotee could announce, “I desire to sacrifice myself for my god.” He then stood before the statue and removed bits of his flesh to place on the statue until he died of his wounds, and again “they look upon him as a saint.”88 This narrative has a long and curious history; it is the first European account of the cult of Jagannatha, which, contrary to Odorico’s supposition, is actually located in Puri, on the eastern coast of India in the state of Odisha. The massive idol and statue that crushed everything in its path is the source of the English word “juggernaut,” though the friar named neither the god nor the place where he was worshipped. The cult became representative of the image of Indian religion as bloody and superstitious, even though some European observers as early as the seventeenth century realized that the “martyrs” were simply people who had been accidentally killed in the crowded conditions of the festival.89 Odorico included this story to contrast the false Indian martyrs with the true Franciscan ones whose relics he carried with him. He did not record any other stories of sacrificial death from other communities, and his readers would have recognized the Juggernaut story as a form of martyrdom. But we should not imagine that he was drawing a parallel between the Malabar Indians and his own martyrs. The opposite is true; the story of those sacrificing themselves to their gods was intended to highlight by contrast the pious behavior of the true Christian martyrs, the authentic martyrs of Tana. It is striking that one of the crucial differences in behavior (rather than belief ) was that the idolatrous martyrs voluntarily sacrificed themselves, whereas the four martyrs never expressed a desire to die. The pagans desired martyrdom, but the Franciscans did not. Islam itself was similarly put in the context of Christianity. According to Odorico, Saracens went on pilgrimage to Mecca “just as Christians go to the Sepulcher.”90 In Mecca, Saracens also venerated a tomb—that of Machomet. Perhaps most surprisingly, the mosques the melic built for the bodies of the martyrs were not just like churches; Odorico said they were churches, and the clerics in them were “priests.”91 The tombs of the martyrs thus were both Christian and Muslim; both religions were described as having tombs as their most sacred places, and the space occupied by the martyrs was both a mosque and a church. Are these correspondences intended to suggest that Islam too might be transformed into Christianity, or that it was its mirror image, and thus unassimilable?

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The possibility that Islam might in some way be made into Christianity is supported by the ambiguous figure of the melic. Like the pagan citizens of Tana (and unlike any of the other Muslims), the melic recognized the sanctity of the martyrs and sought to have them released. In this sense, he echoed the Ayyubid sultan al-Ka¯mil in Bonaventure’s account of the story of the meeting of Francis and the sultan, in which al-Ka¯mil was willing to convert, but feared the reaction of his court and subjects.92 Yet it was the melic who was executed with all his family by the emperor for having the friars killed, despite his pious building of church-mosques in their honor. The cadi, on the other hand, did not die, but fled the emperor’s lands. Why? By Christian logic, the melic deserved to die, precisely because of his recognition of Christian truth. He abandoned the martyrs and failed to convert. His story showed both the power of Christianity and why Muslims did not convert and deserved punishment. Elsewhere in the Relatio, Saracens stand apart from other groups. Odorico delighted in giving offbeat ethnographic information: in the town of Huz, for example, it was the custom for men, not women, to knit and spin.93 But in no place did he describe Saracen habits and customs—at least, not explicitly. The Huzzites might well have been Muslim—Odorico located Huz near Chaldea, but he did not identify them religiously. Odorico showed little interest in Islam or Muslims in a cultural or religious sense, mentioning them only in a political context: he told his readers, for example, that there are “many Christians of all kinds in Tabriz, but the Saracens rule them in all things.”94 The Relatio conveys a sense of Asia as a vast world of paganism, a small part of which was ruled by Muslims, but not inhabited by them. Only in reference to the martyrs did the Saracens appear in a religious context: the melic built mosques in honor of the martyrs; Saracens on Odorico’s ship prayed for wind when they were becalmed, to no avail;95 and the Saracens (as well as the pagans) used earth from the site of the martyrdom to heal the sick.96 The power of Odorico’s account came from the revelation of an exotic world beyond the merely alien Islamic world with which western Christians had traded, fought, and in many places cohabited. The Muslims of Odorico’s account needed no introduction for western readers; they wielded political power, and were unlikely to convert—yet knew enough to know that they should. This Latin Christians already knew. But the Relatio showed that further to the east were vast realms, filled with kings whose wealth and power dwarfed that of any Muslim ruler. The events at Tana demonstrated how willing pagans were to convert when exposed to the deep faith of the Franciscans, the message the letter of 1323 also aimed to convey. Here, then, the

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audience could have their cake and eat it too. The martyrs shone with all the glory of the martyrs of the age of the apostles, and the Saracens filled the role of the evil persecutor. But the martyrs were victorious in both earthly and heavenly terms; the melic was killed for having allowed the execution of the martyrs, while the martyrs enjoyed a heavenly reward for their sacrifice. As we will see, the Franciscans would soon turn away from this kind of triumphalism. The surviving manuscripts of the Relatio tell us a great deal about what readers found compelling about the narrative. Unlike Jordan’s or Bartholomew’s account, Odorico’s was widely read and copied, and is preserved in many dozens of manuscripts, some translated into vernacular languages. The greater number were preserved with other travel narratives such as Marco Polo’s and Mandeville’s. Even those texts which were gathered with Franciscan-focused material also betray an interest in travel and the marvels of the East. The fifteenth-century manuscript at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge contains a Pseudo-Bonaventurean text on the Mass and Honorius III’s approval of the Franciscan rule, but also shows a notable interest in Asia and apocalyptic material. The manuscript also includes Pseudo-Methodius’s “Revelations,” the “Purgatory of St. Patrick,” the “Voyage of St. Brendan,” the “Travels of Mandeville,” the letter of Prester John to Manuel Komnenos, the “History of the Three Kings,” a treatise entitled De sarracenis, and the “History of Judas Iscariot.”97 This classification of the Relatio effectively transferred the story of the martyrs into an immensely popular genre, travel literature of the late medieval period, as if a tract on liberation theology was printed in the middle of a spy novel. This is seen most graphically in some of the illustrated manuscripts of Odorico, where illuminations depicting the martyrs are included among other images of the “wonders of the East.”98 Not only did it give the martyrs’ story a much wider readership, but it also transmuted its meaning in a variety of ways. The passio could be read not just as Franciscan self-fashioning in a time of uncertainty, but also as shaping a broader western Christian sense of distinctiveness.

A Spiritual Reading of the Martyrdom Yet Odorico’s account might well have had a more specific meaning for some Franciscans within the context of the controversy over poverty. Odorico dictated his account in 1330 and died soon after, as the struggles within the order

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were still raging: Michael of Cesena had fled Avignon only two years earlier. Though old and near death, Odorico made his way to the papal court shortly after his return to Italy, in part to demonstrate his obedience to John XXII in a time when his loyalties might be questioned—or at least a postscript to some of the manuscripts of the Relatio so claimed.99 Odorico himself may well have been loyal, but the story of the martyrs his account spread across Europe was far more subversive, at least from the point of view of Avignon. For some Franciscan readers, an account of friars dying at the instigation of tyrannous religious authorities could have been read as a veiled attack on John himself, the Tana martyrs standing in for (or standing alongside) the friars and beguines killed by the Inquisition. That sense would have been all the stronger among those who were familiar with the background of the martyrs themselves, particularly Tommaso, who was the leader of the Tana martyrs. Tommaso was imprisoned in 1274 for placing fidelity to the Franciscan rule over fidelity to the pope, and was thus among the first generation of spirituals. In 1290 he was released and spent the remainder of his life between missionary work in the East and trips back to Europe, once as an ambassador for the Armenian king Het‘um II in 1292100 and on another journey as a courier carrying Giovanni di Montecorvino’s letters back from Mongol lands to Europe in 1306.101 We know little about the other martyrs, but their willingness to associate with Tommaso would suggest at least some sympathy for the spiritual movement. Such close association with someone who had already been punished for disobedience would not be a connection taken on lightly, particularly in the 1310s and 1320s. While Odorico did not highlight the martyrs’ spiritual inclinations, the name of Tommaso di Tolentino would have been familiar to many. Angelo Clareno, one of the leaders of the spiritual movement, included Tommaso as a significant figure in his History of the Seven Tribulations (c. 1320s), mentioning both his early suffering in Ancona and his martyrdom.102 The spiritual affiliations of Tommaso di Tolentino and perhaps even of Odorico himself encourage us to imagine a spiritual reading of the martyrdom. The martyrs were killed through the collusion of two men: the cadi, described as the “bishop of the city,” and the melic, who was the “podesta`.” The cadi believed that the friars must be killed in order to preserve Islam; the melic was reluctantly persuaded by these arguments, but harbored sympathy for the martyrs. The story thus used the paradigm of the dynamic between Pilate and Caiaphas to structure the martyrdom into a story that paralleled the Crucifixion of Christ. The populace, however, did not occupy the place

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of the Jews in the Gospel accounts, shouting for the Crucifixion—that role was filled by the Muslims in the earlier scene at the court of the cadi who protested against the Franciscans’ blasphemy. The pagan crowd instead was the equivalent of the gentiles to whom Christian salvation was offered after it was rejected by the Jews—that is, the readers of the story in Europe. What did this allusion say about the contemporary crisis in the order? The cadi is easily read as John XXII, seeking to destroy the righteous men in a desperate attempt to preserve his corrupt and worldly religious authority. The emperor (who had no explicit religious or ethnic identity)103 avenged the friars—a Franciscan reader sympathetic to the spirituals might see in him another emperor, the Holy Roman Emperor Ludwig IV the Bavarian (1328– 47), who supported the spirituals (as well as Michael of Cesena) against the pope, and even appointed a spiritual Franciscan, Pietro Rinalducci di Corvaro, as John’s replacement as pope (antipope Nicholas V). The result of the martyrdom was the flight of the persecuting religious authority (John), the establishment of a cult devoted to the dead martyrs (like those of spiritual friars martyred in Marseilles), and the suggestion that the world would turn to proper Christian belief. This was a set of events that many hoped to see played out in Europe.

Frescoed Franciscans It was not only in texts that the martyrs suddenly appeared. They also began to be commemorated in frescoes, stained-glass windows, and other media in the early fourteenth century. The earliest representation of Franciscan martyrs came unsurprisingly from Coimbra, the center of the cult of the Moroccan martyrs. A small stone reliquary depicting the five martyrs in trefoil arcades can probably be dated to the late thirteenth century. In the first arcade is seated the Miramolin, and the first friar is addressing him in prayer. The death of the Franciscans is not depicted, so it is not in a strict sense, a depiction of the martyrdom itself.104 The oldest preserved depiction of Franciscan martyrdom per se (rather than of a Franciscan martyr) is most likely the stained-glass window in the chapel of Sant’Antonio in the lower church of San Francesco in Assisi, roughly dated to c. 1310.105 Monumental fresco cycles also began to include the martyrs; Ambrogio Lorenzetti around 1340 painted two frescoes in the church of San Francesco in Siena as part of a larger cycle decorating the chapter house. Lorenzetti’s work in the church

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was lost for centuries, and the two frescoes were rediscovered only in 1855; they were moved to a chapel in the choir of the church a few years later. Maureen Burke has identified one of the frescoes as the martyrdom of six friars in Almalyk in 1339, which makes sense of the Mongolian details in the frescoes.106 A fragment of Lorenzetti’s fresco of the martyrs of Tana was rediscovered in the cloister of the convent only in the twentieth century, making it unlikely that he depicted them again in this fresco.107 However, this identification is not certain either; one of the martyred friars was also bishop of Armalech, and none of the participants bore episcopal insignia. A second Lorenzetti fresco discovered in the chapter house was also moved to the chapel: Saint Louis of Toulouse Before Pope Boniface VIII. This fresco shows Saint Louis on his knees before an enthroned Boniface, who has taken the saint’s hands into his own. Louis is dressed in his Franciscan robes, and the scene is generally taken to represent the renunciation of his inheritance (the kingdom of Naples, of which Boniface was overlord), and the acceptance of his vows to join the Franciscan order, a meeting that happened in 1296.108 In their original setting in the chapter house, the Martyrdom of the Franciscans and Saint Louis were joined by scenes from the passion of Christ, including The Crucifixion of Christ and The Resurrection of Christ. Nevertheless, it is the scenes of Louis and the martyrdom that appear to speak to each other. Beyond their explicit Franciscan content, formal qualities link the two scenes. Both the khan and the pope are elevated on thrones; Burke notes that “the figures of the rulers (pope and khan) . . . are positioned in the central third of each scene, with an equal height to be found above and below.”109 Boniface, however, is on the extreme left of his panel, while the khan is in the center. Furthermore, Boniface is seen from his right side at a slight angle, while the khan is seated frontally. Both figures lean forward slightly: Boniface toward Louis whose hands he is grasping, and the khan to his right, toward a group of four Mongol figures holding weapons. The khan is not looking at the martyrs about to be beheaded; instead, his eyes meet those of a man in a simple white robe, with a single fillet around his head. He is the least exoticized and least violent of all the figures. Both rulers confront a busy scene: the pope faces three rows of spectators, which include cardinals as well as lay visitors and a crowned figure who has been identified as either Louis’s brother Robert, who became heir to the kingdom as a result of Louis’s vows, or their father Charles, looking on glumly as his eldest son renounces his inheritance. The khan is flanked by two groups of Mongols, with the friars and their guards before him.

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The visual links between the khan and the pope open the fresco to being read in a variety of ways. The twinning of the figures of the khan and the pope call to mind a third figure which often appeared in the accounts of the Franciscan martyrs in this period: John XXII. The letter of 1323 was the first to use the pope as a guarantee of the piety and sanctity of the martyrs. Both the Franciscan chroniclers Elemosina and Paolino da Venezia elaborated on this association and recounted scenes in which the passiones of the Tana martyrs were read out before the pope to great effect. This association would have been all the more powerful given the existence of a cycle of frescoes dedicated to the Tana martyrs in the chapter house in Siena, which now is largely lost. The position of the cadi in that fresco would reveal a great deal about how the entire cycle might have been viewed. Again, the viewer could interpret these associations in radically different ways. Boniface VIII was blessing Louis of Toulouse, just as John XXII was giving his approbation to the martyrs of Tana in the contemporary Franciscan chronicles. But a spiritual reading lurked beneath the surface of both frescoes. The convent in Siena was closely associated with spiritual activity in the early part of the fourteenth century.110 The construction of a grander Franciscan convent in 1326, which the frescoes were planned to complete, may have been intended to put the convent’s spiritual associations behind it. But did they still linger? Would some viewers of the frescoes of 1340 have seen them through a spiritual lens? Both frescoes show pious Franciscans with similar values. Louis was rejecting the world of power and prestige, and the martyrs were demonstrating by their willingness to die their rejection of compromise with the worldly power of the Mongol khan. This, then, curiously aligns the pope and the khan in a similar way as a spiritual reading of the martyrdom of the friars at Tana aligned the cadi and Pope John XXII. Like the khan, John XXII had the suffering and death of the martyrs displayed before him. Beneath the painting of Louis’s renunciation, too, lurked a spiritual message. Louis was demonstrating his commitment to poverty and humility by rejecting his royal inheritance in order to join the Franciscans. It is a reenactment on a far grander scale of Francis’s rejections of his patrimony, when he stripped himself of his clothes to return them to his father. In the famous fresco of this scene by Giotto in San Francesco in Assisi, Francis confronts his father, while Bishop Guido supports him from behind, wrapping him in his cloak to shield his nudity. The relation between the secular status Francis was surrendering and the religious one he was entering is staged confrontationally. The poverello faces what he rejects, and is aligned with what he is

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joining. If we apply the same dynamic to the image of Louis before the pope, Louis is handing over his royal prerogatives to Boniface. The prince was, of course, heir to the kingdom of Sicily, over which the pope was temporal sovereign. The centrality of secular authority was emphasized by the presence of the crowned figure in the scene, who represented Louis’s father or brother. This emphasis on the pope’s temporal power and its contrast to Louis’s rejection of it aligns the image with long-standing Franciscan critiques of ecclesiastical wealth and power. Those critiques became more pointed at the turn of the fourteenth century, in reaction to the divisive papacies of Boniface IX and John XXII. In one possible reading of the scene, Boniface represents everything that Louis is rejecting—worldly power, wealth, and prestige. These are precisely the qualities vested in the Muslim persecutors of the Franciscan martyrs—in the convent in Siena, specifically the Mongol khan. These questions arise in part due to the troublesome nature of claims about poverty. As John XXII understood, the Franciscans’ emphasis on communal poverty and their claim to faithfully follow the evangelical life of Christ and the apostles was a rejection of much of what the established church represented. It was all too easy for Franciscans and others to see in the figures of the Mongol khan, the Miramolin, and the Ayyubid sultan the wealthy and worldly institutional church, led by an equally worldly and wealthy pope. While Innocent III might have seen the humble and poor Francis as the pillar holding up a church crumbling under the weight of its own wealth, John XXII saw the Franciscans, particularly those most devoted to poverty, as tearing the church down. But it was precisely this flexibility of Franciscan martyrdom that made it so appealing to the order. The rejection of the world by the martyrs may have been inspired by the same ideology that undergirded the love of poverty, but it also supplanted it, so that the Franciscan rejection of material possessions need no longer be expressed through devotion to apostolic poverty, whether interpreted rigorously or loosely.

Conclusion The martyrdom of the friars at Tana was widely read because of the flexibility of its message and because of its arrival in Europe as the Franciscan order was suffering through an existential crisis. The story of the martyrs could assure anxious friars of the fundamental piety of the order; it could also be used, as

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Jerome of Catalonia had, to defend Franciscans against the specific accusation of heresy in the wake of the controversy over poverty. Martyrdom had the power to unsettle as well as comfort. It could offer a critique of the desire for martyrdom, and it could allow spiritual friars to read the Saracens and the suffering they inflicted as a coded reference to the persecutions of John XXII and his inquisition. The Tana martyrdom also represented a pivot. It was written while Franciscans and others still believed in the possibility of widespread conversion of the Mongols, particularly in the realm of the Golden Horde. Yet the enthusiasm for martyrdom was new; the evangelists of the thirteenth century, like Giovanni di Montecorvino and William of Rubruck, neither sought it out nor glorified it. While Jordan, the letter-writers in Caffa, and Odorico all celebrated the possibilities of transformation and conversion, the promotion of martyrdom transmuted evangelizing enthusiasm into the marvels of martyrdom—which required no proof of success in converting. Specific numbers and names of people baptized could be supplanted with crowds praising the martyrs. Within a decade, however, the crowds dissipated, leaving only the martyrs as a testament to the achievements of the Franciscans in the East.

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“The Infidels Learned Nothing” Poverty, Rejection of the World, and the Creation of the Franciscan Passio

The story of the Tana martyrs spread quickly in Europe. Within five years of the composition of Odorico’s account, the passio appeared in three independent sources: two chronicles in Italy and a collection of diverse Franciscan material in England. Other passiones showed up as well; the Tana narrative inspired Franciscans to compose accounts for other martyrs, whose stories had been circulating in some form within the order. Thus, the first full passio of the Moroccan martyrs came out at the same time as the story of the Tana martyrs was spreading through Franciscan networks. Like Jerome of Catalonia, the authors saw Franciscan martyrdom as an anchor for the order in trying times, serving as proof of the sanctity of both individual friars and the order as a whole. But even more than this, the martyrdoms were in dialogue with the ideal of poverty; in some cases, they proved the piety of those most devoted to poverty (i.e., spirituals), but in others they served to replace poverty as a marker of the distinctive brand of Franciscan piety.

Paolino da Venezia: The Courtly Friar Reads the Martyrdom The Tana martyrs caught the eye of a prominent member of the court of Robert I of Naples in the late 1320s and early 1330s. The Franciscan Paolino da Venezia was one of the earliest to record the story of the Tana martyrs outside of those who had been to India; he described the martyrdom in two

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different works, first in the Compendium or Chronologica magna1 and again in the longer Historia satyrica (around 1334).2 Unlike Odorico, we can be certain that Paolino was no spiritual; the inventory of his goods following his death included an abundance of silver liturgical vessels,3 and his Franciscan colleagues complained about his exorbitant expenditures on clothing and his employment of entertainers within his household.4 Furthermore, his historical works clearly took the side of John XXII in his conflict with the Franciscans, portraying the spirituals as schismatics and heretics.5 Paolino’s chronicles were designed to be a demonstration of his own intellectual prowess, and so the martyrs, too, were shown to be learned men; they demonstrated that martyrdom was not always just a proxy for conflict with Islam or for the issue of poverty. Paolino had a distinguished ecclesiastical career in Venice, Avignon, and Naples: after joining the order in the province of Venice (c. 1290), he served as an inquisitor in Treviso, among other offices. He moved to Avignon (1316–26), which seven years earlier had become the refuge of the popes from the tumults of Rome. Paolino made the most of the opportunities Avignon offered. He was appointed as a papal penitencer under John XXII, and filled a variety of diplomatic roles for the pope. It was a heady time to be in Avignon; not only was Paolino present for the conflict with the spirituals, but the papal court drew many others into its orbit. His time in Avignon coincided with that of Robert I of Naples, who resided in the papal city from 1319 to 1324. Paolino was in the enviable position of being able to find patrons in two of the richest and most powerful courts in Europe, all in the same city. Thanks to Robert, he was eventually appointed bishop of Pozzuoli (just outside Naples) in 1324. He did not move south until two years later, and when he did, he spent much of his time at the court of Robert I, just a few miles away from his see. Paolino was engaged in the intellectual and political life at both courts, and he wrote a number of texts that bolstered his reputation and career. One of his earliest treatises was on good government, De regimine rectoris, written in the Venetian dialect and dedicated to Marino Badoer, the duke of Candia. He also wrote treatises in Latin on chess, geography, and pagan mythology. Robert I owned a copy of his Historia satyrica, and may have annotated it in his own hand.6 Boccaccio, though still young and not well known, mocked his intellectual pretensions, calling him a “Venetian blabbermouth,”7 yet borrowed from his material.8 Boccaccio also did not like Paolino’s prejudice in favor of his patron John XXII, remarking that he did not mention the nefarious deeds of the “tyrant.”9

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As a chronicler and compiler of historical texts, Paolino was pursuing a path to prominence popular in the early fourteenth century. Both of his historical texts were world histories, which, like many other thirteenth-and fourteenth-century chronicles, sought to place the history of their region, king, or order within the scope of the history of creation. His colleagues at the papal court in Avignon, such as the Dominicans Bernard Gui (c. 1261– 1331) and Ptolemy of Lucca (c. 1236–c. 1327) also composed world chronicles. All three looked back to Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale as a model, and each of them departed the papal court with an episcopal ring on his finger for his good services.10 Like his colleagues, Paolino was not writing history de novo, but was compiling his account from earlier sources. Paolino’s distinctive contribution was the carefully structured graphic schema that organized the diverse material he copied and edited. It featured a series of tables at the beginning of the chronicle, which provided a kind of index, while the text itself was structured through the reigns of emperors, popes, and kings, graphically represented (often as crowned heads) as another way in which the reader could read selectively. But Paolino’s histories were not just scholastic compilations of past events. They naturally incorporated sacred history, and even spurred their readers to meditate on the events of the Crucifixion, as they drew upon Franciscan texts such as the Meditationes vitae Christi as well as more conventional historical narratives like Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History.11 Paolino included an account of the Tana martyrs in both his Chronologia magna and his Historia satyrica.12 Paolino was evidently drawing on some version of Odorico’s account, rather than Bartholomew’s, but it was not a word-for-word transcription. Paolino notably misdated their deaths, placing them in 1319, and did not explain how the friars ended up in front of the cadi. According to Paolino, the friars, claiming to be “lovers of holy poverty,” told the melich that they had traveled to Tana seeking the tomb of Saint Thomas. The Saracens accused them of claiming that “our law is better than the law of Mahumet,” though Paolino did not record the friars as having directly denigrated Islam or the prophet.13 When the population of the town proclaimed them saints, the melich was convinced by the cadi and the mysterious man from Alexandria (named Yusuf and identified as a Saracen), who played a larger role in this account, to have the friars executed. Although Paolino followed a rough outline of Odorico’s account, his condensed version left out details that altered the valence of the story. Whereas Odorico described the friars as preaching the doctrine of the Incarnation,

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Paolino specified that they used natural parallels—the rays of the sun, the seeds of the earth—to show that God could have a son yet have no wife. The friars thus showed themselves to be learned friars, who like Paolino himself, were akin to the philosophers thirteenth-century enthusiasts of evangelizing among the Muslims imagined could convert the Saracens through wisdom. Nevertheless, it was not through intellect that the friars triumphed, but through faith, demonstrated in the miracle of the fire. But Paolino also framed this episode differently than either Odorico or Bartholomew had. Jacopo stepped into the fire willingly, having been challenged to demonstrate the veracity of their claims about their religion through a miracle. Thus, the martyrs were like Francis in Bonaventure’s version of his encounter with the sultan, when the saint challenged the Saracen wise men to demonstrate the veracity of their faith by stepping into a fire, as he was willing to do.14 Once again, the martyrs accomplished what Francis only desired. Jacopo’s miraculous preservation in the midst of the flames proved the superiority of Christianity to Islam, whereas in Bonaventure’s account of Francis, the saint never had the opportunity; the sultan refused to kindle the fire.15 Why was Paolino interested in this martyrdom, and why did he include it in both of his historical texts? It is the only Franciscan passio he recorded— probably because it was the only one he knew. The second chronicle, the Historia satyrica, gives us a small clue: his account of the martyrs began with Pope John XXII; he “read a letter in the consistory with great favor” about the martyrs.16 This letter described the martyrdom of the four friars. Unfortunately, Paolino gave no hints about who composed the letter: Was it Bartholomew? Or Odorico? Thus, Paolino not only authenticated the passiones as having been approved by the pope, but he also showed that they were even read aloud to the papal court. John’s potential interest in the martyrs was an opportunity to demonstrate what sorts of Franciscans he found pleasing. With this perspective, certain details of Paolino’s account become more significant. The Venetian never identified Tommaso di Tolentino by anything other than his first name; Jacopo di Padova’s city of origin, on the other hand, was recognized. Paolino thus avoided mentioning a well-known spiritual in John’s textual presence.17 Furthermore, Paolino identified the martyrs as “lovers of holy poverty.” In another context, this might be seen as a recognition of Tommaso’s spiritual associations, but that is not the case here. Instead, Paolino was showing how poverty should work within the Franciscan order. The friars found themselves in India “to preach to infidels” and to seek the tomb of Saint Thomas.

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The martyrs remained faithful to Franciscan poverty, but their willingness to die gave them their true glory. Like Jerome of Catalonia, the ideal of poverty was sublimated to the holier status of martyr. The Franciscans of Tana joined the triumphant parade of saints and martyrs that populated Paolino’s chronicle, showing the order to be the culmination of providential history. While Paolino was not following a Joachimite theology of history, he did see the Franciscans as embodying evangelical values that had their origin in the life of Christ and the apostles themselves. “Poverty,” Paolino pointed out, “was the root of non-sinning. It is the origin and fundament of all good things.”18 He made the distinction between possession and use, which John XXII had just a few years earlier undermined in his bull Ad conditorem, pointing out that while use is necessary to sustain human life, possession is not. “He therefore is poor according to the spirit who renounces both the possession of all temporal goods for the sake of God and superfluity in the use of them.” This was the “essence of evangelical poverty,” which comes in two forms: “The second kind of poverty (communal) existed among the apostles.” Not only the apostles, of course—“In order to teach more by example than through words alone, Christ has renounced all possessions.”19 The Franciscans were the only ones to practice the communal poverty of Christ and the apostles, who were the cornerstones of the church. The Franciscans, like the early church, also produced martyrs; the account of the events at Tana demonstrated the continuing evangelical and apostolic piety of the order. Despite John’s bulls, evangelical poverty remained fundamental to the Franciscans.20 But fidelity to poverty could no longer be located in the real or even theoretical poverty of the order: John had forced it to own what it used. The story of the martyrs, appearing at the end of the chronicle, provided both papal approbation of Franciscan piety and proof that such piety was rooted in the values of the primitive church.

Elemosina’s Chronicle: The Triumph of the Church Another Franciscan chronicler writing around the same time, Johannes Elemosina, showed an even greater interest in the martyrs, making the dead friars central to the order’s history and values. His world chronicle was structured around evangelization and martyrdom. But Elemosina was not a courtly sophisticate like Paolino; nor was he a spiritual—he was the guardian of the convent of Gualdo Taldino, a town in the hills of Umbria.21 The manuscripts

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containing his chronicle are scruffy and unpolished compared to Paolino’s illustrated and carefully structured opus. Perhaps as a consequence of his obscure location, only two copies of his chronicle survive—both are autographs, so it is possible that no one other than Elemosina himself read or copied the text.22 It is this manuscript that preserved the letters of Giovanni di Montecorvino. Elemosina, however, did share with Paolino and others of the same era his understanding of what a chronicle should be; his was also a universal history, conceived as a succession of empires. For most of his chronicle, Elemosina drew on earlier accounts, such as Orosius, but he also added his own distinct voice to his account in a number of ways, most prominently through separate notes he appended at the bottom of many of the manuscript pages, which are not based on earlier material. These are almost exclusively on religious subjects; one of the earliest is a chronological note announcing the birth of Jesus in the twenty-seventh year of Augustus’s reign.23 More frequently, however, the notes do not give specific historical information, but rather explain how the history of salvation worked. This history, of course, is not one of dates or events, but of the mysterious grace of God working for the salvation of humanity. At the bottom of the page recounting the deeds of Constantine and his mother Helena, for example, Elemosina added an account describing how “God renewed the world through the Christian faith.”24 The note does not refer directly to the historical account above; Elemosina makes no reference to Constantine, his mother, the cross, the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, or any other such subject, but simply exults in the triumph of Christianity over idolatry that Constantine represented more broadly. These notes were in a sense Elemosina’s guide to the history recounted in the paragraphs above, letting the reader know how the specific events in the history of empire or church fit into the larger divine pattern. And for Elemosina, that pattern was a pattern of triumph. Once he turned to the Christian era, Elemosina showed a particular interest in three subjects: conversion, martyrdom, and the non-Christian world of the Middle East and Asia, themes Paolino also found compelling.25 Significant enough to receive their own rubrics were the conversion of the Irish,26 the Burgundians,27 the Armenians,28 and the English.29 He also addressed the subject through his notes, as when he described “how nearly all the peoples of East and West came to the faith of Christ.”30 Martyrdom was also a common theme. Beginning with the first Christian martyr, James,31 his chronicle included Hilarian, who died in Ostia;32 four hundred

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martyrs killed in Lombardy;33 John of Spoleto, martyred by the Saracens;34 the Visigothic king and martyr Hermingild;35 King Oswald of Northumbria, another king and martyr whose story occupied several folios;36 martyrs in Palestine during the Persian invasion;37 and so on. The larger story Elemosina sought to tell, then, was the spread of Christianity to all the peoples of the earth, a mission achieved through the efforts of the church and empire on earth, and through the valiant Christians who were willing to die so that Christianity might triumph. It was a story begun by Eusebius in the fourth century, and fundamental to how Latin Christians understood providential history through the Middle Ages and beyond. What Eusebius began, Elemosina thought he might finish. The quickening of apocalyptic time was manifested most clearly in the trifecta of martyrdom, Franciscan values, and conversions. He discussed “the great Christian king of India” and his devotion to the Holy Sepulcher,38 the efforts of Franciscans like Giovanni di Montecorvino in Mongol lands,39 and, of course, the Franciscan martyrs who died in India. Like Odorico, Elemosina offered an image of a world on the verge of conversion, and saw the work of Franciscan friars across Asia in the vanguard. The martyrs of Tana appear at the very end of his chronicle—indeed, Elemosina may have been inspired to write his account by hearing of their deaths. The beginning of his history indicates that he had originally planned to end his chronicle in 1331,40 and he indeed stopped his historical chronicle at this point. Thus he suggested that he structured the text to conclude just as the account of the Tana martyrs reached Avignon. The last twenty folios of the chronicle abandon the chronological narrative and are devoted almost exclusively to Franciscan martyrs, evangelism among infidels, and apocalyptic materials: first the words of Christ himself to his apostles, warning them of the plagues and earthquakes that would presage the coming of the Son of Man,41 and then the visions of the biblical prophet Daniel.42 Only a few paragraphs interrupt this focus: one short entry describing the disastrous flood in Florence in 1333 (which could be considered apocalyptic) and an even briefer mention of the death of John XXII and the coronation of Benedict XII in 1334.43 While we cannot be certain why Elemosina wrote his chronicle, it seems that in concluding with a series of Franciscan martyrdoms and the scriptural predictions concerning the end of the world, Elemosina might have seen in his own day the quickening of apocalyptic chronology, and intended his account to be a complete history of the world, from beginning to end.44 The accounts of the Franciscan martyrs, particularly those who died in India,

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happening in the furthest reaches of the known world, were a signal that the evangelization of the whole world was nearly complete and that the end of the world was at hand. The importance of the Tana martyrs to Elemosina is further signaled by his treatment of their story. Rather than giving a brief paraphrase or retelling their passio in his own words as he had done for other historical accounts, he transcribed all the materials he had about the martyrs, including both the letter of Jordan and the account of Odorico.45 But Elemosina did not discuss any other Franciscan martyrdoms: the martyrs of Morocco (1220), Ceuta (1227), Valencia (1231), and Armenia (1314) all go unmentioned. He did briefly refer to one other Franciscan martyr: Stephen. He did not give a location for his martyrdom, but gave the date of 1333 and mentioned his miraculous escape from chains.46 Why? The most likely reason is because he did not have the full passiones for any of the martyrs other than the Tana four and the brief account of Stephen. The absence of other Franciscan passiones in a chronicle devoted to evangelization and martyrdom is further evidence that the Tana friars were the first Franciscans to receive a full passio. All other accounts of Franciscan martyrs were written after their stories began to circulate. Elemosina did, however, include a story about other Franciscan martyrs in his chronicle—but did not recount their deaths. In 1307 five friars traveled to Egypt; the motive for their journey was, like so many of the friars who traveled outside Christendom, for “the consolation of Christian captives.”47 Many former inhabitants of Palestine and Syria were enslaved in the Mamluk realm, for less than twenty years had passed since the Mamluks had conquered the remaining Frankish holdouts of Tripoli and Acre. The friars were impressed by Egypt: the great city of Cairo, the magnificence of the court of the sultan, and the marvels of the vast desert all amazed the visitors. They particularly commented on the Christian population of Cairo, noting that they all “obey the Sultan just as the Saracens, and because the majority are faithful and true, they commit to them the care of provinces and cities.”48 The friars were also surprised to find that the soldiers who escorted them to the sultan’s court were Christian knights, and yet were entrusted with the sultan’s safety. The pleasant experience of the friars in Egypt stood in stark contrast to their later fates, which Elemosina briefly noted. One of the friars, Monaldo di Ancona, was among the martyrs killed in Armenia in 1314; his martyrdom was not included in Elemosina’s chronicle, but he was named in his catalogue of Franciscan holy men.49 Another, named Angelo, was killed by heretic

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Bulgarians (previously mentioned in the letter from Caffa in 1323), and a third (Francesco) died at the hands of infidels in the midst of celebrating Mass.50 Why include the story of their travels to Cairo and not include an account of their martyrdom? Their account of their visit to Cairo brimmed with the possibility of conversion. The friars praised the Saracens in a number of ways: the caliph “agreed with the friars about many things” in a discussion about scripture, and the sultan had “the greatest devotion” for the monastery of Saint Catherine on Mount Sinai.51 As we will see below, Monaldo’s passio instead emphasized that the Saracens obstinately refused to convert, even when confronted with miracles. What the story of their visit to Cairo shows us is how new Franciscan martyrdom really was in the 1320s and 1330s. Elemosina was as interested as anyone could be; it was central to his chronicle, and the martyrs appeared prominently in his catalogue of holy men. Yet even he was uncertain how to treat the Franciscan dead. The best he could do was to include the accounts he had access to, of their travels among the Muslims, and mention the little information he had on their deaths. Elemosina also included an account of John XXII’s response to the death of the martyrs in one of the manuscripts of his chronicle, and it was a dramatic affirmation of the martyrs. “The pious report of the holy martyr friars . . . was echoing from the East to the West, and everywhere the hearts of the brothers were renewed by the fervor of the Holy Spirit,” Elemosina elaborated with a flourish. “When it was announced in the Roman Church, the pope cried tears of devotion.” But the guardian of Gualdo Taldino was willing to go further. “When the lord pope was asking whether these martyrs might be canonized, certain friars of other orders offered their saints for canonization, the pope refrained from judgment over these things, deliberating carefully.”52 Elemonsina’s account went beyond Paolino’s description of the arrival of the story of the martyrs at John’s court. While Paolino had suggested that the pope heard the passio of the martyrs “with great favor,” Elemosina described John as weeping tears of devotion, linking John XXII to the friars whose hearts were renewed by the Holy Spirit when they heard the news. He furthermore put forward the possibility of canonization of the martyrs, which again would seem unlikely given Tommaso’s spiritual inclinations.53 Whereas Paolino had the pope enjoying the passio in the midst of his consistory, Elemosina left the pope thinking carefully about the martyrs, their canonization blocked by the efforts of others. While this account (like Paolino’s) gave papal approbation to the martyrs, it also suggested that the martyrs projected their own kind of authority, which even the pope needed to take time to consider and absorb.

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Elemosina tied together the history of the church, the order, and providential history in a way that followed a long tradition within the order; just as Francis was a second Christ, so too was the providential history of Christianity recapitulated in the Franciscan order. This conception of Franciscanism had been critically undermined by John XXII’s bulls on poverty, a subject Elemosina downplayed. His chronicle, however, did not seem compelling to his peers; only two copies survive—both were made by Elemosina himself— and we have little evidence of his influence on other chronicles. It may have seemed that the world was ending, but given the circulation of the manuscript, the Franciscans were not convinced that the values of the order were central to its culmination.

Three Passiones, Two Scribes, One Manuscript We must turn to an anonymous English manuscript (Cotton ms. Nero A IX in the British Library) to find Franciscans focusing on martyrs other than the four who died in India.54 The manuscript is a compilation, half of which is a collection of Franciscan material written in two different hands. The entire manuscript was bound together by Sir Robert Cotton in the seventeenth century. The first portion was probably written by Jean Salat in the early sixteenth century, and focuses on the conflict between Boniface VIII and Philip IV.55 The manuscript is a key clue to the sudden interest in Franciscan martyrs in the early fourteenth century, but the manuscript itself is an enigma. Both scribes who worked on the Franciscan half of the manuscript included passiones. Does the order in which they were added tell us something about when they were composed, or at least arrived in England? Was the manuscript intended from the start to be a collection of Franciscan passiones, or did the second scribe add more in response to the first?56 If so, what response did the second scribe intend? Expansion of the collection of martyr stories? Contradiction of the tone or values encoded in the first account? As we will see, these were all possibilities. The first compiler assembled the anonymous “De beato Francisco et impressione sacrorum stigmatum,”57 and two martyrdom accounts: one of the five friars who died in Morocco in 1220, and the other of three friars who died in Armenia in 1314, adding them to a preexisting manuscript containing Thomas of Eccleston’s “De adventu fratrum minorum in Angliam”58 and an anonymous “De Britannia et Britonum rebus gestis.”59 Some indeterminate time later, the second hand added three more texts: the letters of Jordan and

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Bartholomew concerning the Tana martyrs, and a text entitled “De locis fratrum minorum et predicatorum in Tartaria.” These martyrdoms accounts were not embedded in any larger chronicle or text, so we have little idea what the purpose of collecting them was. The Franciscan portion of the manuscript apparently belonged to the convent in Hereford.60 We cannot be certain about the date when the text was written; the first hand can only broadly be dated to the first half of the fourteenth century, while the second could be later. Based on the materials, the first hand could have been written no earlier than 1314, and the second hand must have been after 1322. This manuscript in itself embodies the conflicting ways in which Franciscans were inclined to see the world. The first author has preserved (or composed) the first detailed passiones of both the Moroccan (1220) and the Armenian (1312) martyrs to survive. He chose to add them to a manuscript already in the convent in Hereford around 1300, as a rough draft of a letter to the provincial minister Hugh of Hartlepool in the manuscript suggests.61 It is, of course, possible that the scribe chose the manuscript because it was available and not for its contents. Nevertheless, when read together, the texts instill a particular Franciscan identity in its English reader, one that simultaneously rooted the reader in Hereford and presented the Franciscans as opposed to the world. Thomas of Eccleston’s text explains how the Franciscans were established in England, situating the friar writing (and reading) in Hereford, and explaining how the Franciscans came to be there, while the history of Britain gave further background—references to Hereford were marked out, and important moments in Franciscan history were inserted. The Franciscan values that the collection imparts were distinctive as well. The frame of the account of the stigmata told of the desire of the order in 1288 to learn the exact date and time when Francis received the wounds of Christ. One pious friar spent the night in prayer in Francis’s cell in La Verna, and received a visit from Francis himself in the early morning, who then revealed further details about the miracle. Francis confirmed that it was Jesus himself in the guise of a seraph who had appeared to him. He claimed an angel had warned him in advance, saying “I should prepare myself for suffering and for receiving in me what God might wish to achieve.”62 Francis told the angel that he was ready to accept “whatever suffering that God condescended to inflict.”63 The poverello received the vision of the crucified seraph on the morning of the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. When Jesus then stood before Francis, he asked for alms, but the saint insisted he had nothing to give other than his body and soul. Jesus prompted him to

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give three golden balls that he was surprised to find in his breast, which represented the three orders that Francis had founded. The account, in addition to giving further evidence supporting the authenticity of the stigmata, emphasized the suffering Francis had endured, and his poverty, something which had not been associated with the stigmata previously.

The First Passio of the Morocco Five The account of the stigmata was followed by the passio of the Moroccan martyrs in the same hand. This is the first full account of the martyrs, providing a complete narrative of their journey, suffering, and death.64 Nevertheless, it is not the version that has generally been read or cited, though scholars have been aware of it for more than a century. It reveals a great deal about both medieval and modern notions of Franciscan martyrdom. The Moroccan martyrs often appear in general histories of the Franciscan order, of missions, and of Muslim-Christian conflict, and nearly all cite (when a citation is given to a primary source) the late fourteenth-century Chronica XXIV generalium ministrorum ordinis fratrum minorum and its appendix, both of which contain a full passio of the friars. (This narrative was discussed in the introduction; see Chapter 6 for a fuller discussion of it). The accounts in the Chronica were written some 150 years after the death of the martyrs, yet they have been taken as a reliable witness to the circumstances of the friars in the early thirteenth century. The Nero text predates the Chronica text by at least fifty years, and is markedly different. Stories of the Moroccan martyrs, either written or oral, were circulating in Franciscan communities in the mid-thirteenth century, yet the martyrs themselves were not considered to be significant enough to merit a full passio of their own.65 It is, of course, possible that an earlier passio does exist, or that the Nero version is based on an earlier account, but no evidence of it remains. The absence of an account of the martyrs’ deaths in either Paolino’s or Elemosina’s chronicle is particularly telling, given their interest in evangelization and martyrdom. Elemosina did include them in his catalogue of holy Franciscans, but got their names wrong, suggesting that, living in Umbria, the heart of the Franciscan order, there was no established passio available to him. It is difficult to think of a reason why the chronicles would have excluded the martyrs if a passio did exist, and as difficult to imagine that a passio existed that they would not have had access to, given their respective associations

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with Assisi and the papal court at Avignon. The only evidence suggesting that a passio may have existed in the thirteenth century is Jordan of Giano’s statement that, “when the life and legend of the martyrs were reported,” Francis reminded his brethren that “everyone should glory in his own suffering and not in that of another.”66 The verb used to describe the transmission of the story, “defero,” could refer to oral or written communication, and the reference to the martyrs’ “vita et legenda” might suggest a written text, but neither phrase is conclusive. What we know about the martyrs from earlier sources is limited. As we have seen, they first appeared in the vita of Saint Anthony of Padua (c. 1232), who was inspired by seeing the bodies of the martyrs returning to Portugal to follow in their footsteps. Anthony himself desired to travel to Morocco and to be martyred, but as with Francis, God had other plans. Anthony’s story only mentioned their martyrdom and a few identifying characteristics; it did not provide a narrative of their deaths or even their names.67 Clare and other members of her order were clearly familiar with the story of the martyrs of Morocco as well, and saw the martyrs as embodying the Franciscan virtues they wished to imitate, but again who the martyrs were and what their deaths represented to the sisters is lost to us.68 Indeed, the title given the passio in the Nero manuscript, “The Martyrdom of the Five Lesser Brothers in Morocco, who were in the life of the blessed Anthony,” acknowledges the martyrs’ shadowy existence in the thirteenth century.69 For the scribe in England, at least, the martyrs were still best known through their connection with Saint Anthony of Padua; he did not presume widespread independent knowledge of the martyrs on their own merits. Similarly, in Thomas de Papia’s thirteenth-century Dialogus de gestis sanctorum fratrum minorum, the Franciscan martyrs appear only as the inspiration for Anthony of Padua’s life, rather than as subjects worthy of their own.70 The title further suggests that there was no preexisting passio for the author to follow. He had a free hand to shape the narrative according to the needs of the community. Most striking, of course, is the fact that the first author was composing the passio of the Moroccan friars at the same time as the order was being thrown into chaos over the debate about poverty. It was also at the same time that the passio of the Tana martyrs began to circulate, but the first scribe of the Nero manuscript did not include those letters or accounts. Was he aware of them? Was he writing in response to them? Or was he impelled to write his passio by the same larger cultural forces that made the Tana martyr accounts so appealing?

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In that case, the Morocco martyrdom account would be a parallel text, not a response. The account presented the goal of the friars as both conversion and martyrdom. They were at the outset “inflamed by the fire of loving-kindness; so that they panted for martyrdom soon with all their hearts.”71 Their journey was placed “in the time of the lord pope Innocent III under the teaching of St. Francis for the imitation of the footsteps of our accomplished Savior.”72 Once the friars reached Seville, they approached the central mosque “so that they might turn the infidels away from the teaching of Machomet.”73 Rebuffed at the mosque, they were brought before the king, to whom they proclaimed: “We come to announce to you the faith of our lord Jesus Christ, so that you might believe in the Lord God, forsaking the most vile slave of the devil, Machomet. With us you will have eternal life.”74 Although conversion and martyrdom might seem to be two different goals, in fact they were necessary complements. Preaching was the means by which martyrdom could be achieved, particularly when preaching included vituperative insults directed at the prophet Mohammed. When the king sentenced them to be beheaded, the friars said to themselves: “This is what we have desired: we were constant in the Lord.”75 Their hopes were disappointed when the king’s son intervened, arguing that execution in this case was not just. The king then gave the friars the choice of returning to Christian lands or being sent to the court of the king in Morocco;76 they chose the latter. Once in the custody of the king, the friars engaged in a theological disputation with a Muslim prince, which allowed them to briefly preach. They provided a brief synopsis of Christian doctrine which was proven “by the testimony of many saints, namely by Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and other patriarchs, and after by prophets, then by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, after this by the apostles and finally by the glorious martyrs and the modern saints.”77 After being tortured, they were brought before the king in Marrakesh. He asked them: “Who are you, who insult and mistreat our faith?” To which the friars replied: “Nothing is faith, unless it is the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, whom we preach.”78 With that reply, the king had all the information he needed; he beheaded them himself. At first glance, the account has all the qualities of a traditional passio: stalwart Christians, fuming tyrants, torture, and death. But crucial elements are missing. The martyrs performed no miracles that might have convinced

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wavering Muslims to become Christians. Nor did God intervene to protect them during torture, or to express divine approbation of their deeds through celestial signs: no thunder or lightning, no miraculous cures at the site of their deaths. In contrast to the account of the Tana martyrs, this story offers little possibility that the friars might succeed in converting anyone to Christianity. The citizens of Marrakesh were as impious as their ruler, and willingly joined in the desecration of the martyrs’ bodies.79 Even sympathetic Muslims remained unimpressed by the martyrs’ faith. The son of the king of Seville was moved by piety, not to convert to Christianity, but to urge the friars to become Muslims.80 The account also mentioned that a group of “poor women” who had been helping the friars were killed alongside the martyrs; the text did not even bother to identify them as Christians or Muslims, nor give any sign that their deaths were religiously meaningful.81 Strikingly, the narrative did not even acknowledge the cult the martyrs’ relics enjoyed at an Augustinian church in Coimbra, which by the fourteenth century was well known as a miracle-working center. Why was this passio so different from that of the Tana martyrs? The five friars died not in the exotic East, but in the part of the Islamic world that was closest to Europe, which had no pagan population that could be imagined as easily converted. The appeal of the account came directly from its rejection of the possibility of conversion; the victory of the martyrs was not of this world. Instead, the friars triumphed by leaving behind the world of desire and material wealth, which Islam represented so effectively in the imagination of medieval Christians. To be martyred by Muslims, then, was the ultimate form of rejection of the world. Furthermore, the triumph of the martyrs could not be gainsaid; martyrs win, no matter the actions of their persecutors. The martyrs were performers who powerfully demonstrated two Franciscan virtues so often in conflict—submission and humility before a world where pride and power ruled, and the dramatic and haughty rejection of the world.82 Nevertheless, the account did share something with the Tana martyrdoms. The friars who died were not identified as spirituals or conventuals, but the narrative evoked concerns dear to the spiritualist movement. When offered worldly wealth to convert to Islam, the friars did not just reject the offer, as Francis had done before the sultan. They cursed the Muslim: “May your money join you in damnation.”83 More strikingly, they walked to Seville “barefoot and following a form of dress different [habitus dissimilis] from others.”84 One of the central ways in which spiritual Franciscans expressed

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their poverty was through their distinctive habit; the conventual Bertrand de la Tour, papally appointed minister-general of the order after Michael of Cesena fled Avignon, complained about the spirituals’ habitus difformis,85 and John XXII’s bull Quorumdam exigit had specifically condemned spirituals for wearing “short, tight, unusual, and squalid habits.”86 Likewise, the new constitutions of the order, produced following the general chapter meeting of the order in Naples in 1314 (where Michael of Cesena was elected ministergeneral in a defeat for the spiritual faction), insisted that all friars should observe vilitas (cheapness) in their habits, but that this should be uniform—no group of friars should distinguish themselves by wearing distinctively impoverished clothing.87 The habitus dissimilis of the would-be martyrs was a flag few Franciscans would miss. Like the Tana passio, the Moroccan account was open to, and even encouraged, a spiritual reading.

The Passio of the Martyrs of Armenia (1314) The second martyrdom, written by the same scribe, recounted the death of three friars in the city of Arzenga (Erzinjan) in Armenia in 1314. Unlike the account of the martyrs of Morocco, this story has a clear provenance: it is a copy of a two-part letter. The passio had been composed by the guardian of the Franciscan convent in Trebizond, Carlino de’ Grimaldi, and sent to Philip, the vicar of the East, who then forwarded it on to Raymond de Fronsac, the procurator of the order at the Roman Curia.88 Here, too, the account in the Nero manuscript may be the earliest surviving one; this letter was the source for the information in the letter of 1323.89 The trajectory of the letter followed studiously correct hierarchical lines; the final recipient of the letter, Raymond de Fronsac, had been at the forefront of the conventual attacks on spirituals. He had worked with Bonagratia of Bergamo in 1311 to encourage Clement V to condemn the arguments of Pierre Jean Olivi. Nonetheless, the account shared some things in common with the story of the martyrs of Morocco: evangelization and martyrdom were two sides of the same coin. In front of the cadi of the city and a gathered group of Muslims, the three friars fired up their audience with a rhetorical question: “And who,” they asked, “is this Macomet who deceives you, asserting himself to be a prophet? What writings, what miracles, what vita bear witness to him?”90 Mohammad’s lack of corroborating evidence was, of course, in contrast to the abundance of evidence verifying Christian truth; this was the same line

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of argument used by the Moroccan martyrs in the preceding passio. But the friars were not content to evoke the testimony of the patriarchs, the witness of the prophets, martyrs, and saints of old. The Muslims of Erzinjan would have a demonstration all their own: the friars told them, “All is witnessed in the Christian faith, and we are prepared for this faith to offer ourselves freely and willingly to martyrdom and death.”91 Having already insulted Mohammad, the friars were condemned to die—but in dying they would demonstrate the very truth they had just preached. This stands in contrast to the martyrs of Tana, who similarly demonstrated the veracity of the Christian lex through their willingness to die; the difference was that, in the miracle of the fire, the friars were preserved from death, and in the Armenian martyr account, it was the willingness to die and their death that was the proof. The cadi understood the logic of martyrdom well, and held back those who sought to kill the friars, at the same time telling the brothers, “Go back while you are able.”92 When the friars came back to preach a second time, the cadi could no longer hold the angry Muslims back. The friars were condemned to death, and executed in the public square of the city. As the friars had hoped, the signs and miracles they had spoken of accompanied their deaths. “It was said commonly and publicly from all Armenians of Arzenga,” the author exulted, “that from the very night on which they buried the aforesaid relics and members [of the martyrs], those who wished could see everything by the light and splendors of the sky above the place where the holy relics were placed.”93 Even while they were still alive, they had performed miracles. The cadi had challenged them to heal a blind man as demonstration of the Christian proof through miracles; the friars “made the sign of the cross and a prayer over his eyes, immediately water began to flow from his eyes, then blood.”94 The blind could see, but the watching Saracens were only enraged by the miracle. The letter presented the martyrdom as a triumph, and unlike the Moroccan account, it included dramatic miracles. Nevertheless, the guardian commented in his letter, “The infidels learned nothing”; at best, they were “confused.”95 Thus, for the first author, Franciscan mission and martyrdom amounted to the same thing—they demonstrated Christian superiority to Muslims, and documented the Islamic rejection of Christian truth. The martyrdom, however, had a great effect on the indigenous Christian population; the guardian claimed that the Greeks venerated the martyrs’ relics, and that the Armenian community of Erzinjan testified to the miracles that had happened following the martyrs’ execution. Is this, then, a sign of

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the martyrs’ power to convert? In one sense, yes. Their witness was testimony of the martyrs’ glory by those who were the targets of contemporary papal condemnation and of missions dedicated to their conversion to Catholicism. But no, in the sense that their devotion was not presented as the miraculous conversion of former heretics and schismatics, but the honest devotion of true Christians. In this, the account reflected the experience of other Franciscans evangelizing outside of western Christendom, like William of Rubruck and Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, who found greater success in reconciling eastern Christians to papal authority than in converting Muslims, or even pagans. What was the first scribe’s goal in bringing the two passiones together with the vision of the stigmata, Thomas of Eccleston, and the De Brittania? What meaning did martyrdom among Muslims have for his readers in Hereford? Was he inspired by the spread of the story of the Tana martyrs, or was his interest in martyrdom independent? The compilation explained the basic elements of a friar’s identity in particular ways: his place in England elucidated through Thomas of Eccleston and the De Brittania, and the values he should hold as a Franciscan were defined through the account of Francis’s stigmata. Here, Francis’s greatest spiritual moment was one of intense suffering, and one that his hagiographers had characterized as being a superlative form of martyrdom. To make that point even clearer, the scribe followed with two accounts of martyrdom. While the friar reading could not reasonably hope to receive the stigmata, a desire for martyrdom was a potential spiritual goal, with perhaps even the possibility of traveling to infidel lands to achieve it. Even more potent were the values martyrdom was meant to represent: transcendence of the world and rejection of the material and the physical. The Muslims could be read as whatever sought to tie the friars to desire, pride, and physical needs—Muslims may simply be Muslims, or they may represent the worldly church, or indeed the world itself.

The Second Scribe The second scribe in the Nero manuscript continued with the theme of martyrdom, but understood it in a different light than his predecessor. We do not know how long after the first scribe the second wrote; the hand is later, perhaps even fifteenth century. He began his account with the two letters by Jordan Catala and Bartholomew, reporting on the martyrdom of the friars at Tana; Odorico’s account was not mentioned. The manuscript is

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the principal source for Bartholomew’s epistle. This was followed by a text entitled “Concerning the Places of the Lesser and Preaching Brothers in Tartaria” (“De locis fratrum minorum et predicatorum in Tartaria”). It listed seventeen Franciscan convents (though it claimed there were eighteen) from the Black Sea to China, while mentioning only three for the Dominicans. The account also listed nine friars who had been martyred in five different locations, including the three who died in Armenia already described by the first scribe. The other five were Francisco di San Sepulcro, who died in Tabriz; Peter, guardian at Caffa, who died in Solcati in the Crimea; Bertrand de Malaco of Tolosa, Aaron, and Pons, who died in the Indian Ocean; and Angelo di Spoleto, killed by the Bulgarians in Mauro Castro, who is likely the same Angelo mentioned earlier in Elemosina and the letter of 1323. The account ended with the successes the Franciscans had achieved in their missionary work, which was the conversion of a number of important kings, queens, and princes, along with their families.96 The second scribe clearly did not compose any of the narratives, but the collection had a clear agenda. Its textual map marked a vast territory as Christian, or becoming so. Furthermore, it claimed the primary role in that process for the Franciscans, contrasting the plethora of Franciscan convents to the paltry number of Dominican houses. Little evidence survives to help us understand the relationship between the two scribes. Was the first unable to complete his intended project? If so, he conveniently stopped at the end of the passio of the martyrs of Armenia. How long after the first scribe finished did the second one start? While the two sections were linked by the stories of Franciscan martyrdom, in other ways their subjects were quite different. The first scribe was interested in the origins of his community. The collected texts grounded the community in the history of Britain and the arrival of the Franciscans on the island, while also showing the spiritual origins of the Franciscans, emblematized in the values of the stigmata and martyrdom, while the account of the martyrs of Armenia demonstrated that those values continued into the scribe’s own time in the early fourteenth century. The second scribe, in contrast, was interested in the contemporary order, particularly in Mongol lands. All the material he collected came from the same early fourteenth-century time frame. The account of the Tana martyrdoms, with their exultation over the possibility of conversion and transformation, and the account of the progress of the mendicant orders in establishing Christian churches in Mongol lands, indicates that the scribe shared Odorico’s and Elemosina’s optimism about conversion and

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martyrdom. In this sense, the second scribe effectively countered the claims of the scribe of the first section of the manuscript. Where the first had portrayed Franciscan mission as a means to martyrdom and the rejection of the world, the second scribe saw a world on the verge of transformation, thanks to the Franciscans. Is this a manuscript at war with itself, just as the order itself was struggling with bloody divisions over poverty? Or did the second scribe not recognize the rhetorical thrust embedded in the first scribe’s narrative, and simply responded to the theme of martyrdom? While it is tempting to see in this difference the contrasting perspectives of a spiritual and a conventual Franciscan, we cannot know the ideological affiliation of either writer. For the Franciscan reader, the Nero manuscript offered martyrdom as a language that could allow the order to speak with one voice again, a language that expressed the highest aspirations of the Franciscan order, but without depending on the troublesome concept of poverty.

The Oxford Compilation The assemblage of English history, Franciscan martyrdom, and evangelizing material in the Nero manuscript was echoed in another Franciscan manuscript, now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It also contains a copy of Thomas of Eccleston’s account, and the passio of the four friars who died in Tana. It was likely once a part of the library of the Franciscan convent in Oxford, and was copied from the Nero manuscript. However, the friar who assembled this text did not copy everything from his colleagues in Hereford; he did not copy any of the material from the first scribe. It would seem that he favored the second scribe’s sense of the potential for Franciscan transformation of the non-Christian world to the east. This sense was strengthened by the inclusion of Giovanni da Pian del Carpine’s journal of his travels among the Mongols. But the collection made a broader point about martyrdom by including this material along with other texts principally devoted to poverty, including two sermons of Robert of Grosseteste on the subject, and most strikingly, the “Sacrum commercium.”97 The “Oxford compilator,” as we might call the anonymous assembler of these texts, was gathering Franciscan material of a particular kind. Also included in the collection were texts defending the Franciscans against criticism by the Dominicans (an account of a debate between the two orders in

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Oxford in 1269),98 as well as William of St. Amour’s attack on the mendicants at the University of Paris, and John of Peckham’s defense of Franciscan confessors. The collection thus aimed to accommodate Franciscan rigor, represented by the passio of the Tana martyrs and the “Sacrum commercium,” with an emphasis on education and engagement with pastoral responsibilities. It is thus little wonder that it is the Tana account that the compiler copied, rather than the passio of the Morocco Five.

Fourteenth-Century Catalogues of Franciscan Saints Franciscan martyrdoms show up in the 1330s in other, shorter sources as well. Elemosina assembled a collection of Franciscan saints and martyrs, which was one of several in the early fourteenth century that began to include martyrs alongside saints and holy men and women; thirteenth-century collections such as that of Thomas de Papia had excluded them. Structured roughly chronologically, the list briefly recorded the names and achievements of Franciscans. It may in fact be the first catalogue of Franciscan saints.99 The author proclaims at the beginning of the text that “these are the names of the holy friars, through whom the Lord displayed miracles,”100 but the miracles are few and far between in any detail. The catalogue gives little information about the individuals catalogued. The martyrs are usually given a name, place of death, and sometimes the manner in which they died. Many of the other holy Franciscans were only named and given a general location, and in many cases it is not clear whether that was their place of birth, the location of their convent, or their place of death and burial. Some exceptional figures received further description: Guilelmo di Todi resuscitated three dead men, and Peter of Brabant had a vision of the Eucharist appearing as a young boy while he was celebrating Mass.101 No dates were given (with the exception of the martyrs of Tana and Odorico di Pordenone). Toward the end of his catalogue (after mentioning the Franciscans martyred in Acre in 1291), Elemosina paused to express his enthusiasm for Franciscan sanctity as embodied in the martyrs. Echoing his contemporary Jerome of Catalonia, he wrote, “In various parts of the world, many holy friars ascended to God in perfect holiness, were made confessors of Christ, and many were consecrated by martyrdom.” He acknowledged that the martyrs were also evangelists: “Many other friars, while in holy poverty and perfect obedience and true chastity, produc[ed] tears of remorse and of compassion

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fervently imitating the blessed Francis, joyfully bringing in the harvest by dying in Christ.” But the emphasis again was on their suffering; Elemosina celebrated “those going in cold and snow and severe heat, in obedience to the clergy, [who] came finally to Christ, carrying their vestments of eternal reward.” He admitted that, “although they had not performed miracles and signs, the signs nevertheless were similar.”102 Elemosina thus tied the vows of the Franciscans—poverty, chastity, and obedience—to both preaching and martyrdom, and provided a defense for those holy friars whose deaths were not marked by miracles and wonders. The appearance of the martyrs in the “Memoralia” again demonstrates the novelty of the martyrs in the 1320s and 1330s. The tradition of listing holy Franciscans was well established; generally, that was a way to acknowledge the broader sanctity of the order beyond Francis, Anthony, and the few other canonized saints, particularly the sanctity of the brothers who had gathered around Francis, such as Leo, Giles, Rufinus, and others. What was new in the fourteenth century was adding martyrs to that list. Despite Elemosina’s evident enthusiasm for them, he was confused about the details of many of the martyrs. He only knew the names of three of the martyrs of Morocco, and even these were wrong. Elemosina listed the three names as Leo, Ugo, and Dompnus. By the later fourteenth century, these become the names of three friars among seven who died in Ceuta in 1227. As Isabelle Heullant-Donat has argued, this is strong evidence that the Ceuta martyrs were created to smooth over mistakes like these.103 Similarly, he did not know that Monaldo di Ancona had two companions in his martyrdom in Armenia in 1314 (and also seems to have misdated it to the thirteenth century). It is tempting to argue that he must have composed the Memoralia after his chronicle; this would explain the absence of the Morocco Five from the latter. But he also mistakenly named Jacopo di Padua, one of the martyrs of Tana, as Paulo, an error he did not make in his chronicle. The two texts seem to have been roughly contemporary, and the differences in the names of the martyrs is a further sign of the uncertainty that surrounded their stories and the newness of Franciscan interest in them. Though the cult of the Moroccan martyrs had existed for a century, Elemosina still could not be certain about their names, and had no access to anything like the passio in the Nero manuscript. It would be another fifty years before these stories became better known and the names of the martyrs firmly fixed. An anonymous martyrology written around 1335 (probably somewhere in Umbria) offers another catalogue of uncanonized Franciscan saints, organized by province rather than by chronology.104 Like Elemosina’s account,

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which the editor of the Memorialia suggested inspired the text, each name is accompanied by just two or three pieces of information. The author framed his account around an apocalyptic setting, evoking the language of the book of Revelation.105 Like Elemosina, the catalogue of 1335 only listed Monaldo di Ancona of the martyrs of Armenia and identified the Moroccan martyrs incorrectly,106 but got the martyrs of Tana right.107 But other martyrs show up here for the first time: Electus, who died holding the rule (who was mentioned, unnamed, by Thomas of Celano).108 The text lists a number of other martyrs, too, who did not die among infidels, but among heretics: Peter and Cathelanus, who were inquisitors killed in Valence and proclaimed by John XXII,109 as well as Stephen of Toulouse, also an inquisitor. Some martyrs were listed without mention of who killed them: Conrad and Wysclaus died preaching the faith, but the text does not record to whom they preached.110 One manuscript of the 1335 Umbrian catalogue provides us with the first anonymous mention of the martyrs of Valencia.111 The references to the martyrs are too brief to be able to categorize the author’s understanding of martyrdom. Their deaths at the hands of Muslims made them worthy of inclusion in the catalogue; martyrdom was quickly becoming a Franciscan characteristic that needed no elaboration.

Conclusion These catalogues had little circulation; Elemosina’s “Memoralia” exists in a single manuscript, while the anonymous inventory of 1335 was a little more widespread, surviving in eight copies. But their significance comes less in their influence, which was limited, and more in the way in which they capture how rapidly and enthusiastically the Franciscans rushed to embrace the martyrs in the 1320s and 1330s. The martyrs appeared in a variety of textual formats, but in one way or another each of the authors sought to naturalize the martyrs by including them within the bounds of existing forms of Franciscan rootedness. Enthusiasm for the martyrs rose as the friars could no longer rely on poverty as a fundamental Franciscan virtue. In this sense, the martyr accounts were a balm to spirituals and conventuals alike, and offered a Franciscan identity both could admire. It comes as no surprise, then, that the most important medieval chronicle of the Franciscan order, the Chronica XXIV ministrorum ordinis minorum (1369), took martyrdom to be a central

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expression of the community’s identity. In doing so, the Chronica strengthened the Franciscan sense of opposition to both the world and Islam, and further muted the hope of conversion some earlier narratives had expressed. As a result, Franciscan and western Christian depictions increasingly emphasized Islam as worldly, untransformable, and utterly opposed to Christianity —an image with a very long legacy.

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“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 TwentyFour 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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 fourteenthcentury 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.

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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 cre`che 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

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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:

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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 alAndalus 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

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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 Guimara˜es. 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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 doppelga¨ngers 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—

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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

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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

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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,

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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 Co´rdoban 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

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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

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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

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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 doppelga¨nger, 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 inquisitor-martyrs (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

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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 nonChristian 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,

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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 Elemosina’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

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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.”

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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

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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

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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.

epilogue

The Afterlife of the Martyrs

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

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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 semieremitical 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

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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’ra¯n 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

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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

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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 fourteenthcentury 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.

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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

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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

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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 Co´rdoban 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 Co´rdoban 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,

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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

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draw attention to the Co´rdoban 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

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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

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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

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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,

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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 Tuh.fat al-Adı¯b fı¯ l-Radd ‘ala¯ Ahl al-S.alı¯b (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, Cro´nica sera´fica de la Provincia de Cathalun˜a, 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.

notes

introduction 1. For the earliest case in the twelfth century, see E. M. Rose, The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of Blood Libel in Medieval Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), and for sixteenth-century Germany, R. Po-Chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988); for a broader look, see Alan Dundes (ed.), The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). 2. R. Po-Chia Hsia, Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1992). 3. Stephen Bowd, “Tales from Trent: The Construction of ‘Saint’ Simon in Manuscript and Print, 1475–1511,” in The Saint Between Manuscript and Print: Italy 1400–1600, ed. Alison K. Frazier (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2015), 188n20. 4. The first passio was written by Giovanni Mattia Tiberino, one of the doctors who examined Simon’s body the day after it was discovered. Passio beati Simonis pueri Tridentini (Rome: Bartholomaeus Guldinbeck, 1475). For the complications of the exact date that Tiberino actually wrote the text, see Wolfgang Treue, Der Trienter Judenprozess: Voraussetzungen– Abla¨ufe–Auswirkungen (1475–1588) (Hannover: Verlag Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1996), 293–95. I would like to thank Margaret Meserve for sharing her work and insight with me. 5. Bowd, “Tales from Trent,” 183. 6. Raffaele Zonvenzoni, “Divo Ioanni Inderbacchio,” in “On Everyone’s Lips”: Humanists, Jews, and the Tale of Simon of Trent, ed. Stephen Bowd, tr. J. Donald Cullington (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012), 58; adapted translation, 59. 7. Po-Chia Hsia, Trent 1475, 70. 8. Battista de’ Giudici, Apologia Iudaeorum; Invectiva contra Platinam: Propaganda antiebraica e polemiche de Curia durante il pontificato di Sisto IV (1471–1484), ed. and tr. Diego Quaglioni (Rome: Roma nel Rinascimento, 1987). 9. Lorenzo Di Fonzo, “Il processo di canonizzazione di S. Bonaventura da Bagnoregio O. Min. (1474–82),” in San Bonaventura, maestro di vita francescana e di sapienza Cristiana: Atti del Congresso Internazionale per il VII Centenario di San Bonaventura da Bagnoregio; Roma, 19–26 settembre 1974, ed. Alfonso Pompei (Rome: Pontificia Facolta` Teologica “San Bonaventura,” 1976), 227–89; Alberto Forni and Paolo Vian, “Bernardino da Siena e Bonaventura da Bagnoregio: Due santi francescani fra Giovanni da Capestrano e Sisto IV,” in Giovanni da Capestrano e la riforma della Chiesa: Atti del V Convegno di Greccio; Greccio, 4–5 maggio 2007, ed. Alvaro Cacciotti and Maria Melli (Milan: Edizioni Biblioteca Francescana, 2008), 97–140.

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For a broader context, see Ronald C. Finucane, Contested Canonizations: The Last Medieval Saints, 1482–1523 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011), 33–70. Sixtus also made the feast day of Saint Francis a holy day of obligation. Alison Knowles Frazier, Possible Lives: Authors and Saints in Renaissance Italy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 236. 10. De’ Giudici, Apologia Iudaeorum, 112. 11. Margaret Meserve, “News from Negroponte: Politics, Popular Opinion, and Information Exchange in the First Decade of the Italian Press,” Renaissance Quarterly 59 (2006): 440–80. 12. Reports of massacres emerged within days of the conquest: see the letters of the ambassador of Ferrara, Niccolo` Sadoleto, in Naples, quoted in Karen-edis Barzman, The Limits of Identity: Early Modern Venice, Dalmatia, and the Representation of Difference (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 27–28. 13. War began again almost immediately after Otranto was liberated; by 1482 the papacy had allied with Venice against Naples and Ferrara, and the Neapolitans had sent a Turkish cavalry unit recruited at Otranto to attack the Roman countryside. Kenneth Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, 1204–1571, vol. 2, The Fifteenth Century (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1978), 376. 14. Penny Cole, “Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS McClean 51, Pope Sixtus IV, and the Fall of Otranto (August 1480),” in A Distinct Voice: Medieval Studies in Honor of Leonard E. Boyle, O.P., ed. Jacqueline Brown and William P. Stoneman (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 103–20, esp. 105. 15. Cole, “Fall of Otranto,” 106. 16. Alphonso of Calabria, heir to the throne, brought some of the bodies back to Naples, where they were installed as relics, first in the church of Santa Maria Maddalena (Sixtus IV attended this installation, Frazier, Possible Lives, 236) and then a few years later in the church of Santa Caterina a Formiello. In many ways, the shrine of the relics commemorated Alphonso’s victory over the Turks more than it did the glories of the martyrs. Alfonso did not commission the writing of the passio of the martyrs, nor did he request the papacy to consider canonizing them; that only began in 1539. 17. This passio dates to the later fourteenth century, and was the one that most likely accompanied the canonization. 18. Chronica XXIV generalium ministrorum ordinis fratrum minorum, in Analecta Franciscana (Quaracchi: Ex Typographia Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1898), 3:18. One of the miracles of the martyrs referred to a girl who had been baptized by a chaplain associated with their story; the account did not make clear, however, how the girl came to be converted. Chronica XXIV, 595. 19. Accounts of a few other miracles did not specify where they had occurred; it may have been in Moroccan territory, but they were miracles that preserved the purity of the relics from the approach of sinful Christians. The only exception is recounted in the appendix of some versions of the Chronica, which recorded that one Christian was healed of an eye injury after a fly that had landed on the relics subsequently rested on his eye. Chronica XXIV, 594. 20. The Moroccan chronicler Ibn Abı¯ Zar’ al-Fa¯sı¯ did record a famine in these years. See the citation in Clara Maillard, Les papes et le Maghreb aux XIIe`me et XIVe`me sie`cles: E´tude des lettres pontificales de 1199 a` 1419 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 63.

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21. Curiously, the sultan of Morocco at this time died a few years later in 1224, still quite young and without heirs. No source, however, connects his early death to the martyrs. 22. I have discussed this separation more fully in “Martyrdom and the Muslim World Through Franciscan Eyes,” Catholic Historical Review 97 (2011): 1–23. 23. One of the companions of Francis, Giles of Assisi, grumbled that the leaders of the order had failed to promote the cause of the five friars at the papal court (Dicta beati Aegidii Assisiensis [Quaracchi: Ex Typographia Collegi S. Bonaventurae, 1905], 75), and a push was made in the early fourteenth century by Jaime II of Aragon to no avail. 24. Also underway was a campaign to canonize the Franciscan Giovanni da Capestrano, whose defense of Belgrade against the Ottomans was widely celebrated, but who was not a martyr. Sixtus may have avoided canonizing John because he was an Observant Franciscan, that is, from a branch of the order devoted to a strict interpretation of poverty and often in conflict with the Conventual branch that Sixtus himself belonged to. Instead, he canonized Bonaventure, from whom the Conventuals derived much of their position on poverty. Bonaventure’s canonization may also have been a response to the canonization of the Observant Bernardino da Siena (1450). Forni and Vian, “Bernardino da Siena e Bonaventura da Bagnoregio.” 25. Antonio Antonaci, I processi nella causa di beatificazione dei martiri di Otranto ([Galatina]: Editrice Salentina, 1960). See the appendix for further details of the place of the martyrs in the modern era. 26. Anna Esposito, “Il culto del ‘beato’ Simonino e la sua prima diffusione in Italia,” in Il principe vescovo Johannes Hinderbach (1465–1486); fra tardo Medioevo e Umanesimo: Atti del Convegno promosso dalla Biblioteca Communale di Trento, 2–6 ottobre 1989, ed. Iginio Rogger and Marco Bellabarba (Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane Bologna, 1992), 430. 27. It is not clear when Sixtus learned of the massacre. Ilarione da Verona, a Benedictine monk, penned a letter describing the conquest of the city by the Turks and the massacres that followed in dramatic and classicizing language just a few months later. Though his letter was not widely circulated, it may have reached the papal court. Ilarione sent his letter to the Sienese cardinal Francesco Todeschini Piccolomini, nephew of Pius II and future Pius III (in 1503). He also dedicated his edition of the Compendium Aristotelis in naturali philosophia et metaphysica to Sixtus in 1478–79. The monk was unlikely to have been an eyewitness. His account is instead testimony to the information that had reached Naples. Lucia Gualdo Rosa, “Una lettera di Ilarione da Verona sulla presa di Otranto,” in Fonseca, Otranto 1480, 257–79. 28. Francesco Tateo has pointed out that the archbishop of Otranto, traditionally described as having been killed at the altar by the Turks, was recorded as being killed by fear in the earliest source. Francesco Tateo, “L’ideologia umanistica e il simbolo ‘immane’ di Otranto,” in Fonseca, Otranto 1480, 175. The citizens who were killed probably were not threatened with death unless they converted; this is a martyrological trope that developed later. For more, see Nancy Bisaha, Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 157–61. 29. Antonaci, I Processi, 63–65. 30. As far as I am aware, the papacy did not promote any women as martyrs until the nineteenth century. 31. For further discussion, see Chapter 4. This account has been published as an appendix to the trial of the Franciscan Michele da Calci for heresy in Florence in 1388. Francesco Flora,

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Storia di Fra Michele Minorita (Florence: Felice le Monnier, 1942), 99; translation in Patrick Nold, Pope John XXII and His Franciscan Cardinal (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 14. 32. Jacques de Vitry, Historia occidentalis, ed. John Frederick Hinnebusch, O.P. (Fribourg: Fribourg University Press, 1972), 158; translation in Francis of Assisi: The Early Documents, vol. 1, The Saint, ed. Regis Armstrong, J. Wayne Hellman, and William J. Short (New York: New City Press, 1999), 582. 33. Jacques de Vitry, Historia occidentalis, 161; translation in Armstrong, Hellmann, and Short, Saint, 584. 34. The bibliography on the origins of the Franciscan order is vast. The best recent introductory works are Jacques Dalarun, The Misadventure of Francis of Assisi: Towards a Historical Use of the Franciscan Legends, tr. Edward Hagman, O.F.M. Cap. (Saint Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2002); Michael F. Cusato, The Early Franciscan Movement (1205–1239): History, Sources and Hermaneutics (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 2009); and Neslihan S¸enocak, The Poor and the Perfect: The Rise of Learning in the Franciscan Order, 1209–1310 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012). 35. Jacques de Vitry, Historia occidentalis, 158; translation in Armstrong, Hellmann, and Short, Saint, 582. 36. Thomas of Celano, “Vita secunda,” in Fontes Franciscani, ed. Enrico Menesto` and Stefano Brufani (Assisi: Porziuncula, 1995), 459. Thomas was drawing from the “Legend of the Three Companions”; The´ophile Desbonnets (ed.), “Legenda trium Sociorum: Edition critique,” Archivium Franciscanum Historicum 67 (1974): 127. 37. Thomas of Celano, “Vita prima S. Francisci Assisiensis,” in Analecta Franciscana (Quaracchi: Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1926), 10:69; translated in Thomas of Celano, “The Life of Saint Francis,” in Armstrong, Hellmann, and Short, Saint, 261. 38. Chronica XXIV, 560. There is, of course, a great deal to be suspicious of in this story. For example, it is unlikely that there was any king in Gaza in 1354; Gaza was part of the Mamluk realm, and the sultan normally resided in Cairo. 39. Guilelmo also appeared in the fifteenth-century vernacular La Franceschina, by the Observant friar Giacomo Oddi, but this account was entirely dependent on that of the Chronica XXIV. Giacomo Oddi, La Franceschina: Testo volgare Umbro del secolo XV, ed. Nicola Cavanna, O.F.M. (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1931), 2:261–62. 40. He attributed this information to Saint Jerome. Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda Aurea, ed. Alessandro Vitale Brovarone and Lucetta Vitale Brovarone (Turin: G. Einaudi, 1995), 2:1101. 41. See Elizabeth Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), for an excellent discussion of this dynamic in early Christian experience and memory making. 42. Edith Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 6. 43. The martyrs of Ceuta were nevertheless canonized in 1516. Luke Wadding, Annales minorum, seu Trium Ordinum a S. Francisco institutorum, 3rd ed. (Rome: Typis Rochi Bernabo`, 1732), 2:34. 44. Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism, 1200–1350 (New York: Crossroad, 1998), 31–152. 45. Amanda Power has warned that “Franciscans had no word to distinguish ‘missionary’ work from any other manifestation of their vocation, which suggests that the term may be better avoided by the historian.” “Going Among the Infidels: The Mendicant Orders and Louis IX’s First Mediterranean Campaign,” Medieval Historical Review 25 (2010): 189.

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46. Martin Goodman, Mission and Conversion: Proselytizing in the Religious History of the Roman Empire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), offers a typology; see 3–7. 47. Bert Roest, “Medieval Franciscan Mission,” in Strategies of Medieval Communal Identity: Judaism, Christianity and Islam, ed. Wout J. van Bekkum and Paul M. Cobb (Leuven: Peeters, 2004), 137–62. 48. For more, see Chapter 3. 49. Bernardino da Feltre had been preaching in Trent during the Christmas season before Simon’s death, and the prince-bishop corresponded with Michele Carcano, another Observant preacher linked to anti-usury and anti-Jewish campaigns, who included Simon in his preaching. Domenico Gobbi, “Presenze minoritiche nel Quattrocento Trentino,” Le Venezie francescane, n.s., 6 (1989): 239–52. For the origins and development of mendicant anti-Semitism, see Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982). 50. The reliquary is now in the Hermitage. See Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 174; and the image of Saint Vincent, Paris, Bibliothe`que nationale de France, ms nouv. Acq. 16251, fol. 78r, accessed online at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b72000827/ f169.item.r⳱. Similarly, the Cathar killer of the Dominican Peter Martyr was sometimes depicted similarly to a stereotypical Saracen. See, for example, the devotional book images (c. 1300) known as Madame Marie’s Book of Images: Paris, Bibliothe`que nationale de France, ms nouv. Acq. 16251, fol. 93v, accessed online at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b72000827/ f199.item.r⳱. 51. Jacques de Vitry, Lettres de Jacques de Vitry, ed. R. B. C. Huygens (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1960), 75, ep. 1; translated in “Writings of Jacques de Vitry,” in Armstrong, Hellmann, and Short, Saint, 579. 52. “Sacrum commercium sancti Francisci cum Domina Paupertate,” in Menesto` and Brufani, Fontes Franciscani, 1729; translated in “The Sacred Exchange Between Saint Francis and Lady Poverty,” in Armstrong, Hellmann, and Short, Saint, 552. 53. See, for example, the thirteenth-century arguments of mendicants and masters at the University of Paris, where the Dominican and Franciscan conceptions of poverty were seen as a clear attack on the propertied church. Andrew Traver, “The Forging of an Intellectual Defense of Mendicancy in the Medieval University,” in The Origin, Development, and Refinement of Medieval Religious Mendicancies, ed. Donald S. Prudlo (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 157–95. 54. See, for example, Kenneth B. Wolf, “The Earliest Lives of Muhammad,” in Conversion and Continuity: Indigenous Christian Communities in Islamic Lands, Eighth to Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Michael Gervers and Ramzi Jibran Bikhazi (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990), 89–101. 55. Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan (New York: Random House, 1995), 49. 56. The Prophet of Islam in Old French: “The Romance of Muhammad” (1258) and “The Book of Muhammad’s Ladder” (1264), tr. Reginald Hyatte (Leiden: Brill, 1997); Lester Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978). 57. Roger Bacon, Opus majus, ed. John Henry Bridges (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), 1:1; for more, see Amanda Power, “Infideles in the Opus Maius of Roger Bacon,” in Travel and Travelers from Bede to Dampier, ed. Geraldine Barnes and Gabrielle Singleton (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2005), 25–44. Amanda Power has also pointed out the unreliability of the

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published edition of the Opus maius: see “A Mirror for Every Age: The Reputation of Roger Bacon,” English Historical Review 121 (2006): 657–92, particularly 677–78. 58. Benjamin Kedar, Crusade and Mission: European Approaches Towards the Muslims (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); see also Jessalynn Bird, “Crusade and Conversion After the Fourth Lateran Council (1215): Oliver of Paderborn’s and James of Vitry’s Missions to Muslims Reconsidered,” Essays in Medieval Studies 21 (2004): 23–48. 59. Marjorie Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 29–58; for the conversion of Jews specifically, see Robert E. Lerner, The Feast of Saint Abraham: Medieval Millenarians and the Jews (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). See also Kedar, Crusade and Mission, 154–55; and E. Randolph Daniel, The Franciscan Concept of Mission in the High Middle Ages (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1975), 14–22. As discussed below, the Franciscan commitment to mission to infidels was encoded in the rule of the order, and in the example of their founder. The Dominicans, in contrast, had only a general vocation for “preaching and the salvation of souls,” which could of course include infidels and Jews, but did not explicitly name them. At the time of Dominic’s canonization, some believed that he had the desire to preach to either pagans or Muslims, but was never able to act on it. See Robin Vose, Dominicans, Muslims and Jews in the Medieval Crown of Aragon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 34–38. 60. Joseph Be´dier (ed.), Les Chansons de croisade (Paris: H. Champion, 1909), 253; translated in Kedar, Crusade and Mission, 161. 61. Quoted in Vose, Dominicans, Muslims and Jews, 138. This letter also mentioned the possibility of conversion among the Muslims, particularly in Tunis. See Maillard, Les papes, 91. 62. Muslims used his eagerness to convert them to stage a surprise attack on the French camp. Michael Lower, “Conversion and St. Louis’s Last Crusade,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 58 (2007): 211–30. Robin Vose agrees with Lower’s argument that conversion was the primary motivation for the crusade, though he suggests that Lower falls prey to the “maximalist” interpretation that sees Dominicans as extensively engaged in missionary activities. Vose, Dominicans, Muslims and Jews, 231n31. Kedar also sees conversion as an important part of the motivation for the diversion to Tunis. Crusade and Mission, 167–68. 63. Vose, Dominicans, Muslims and Jews, 7. 64. Robert I. Burns, “Christian-Islamic Confrontation in the West: The ThirteenthCentury Dream of Conversion,” American Historical Review 76 (1971): 1386–1434. 65. Vose, Dominicans, Muslims and Jews, 44. 66. Kedar, Crusade and Mission, 155. 67. William of Tripoli [Wilhelm von Tripolis], Notitia de Machometo, ed. Peter Engels (Wu¨rzburg: Echter, [1992]), 260. 68. [Pseudo]-William of Tripoli, De Statu Saracenorum, in Notitia de Machometo, ed. Peter Engels (Wu¨rzburg: Echter, [1992]): extermination of Muslims, 330; baptized one thousand, 370. 69. Ricoldo de Monte Croce, “Epistolae V commentatorie de perditione Acconis 1291,” Archives de L’Orient latin 2 (1884): 258–96. 70. Magister Thadeus, Ystoria de desolatione et conculcatione civitatis Acconensis et tocius terre sancte, ed. R. B. C. Huygens, Corpus Christianorum: Continuatio Medievalis, 202 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 157. 71. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory. 72. Angelo Clareno, Liber Chronicarum sive Tribulationum Ordinis Minorum, ed. P. Giovanni Boccali, O.F.M. (Assisi: Edizioni Porziuncola, 1999), 540; translation in A Chronicle or

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History of the Seven Tribulations of the Order of the Brothers Minor, tr. David Burr and E. Randolph Daniel (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 2005), 151. 73. Lucy Grig, Making Martyrs in Late Antiquity (London: Duckworth, 2004), 26.

chapter 1 1. 1 Clem. 5:7, Cle´ment de Rome, E´pıˆtre aux Corinthiens, ed. and tr. Annie Jaubert, Sources chre´tiennes, 167 (Paris: E´ditions du Cerf, 1971), 108; translation from Bart Ehrman, Lost Scriptures: Books That Did Not Make It into the New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 170. 2. Grig, Making Martyrs, 1. 3. As late Roman readers realized. Augustine commented that in Latin they properly should be called “testes,” the Latin word for a witness. See Elena Martin, “Commemoration, Representation and Interpretation: Augustine of Hippo’s Depictions of the Martyrs,” Studies in Church History 47 (2011): 39. 4. For a recent discussion of the origins of martyrdom, see Candida R. Moss, Ancient Christian Martyrdom: Diverse Practices, Theologies, and Traditions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 3–16. 5. Ignatius of Antioch, “Lettre aux Tralles,” in Lettres, ed. Th. Camelot, O.P., Sources chre´tiennes, 10, 3rd ed. (Paris: E´ditions du Cerf, 1958), 114. 6. 1 Thess. 3:3–4. 7. See the catalogue of Paul’s suffering in 2 Cor. 11:23–29. 8. Stefan Krauter, “The Martyrdom of Stephen,” in Engberg, Eriksen, and Petersen, Contextualizing Early Christian Martyrdom, 45–74. Nevertheless, the martyr acta and passiones of the second and third centuries did not generally specifically evoke the first-century models of Stephen or Paul, but more often looked to Jewish martyr stories such as the Maccabees instead. (The Lyons martyrs account does mention Stephen). See also Moss, Ancient Christian Martyrdom, 117–18. 9. Mark 13:9–13. 10. Robin Darling Young goes so far as to call it a public liturgy. In Procession Before the World: Martyrdom as a Public Liturgy in Early Christianity (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2001). 11. 2 Tim. 4:6. 12. Herbert Musurillo, ed., The Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 16–17. 13. Origen [Origenes], “Eis Marturion Protreptikos,” in Die Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller der Ersten Drei Jahrhunderte, vol. 1 of Origenes Werke: Die Schrift vom Martyrium, Buch 1–IV Gegen Celsus, ed. Paul Koetschau (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs’sche Buchhandlung, 1899), 6; translation adapted from “Exhortation to Martyrdom,” in Alexandrian Christianity, tr. John Ernest Leonard Oulton and Henry Chadwick (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, [1954]), 395. 14. Origen [Origenes], “Eis Marturion Protreptikos,” 4; translation adapted from Origen, “Exhortation to Martyrdom,” 394. 15. Rev. 6:9–11. In the book of Revelation, we have the first potential reference to the term “martyr” being applied to someone who had suffered and died for Jesus. Jesus, in John’s vision, refers to Antipas, proclaiming, “I know where you dwell, [even] where Satan’s throne is; and you hold fast my name, and did not deny my faith, even in the days of Antipas my

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witness, my faithful one, who was killed among you, where Satan dwells” (Rev. 2:13). Antipas is here called a “martyr”—but does this mean simply a witness in life who later was killed, or one who is a “martyr” because he died? Tertullian acclaimed him a martyr, at least. “Scorpiace,” in Quinti Septimi Florentis Tertulliani Opera, Pars II: Opera Montanistica, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina II (Turnhout: Brepols, 1954), 1093; 12:7. Translated in Geoffrey D. Dunn, Tertullian (London: Routledge, 2004), 130. 16. See Moss on the significance of Eusebius’s edits to the story of the martyrs of Lyons, for example: Ancient Christian Martyrdom, 104. 17. See Gary A. Bisbee for a fuller discussion, Pre-Decian Acts of Martyrs and Commentarii (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 81–87. 18. A. A. R. Bastiaensen et al., Atti e passioni dei martiri ([Rome]: Fondazione Lorenzo Valla, 1987); Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs. 19. Moss, Ancient Christian Martyrdom, 14. 20. The seven are Polycarp, Carpus et al., Ptolemaeus, Justin, Lyons, the Scillitan Martyrs, and Apollonius. Bisbee, Pre-Decian Acts, 82. In the case of Justin, the likelihood is that entire sections have been “interpolated or substantially edited.” Bisbee, Pre-Decian Acts, 118. 21. Bisbee, Pre-Decian Acts, 132. See Candida R. Moss for a clear summary of the many issues surrounding the text of Polycarp: “On the Dating of Polycarp: Rethinking the Place of Polycarp in the History of Christianity,” Early Christianity 1 (2010): 539–74. Moss argues for a third-century date for the text at the earliest. 22. E´ric Rebillard, Greek and Latin Narratives About the Ancient Martyrs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 23. Alison Goddard Elliott, Roads to Paradise: Reading the Lives of the Early Saints (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1987), 24. 24. This is a citation of Acts 4:24. Sabina in Musurillo, “Martyrdom of Pionus,” in Acts of the Christian Martyrs, 148, as does Pionus himself, makes a similar statement, at 156, and again at 160–62. See also “Cyprian,” 168; “Fructosus,” 178; “Irene,” 288; and “Euplus,” 316. 25. Musurillo, “Carpus,” 22; “Justin, Recension B,” 56; “Apollonius,” 90; “Conon,” 190; “Marcellus,” 250; “Irenaeus,” 296; “Crispina,” 304–6; all in Acts of the Christian Martyrs. 26. Musurillo, “Polycarp,” 10; “Conon,” 190; both in Acts of the Christian Martyrs. 27. Musurillo, “Apollonius,” 92. Apollonius indulged in a long speech denouncing the irrationality of pagan worship, 94–96, and is also able to give a brief theological statement about Jesus, which is relatively rare in the martyrial acts, 100. This is probably a late text in Acts of the Christian Martyrs. 28. Musurillo, “Maximilian,” in Acts of the Christian Martyrs, 246. 29. Musurillo, “Julius the Veteran,” in Acts of the Christian Martyrs, 262. 30. Musurillo, “The Acts of Phileas,” in Acts of the Christian Martyrs, 332. See Judith Lieu for the intertextual connections between acta and apologetic texts: “The Audience of Apologetics: The Problem of the Martyr Acts,” in Engberg, Eriksen, and Petersen, Contextualising Early Christian Martyrdom, 205–24. 31. Elizabeth Castelli points out that “the two main features of this conflict focus on the contests over ‘law’ and ‘sacrifice’—two foundational aspects of civic and religious existence that are both sources for metanarratives concerning justice.” Martyrdom and Memory, 34. 32. There are some exceptions, of course. See below for thirteenth-century interest in fourth- and fifth-century martyrs. 33. The martyrs were deployed to bolster a number of different forms of authority in Late Antiquity besides that of bishops; they were employed to bolster civic identity as well (see Lisa D. Maugans Driver, “The Cult of Martyrs in Asterius of Amaseia’s Vision of the Christian

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City,” Church History 74:2 (2005): 236–54). For an example of a passio serving as a guarantee to a claim of episcopal authority in the early Middle Ages, see Giorgia Vocino, “Under the Aegis of the Saints: Hagiography and Power in Early Carolingian Northern Italy,” Early Medieval Europe 22 (2014): 26–52, esp. 31–34. 34. Ambrose, Opera: Pars Decima; Epistularum Liber Decimus, Epistulae extra Collectioneum, Gesta Concili Aquileiensis, ed. Michaela Zelzer, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiastorvm Latinorvm, 82 (Vienna: Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1982), ep. 77 (22): 12, p. 134; translated in Ambrose, Letters, tr. Sister Mary Melchior Beyenka, O.P., Fathers of the Church, 26 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1954), 380. 35. Ambrose pointed out that demons recognize the martyrs, but Arians do not. Opera, ep. 77 (22): 16, 19, p. 136; translation in Letters, 381–83. 36. Vasiliki M. Limberis, Architects of Piety: The Cappadocian Fathers and the Cult of the Martyrs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 31. 37. Grig, Making Martyrs, 49. 38. Jean Guyon, Le cimetie`re aux deux lauriers: Recherches sur les catacombs romaines (Rome: Ecole franc¸aise de Rome, 1987), 323–25. Guyon argues that, before the late fourth century, the appeal of the cemetery as a place of burial came from the basilicas built over them, not from the martyrs the basilicas commemorated. 39. Carole Straw, “Martyrdom and Christian Identity: Gregory the Great, Augustine, and Tradition,” in The Limits of Ancient Christianity: Essays on Late Antique Thought and Culture in Honor of R. A. Markus, ed. William E. Klingshirn and Mark Vesey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 251. 40. Ambrose, Opera, ep. 77 (22): 10, p. 132; translation in Letters, 379. See also Kate Cooper on how the gesta martyrum gives evidence for lay-clerical coalitions in Rome and conflict between them. “The Martyr, the Matrona, and the Bishop: The Matron Lucina and the Politics of Martyr Cult in Fifth- and Sixth-Century Rome,” Early Medieval Europe 8 (1999): 297–317. 41. See Grig, Making Martyrs, 86–104, for the beginning of the movement of relics around the Mediterranean world. See also the new translation of Victricius of Rouen for the paean to the relics of the martyr entering Rouen, Gillian Clark, “Victricius of Rouen: Praising the Saints,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 7 (1999): 365–99, and the accompanying commentary by David Hunter putting Victricius in the context of polemics around relics and chastity in Roman Gaul, “Vigilantius of Calagurris and Victricius of Rouen: Ascetics, Relics, and Clerics in Late Roman Gaul,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 7 (1999): 401–30. 42. Lucy Grig, “Torture and Truth in Late Antique Martyrology,” Early Medieval Europe 11 (2002): 321–36, esp. 325. Likewise, the devil speaks the truth when tortured by the martyrs! Ambrose, Opera, ep. 77 (22): 19, p. 132; translated in Letters, 383. For torture in the Coptic tradition, see Arietta Papaconstantinou, “Historiography, Hagiography, and the Making of the ‘Church of the Martyrs’ in Early Islamic Egypt,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 60 (2006): 65–86. 43. Prudentius, Crowns of Martyrdom, in Prudentius, tr. H. J. Thomson (London: Heinemann, 1953), 2:291. 44. Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina (Brussels: Socie´te´ des Bollandistes, 1900–1901), 2: 噛7599: Acta sanctorum (Paris: Victor Palme´, 1866), Oct. III: 863D–70F; translation from “The Passion of St. Sergius and Bacchus” (BHL 7599), accessed online, http://www.ucc.ie/archive/ milmart/BHL7599.html. 45. Christ as the first martyr was avenged by God by the destruction of Jerusalem, a punishment of his persecutors. For a longue dure´e discussion of these themes in western culture,

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see Phillipe Buc, Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror: Christianity, Violence, and the West (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 46. Athanase d’Alexandrie [Athanasios of Alexandria], Vie d’Antoine, ed. and tr. G. J. M. Bartelink, Sources chre´tienne, vol. 400 (Paris: Les E´ditions du Cerf, 1994), 258. Anthony of Egypt may well have been the source for the model of the “desire for martyrdom.” A similar “martyr without blood” was Felix, patron of Paulinus of Nola (see Grig, Making Martyrs, 105–10). The desire for martyrdom became a trope in the life of a saint; part of the trope included the notion that the desire for martyrdom precluded the possibility of achieving it. 47. The works of Ignatio have been controversial for well over a century. The martyrdom itself is widely considered to be a late composition, but the “Letter to the Romans” within the martyrdom is, in contrast, held to be authentic. Gary Bisbee has argued against this division, stating “either the Acts of Ignatius must be taken more seriously or the Epistle to the Romans less seriously.” Bisbee argues for the first approach. Pre-Decian Acts, 134. 48. For more on the debate over voluntary martyrdom, see Paul Middleton for a discussion of recent scholarship on the subject, and for an argument in favor of the importance of voluntary martyrdom in early Christianity, in “Early Christian Voluntary Martyrdom: A Statement for the Defense,” Journal of Theological Studies 64 (2013): 556–73, as well as Candida R. Moss, “The Discourse of Voluntary Martyrdom: Ancient and Modern,” Church History 81 (2012): 531–55. 49. Musurillo, “Polycarp,” 4–5. Furthermore, the account points out Quintus’s voluntary path to martyrdom is not “the teaching of the Gospel,” suggesting that Polycarp’s own path is the teaching of the Gospel. Musurillo, “Polycarp,” 4–5. Martyrdom is thus evangelically mandated. See Candida R. Moss, The Other Christs: Imitating Jesus in Ancient Christian Ideologies of Martyrdom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 48. 50. Middleton argues that the episode with Quintus was interpolated into the text. “Early Christian Voluntary Martyrdom,” 570. For the opposite view, see Moss, Ancient Christian Martyrdom, 49–76, for a longer discussion of the structure of Polycarp and attempts to discern different layers. 51. Musurillo, “Cyprian,” in Acts of the Christian Martyrs, 168–70. 52. Musurillo, “The Acts of Euplus,” in Acts of the Christian Martyrs, 312. 53. Ismo Dunderberg, “Early Christian Critics of Martyrdom,” in The Rise and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries C.E., ed. Clare K. Rothschild and Jens Scho¨ter (Tu¨bingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 419–40. Scholars are increasingly rejecting the dichotomy which argued that “gnostic” Christians rejected martyrdom. Philip L. Tite, “Voluntary Martyrdom and Gnosticism,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 23 (2015): 27–54. For more on the polemical use of martyrdom, see also Moss, Ancient Christian Martyrdom, 145–58. 54. Musurillo, “Montanus,” in Acts of the Christian Martyrs, 226. 55. Cle´ment d’Alexandrie [Clement of Alexandria], Les Stromates: Stromate IV, ed. Annewies van den Hoek, Sources chre´tiennes, 463 (Paris: Les E´ditions du Cerf, 2001), 4:14, 3; p. 78; Moss, “Discourse of Voluntary Martyrdom,” 543. 56. Annewies van den Hoek, “Clement of Alexandria on Martyrdom,” Studia Patristica 26 (1993): 329. 57. Augustine and Gregory the Great (among others) extended martyrdom to encompass acts of discipline, or as Gregory put it, “to bear insults, to love one who hates us, is martyrdom in our secret thought.” Quoted in Straw, “Martyrdom,” 255. In the Irish tradition, martyrdom could be divided into three kinds: red martyrdom (death), white martyrdom (asceticism and in some cases exile), and blue (penitential regime). Red and white martyrdom drew upon early

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Continental traditions. Clare Stancliffe, “Red, White, and Blue Martyrdom,” in Ireland in Early Medieval Europe: Studies in Memory of Kathleen Hughes, ed. Dorothy Whitelock, Rosamond McKitterick, and David Dumville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 21–46. ´ Riain, “A Northumbrian Phase in the Formation of the Hieronymian 58. Pa´draig O Martyrology: The Evidence of the Martyrology of Tallaght,” Analecta Bollandiana 120 (2002): 311–63. 59. Conrad Leyser, “The Temptations of Cult: Roman Martyr Piety in the Age of Gregory the Great,” Early Medieval Europe 9 (2000): 293. 60. The earliest such manuscripts date from the middle of the eighth century, but Franc¸ois Dolbeau suggests that they may have had their origins as early as the fifth century. “Naissance de home´laires et de passionaires,” in L’Antiquite´ tardive dans les collections me´die´vales: Textes et representations, VIe–XIVe sie`cle, ed. Ste´phane Gioanni and Benoıˆt Gre´vin (Rome: E´cole franc¸aise de Rome, 2008), 13–35. 61. Leyser, “Temptations of Cult,” 307. 62. Vocino, “Under the Aegis of the Saints,” 50. 63. There were, of course, martyrs of the Merovingian age, often bishops killed in the course of political struggles. They were frequently elevated as martyrs by their murderers as a way to end the feud and for the victor to solidify his victory by making his victim a martyr advocating in heaven on his behalf. See Paul Fouracre, “Merovingian History and Merovingian Hagiography,” Past and Present 127 (1990): 3–38. 64. Patrick Geary, “The Ninth-Century Relic Trade: A Response to Popular Piety?,” in Religion and the People, 800–1700, ed. James Obelkevich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 12. 65. Geary argues that the cult of Roman martyrs was “encouraged in an attempt to supplant the cults of other persons,” living holy men who were not a part of the hierarchical, Rome-focused institution that Boniface and others favored. Geary, “Ninth-Century Relic Trade,” 10. 66. Julia M. H. Smith, “Old Saints, New Cults: Roman Relics in Carolingian Francia,” in Early Medieval Rome and the Christian West: Essays in Honour of Donald A. Bullough, ed. Julia M. H. Smith (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 317–39; Katrinette Bodarwe´, “Roman Martyrs and Their Veneration in Ottonian Saxony: The Case of the Sanctimoniales of Essen,” Early Medieval Europe 9 (2000): 346. In Italy, in contrast, martyr cult remained focused on local figures whose cults were established in Late Antiquity. See Vocino, “Under the Aegis of the Saints.” 67. Janet Nelson, “The Franks, the Martyrology of Usuard, and the Martyrs of Cordoba,” in Martyrs and Martyrologies, ed. Diana Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 68. 68. Martyrs were significant in the Merovingian era, as well. The Gallo-Roman bishops of Merovingian France looked back to their martyred predecessors with pride. In some cases, those martyrs were also evangelists. Ian Wood, “The Cult of the Saints in the South-East of Gaul in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries,” in L’Empreinte chre´tienne en Gaule du IVe au IXe sie`cle, ed. Miche`le Gaillard (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 257–69. The principal martyrs of the Merovingian period were bishops killed in political feuds, as mentioned above. James Palmer, “The Frankish Cult of Martyrs and the Case of the Two Saints Boniface,” Revue be´ne´dictine 114 (2004): 329. 69. Tertullian, “Apologeticum,” in Quinti Septimi Florentis Tertulliani Opera, Pars I: Opera Catholica, 50, 13, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina (Turnhout, 1954), 171. Tertullian’s

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claim “semen est sanguis Christianorum” soon became “sanguis martyrum semen Christianorum.” For a brief history of the adaptation of Tertullian’s aphorism, see William S. Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1893), 693. 70. There are some exceptions, such as the Passio Sebastiani. See Kate Cooper, “Ventriloquism and the Miraculous: Conversion, Preaching, and the Martyr Exemplum in Late Antiquity,” Studies in Church History 41 (2005): 22–45. 71. Herman of Scheda, Hermannus quondam Judaeus, Opusculum de conversion sua, ed. G. Niemeyer, in Monumenta Germaniae historica. Quellen zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters, Bd. 4 (Weimar: H. Bo¨hlaus Nachfolger, 1963), 69–127; Augustine, Confessions, ed. James J. O’Donnell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 1: VII, 12, p. 101. For a comparison of the two conversion stories, see Karl Morrison, Conversion and Text: The Cases of Augustine of Hippo, Herman-Judah, and Constantine Tsatos (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992). 72. Rimbert, Vita Anskarii, ed. G. Waitz, MGH: Scriptores Rerum Germanicum (Hannover: Impensis Bibliopolii Hahniani, 1884), 2:60–62. 73. Translatio Sancti Viti martyris, ed. Irene Schmale-Ott (Mu¨nster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1979), 32; translated in Eric Shuler, “The Saxons Within Carolingian Christendom: Post-Conquest Identity in the Translationes of Vitus, Pusinna and Liborius,” Journal of Medieval History 36 (2010): 39–54. 74. Palmer, “Frankish Cult of Martyrs,” 335–36. 75. Willibald, Vita Bonifatii, ed. Wilhelm Levison, MGH: Scriptores Rerum Germanicum (Hannover: Impensis Bibliopolii Hahniani, 1905), 57:1–58; Ian Wood, The Missionary Life: Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe, 400–1500 (New York: Longman, 2001), 61–63. 76. Alcuin, Vita Willibrordi archiepiscopi Traiectensis, ed. Wilhelm Levison, in Passiones vitaeque sanctorum aevi Merovingici, MGH: Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum (Hannover: Impensis Bibliopolii Hahniani, 1920), 7:81–141, esp. 125. This can also be seen in the work of Alcuin’s student Hrabanus Maurus. See Palmer, “Frankish Cult of Martyrs,” 341–42. 77. Alcuin, Vita Willibrordi, 140. 78. Walter Carruthers Sellar and Robert Julian Yeatman, 1066 and All That (New York: E. P. Dutton, [c. 1931]), 7. 79. Bede, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (1969; repr., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 152–53. 80. Bede, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, 242–54. 81. Christian Sahner, Christian Martyrs Under Islam: Religious Violence and the Making of the Muslim World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018); Sidney Griffith, “Christians, Muslims, and Neo-Martyrs: Saints’ Lives and Holy Land History,” in Sharing the Sacred: Contacts and Conflicts in the Holy Land, First–Fifteenth Centuries CE, ed. Arieh Kofsky and Guy G. Strousma (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben Zvi, 1998), 163–207; see also John C. Lamoreaux, “Early Eastern Christian Responses to Islam,” in Medieval Christian Perceptions of Islam, ed. John Victor Tolan (New York: Garland, 1996), 3–32. For detail on other martyrdom texts, see David Thomas and Barbara Roggema (eds.), Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographic History, vol. 1, (600–900) (Leiden: Brill, 2009); and David Thomas and Alex Mallet (eds.), Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographic History, vol. 2, (900–1050) (Leiden: Brill, 2010). 82. See Mark Swanson, “The Martyrdom of ‘Abd al-Ması¯h., Superior of Mount Sinai (Qays al-Ghassa¯nı¯),” in Syrian Christians Under Islam: The First Thousand Years, ed. David Thomas (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 107–29; and Ignace Dick, “La passion arabe de S. Antoine Ruwah, ne´omartyr de Damas (Ⳮ25 dec. 799),” Le Muse´on 74 (1961): 108–33. For the thirteenth century, see Jason R. Zaborowski, The Coptic Martyrdom of John of Phanijo¯it: Assimilation and

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Conversion to Islam in Thirteenth-Century Egypt (Leiden: Brill, 2005); Johannes den Heijer, “The Martyrdom of Bifa¯m Ibn Baqu¯ra al-Sawwa¯f by Mawhu¯b ibn Mansu¯r ibn Mufarrij and Its Fatimid Background,” Medieval Encounters 21 (2015): 452–84. 83. This life has been preserved only in a Georgian translation, but a short version of Petros’s life also appeared in the chronicle of Theophanes, Chronographia, ed. Carolus de Boor (Lipsiae: B. G. Teubner, 1883; repr., Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1963), 1:416–17; translated in The Chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor: Byzantine and Near Eastern History, AD 284–813, tr. Cyril Mango and Roger Scott (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 1:577– 78. See also Griffith, “Christians, Muslims, and Neo-Martyrs.” For a similar Coptic martyr, see Febe Armanios and Bog˘ac¸ Ergene, “A Christian Martyr Under Mamluk Justice: The Trials of Salib (d. 1512) According to Muslim and Coptic Sources,” Muslim World 96 (2006): 115–44. 84. Kenneth B. Wolf, Christian Martyrs in Muslim Spain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Jessica A. Coope, The Martyrs of Co´rdoba: Community and Family Conflict in an Age of Mass Conversion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995). Wolf points out that while there were an unusual number of deaths between 850 and 859, Islamic chronicles record the deaths of many more in the years after the period who were not commemorated as martyrs by the Christian community. Why not? Because nobody composed a passio in their honor. Thus, it is not the martyr who matters, but the martyrographer. 85. La pasio´n de S. Pelayo, ed. and tr. Celso Rodrı´guez Ferna´ndez (Santiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 1991). 86. The parallels between the Franciscans and the Co´rdobans have been noted by Allan Cutler, “The Ninth-Century Spanish Martyrs’ Movement and the Origins of Western Christian Missions to the Muslims,” Muslim World 55 (1969): 321–39. 87. Wolf, Christian Martyrs, 78–81 (miracles), 97–100 (voluntary martyrs). 88. Of course, there are also passiones from eastern Christian communities as well as some Franciscan accounts that do feature miracles and torture: for an example, see Sydney Griffith, “Michael, the Martyr and Monk of Mar Sabas Monastery, at the Court of the Caliph ‘Abd alMalik; Christian Apologetics and Martyrology in the Early Islamic Period,” Aram 6 (1994): 115–48. 89. Nelson, “Franks.” 90. Ann Christys, Christians in al-Andalus, 711–1000 (Richmond, UK: Curzon, 2002), 54. See Christys’s article for the political context of the translatio of the relics of the Cordoban martyrs (George, Aurelio, and Natalia) to the Parisian convent of St. Germain, “St-Germain des Pre´s, St Vincent and the Martyrs of Cordoba,” Early Medieval Europe 7 (1998): 199–216. 91. James Craigie Robertson and J. Brigstocke Sheppard (eds.), Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury (London: Longmans, 1885), VII: 噛735, pp. 429–35. Translated in Anne Duggan, Thomas Becket (London: Hodder Education, 2004), 226. 92. The dead included nine Dominicans and two Franciscans. Bullarium Franciscanum, Romanorum Pontificum Constitutiones, Epistolas, ac Diplomata continens, ed. Joannis Hyacinth Sbaralea (Rome: Typis Sacrae Congregationis de Propaganda Fide, 1759), 1:302. See Christine Caldwell Ames, Righteous Persecution: Inquisition, Dominicans, and Christianity in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 60–62. 93. See Michael Goodich, Vita Perfecta: The Ideal of Sainthood in the Thirteenth Century (Stuttgart: A. Hiersemann, 1982), 154; or Andre´ Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, tr. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 416. As Vauchez put it, “Between 1254 and 1481, the Roman Church did not recognize as a saint a single servant of God who had died a violent death.”

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94. See, for example, Catherine Saucier on the way in which the liturgy of the Corpus Christi drew upon martyr cult: “Sacrament and Sacrifice: Conflating Corpus Christi and Martyrdom in Medieval Lie`ge,” Speculum 87 (2012): 682–723. 95. Caroline Smith, Crusading in the Age of Joinville (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006), 98–108, 139–49; and Caroline Smith, “Martyrdom and Crusading in the Thirteenth Century: Remembering the Dead of Louis IX’s Crusades,” Al-Masaq 15 (2003): 189–96. 96. For the place of martyrdom in the consideration of Louis’s sanctity, see M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, The Making of Saint Louis: Kingship, Sanctity, and Crusade in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). 97. It is difficult to be precise; the collection includes not only saints’ lives but also describes other important feasts in the church, such as those dedicated to Jesus, Mary, All Saints’, and so forth, but also many entries discuss multiple martyrs, in cases when they died together, or when they share the same name, and James had difficulty distinguishing among them. 98. Goodich, Vita Perfecta, 157; Robert I. Burns, The Crusader Kingdom of Valencia: Reconstruction of a Thirteenth-Century Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), vol. 2:305, app. 2. 99. Michael Goodich enumerates a long list of such thirteenth-century martyrs in the “Master List of Thirteenth-Century Saints” in the appendix of his book Vita Perfecta, 213–41. 100. Nicholas Vincent, “Simon of Atherton: A Martyr to His Wife,” Analecta Bollandiana 113 (1995): 349–61. In a somewhat similar vein, the Carolingian hermit Gangulf was hailed as a martyr after his wife’s lover killed him. Vita Gangulfi martyris Varennensis, ed. Wilhelm Levison, in Passiones vitaeque sanctorum aevi Merovingici, MGH: Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum (Hannover: Impensis Bibliopolii Hahniani, 1920), 7:142–74. 101. (2 September) Acta sanctorum Sept. I: 582–92, Caesarius Heisterbacensis [Caesar of Heisterbach],”Margareta habitans Lovanii (BHL 5320),” accessed online, http://gateway .proquest.com/openurl?url_ver⳱Z39.88-2004&res_dat⳱xri:acta-us&rft_dat⳱xri:acta:ft:all: Z400021721; “Dignissimae cujusdam virginis,” accessed online, http://gateway.proquest.com/ openurl?url_ver⳱Z39.88-2004&res_dat⳱xri:acta-us&rft_dat⳱xri:acta:ft:all:Z400021723. 102. Miri Rubin, “Choosing Death?,” in Martyrs and Martyrologies: Papers Read at the 1992 Summer Meeting and the 1993 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. Diana Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 153–84.

chapter 2 1. Jason R. Zaborowski, The Coptic Martyrdom of John of Phanajo¯it: Assimilation and Conversion to Islam in Thirteenth-Century Egypt (Leiden: Brill, 2005). For Asad, see Sawirus ibn Muqaffa’, History of the Patriarchs of the Egyptian Church, ed. and tr. Yassa¯ ‘Abd al-Ması¯h and O. H. E. Khs-Burmester (Cairo: [n.p.], 1943), 40. For the challenges of using the History of the Patriarchs, see Johannes den Heijer, “The Martyrdom of Bifa¯m Ibn Baqu¯ra al-Sawwa¯f by Mawhu¯b ibn Mansu¯r ibn Mufarrij and Its Fatimid Background,” Medieval Encounters 21 (2015): 452–84, and Mawhu¯b ibn Mansu¯r ibn Mufarrig et l’historiographie copto-arabe: E´tude sur la composition de “L’Histoire des Patriarches d’Alexandrie” (Louvain: E. Peeters, 1989). 2. Asad was buried in the church of the Melkites in Harat al-Rum in Cairo, but the History did not ascribe either miracles or a cult to him.

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3. London, British Library, ms. Cotton Nero A IX, fol. 94v. For more on the martyrs of Morocco, see Chapter 4. In Chapter 3, I will discuss Franciscan missions in greater detail. 4. “Vita beati fratris Egidii,” in Scripta Leonis, Rufini et Angeli sociorum S. Francisci, ed. Rosalind Brooke (1970; repr., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 346. A longer version of the “Life” appears first with the late fourteenth-century Chronica XXIV generalium ministrorum ordinis fratrum minorum, which inserted a passage at the beginning of the long life describing his missionary activity in Tunis and suggesting that he desired death. Chronica XXIV, 78. For a full discussion, see Chapter 6. 5. According to the late fourteenth-century “Life,” the citizens of Perugia had posted armed guards at his deathbed to ensure that his body would remain in the city, but Giles had foretold that he would never be canonized and would not work miracles except “the sign of Jonah” (cf. Matt. 12:39). Chronica XXIV, 113. 6. And like the search for the historical Jesus, the bibliography on Francis and the early order is vast. The discussion began with Paul Sabatier’s seminal examination of the sources for Francis’s life, Vie de Saint Franc¸ois d’Assise (Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, n.d.). That work was continued by Raoul Manselli, with a particular emphasis on the work of the companions of Francis: Raoul Manselli, Nos qui cum eo fuimus: Contributo alla questione francescana (Roma: Biblioteca seraphico-capuccina, 1980). Jacques Dalarun has devoted much of his career to the subject; his Misadventure of Francis of Assisi: Towards a Historical Use of the Franciscan Legends, tr. Edward Hagman, O.F.M. Cap. (Saint Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 2002), provides a methodological guide to the sources from Thomas of Celano to the “Legend of the Three Companions.” His 2007 book provides a cogent argument untangling the skein of interrelated texts about Francis written in the middle of the thirteenth century. Vers une re´solution de la question franciscaine: La “Legende ombrienne” de Thomas de Celano ([Paris]: Fayard, 2007). 7. Thomas de Celano, “Vita prima S. Francisci Assisiensis,” 42; translated in Thomas of Celano, “Life of Saint Francis,” 230. 8. Francis’s visit to Egypt and conversation with al-Ka¯mil has been a subject of fascination for generations of scholars. John V. Tolan has examined the numerous textual and visual depictions of this meeting from the thirteenth century to the present in Saint Francis and the Sultan. Most recent scholarship has focused on the relationship between Francis and the crusade, and has argued that Francis’s mission should not be read as a criticism of the crusade. See Kedar, Crusade and Mission, 116–31; Christoph Maier, Preaching the Crusades: Mendicant Friars and the Cross in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 9–17; and Adam L. Hoose, “Francis of Assisi’s Way of Peace?: His Conversion and Mission to Egypt,” Catholic History Review 96 (2010): 449–69. James M. Powell argues that Francis did see conversion as an alternative to war. In “St. Francis of Assisi’s Way of Peace,” in “Crusades and Interfaith Relations,” ed. Michael Lower, special issue, Medieval Encounters 13 (2007): 271–80, he expands on arguments he made earlier in “Francesco d’Assisi e la Quinta Crociata: Una missione di pace,” Schede Medievali 4 (1983): 67–77. Steven J. McMichael mostly recently has suggested that Francis did disapprove of the crusade, though his arguments are less persuasive: “Francis and the Encounter with the Sultan (1219),” in Cambridge Companion to Francis of Assisi, ed. Michael J. P. Robson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012),127–42. For similar arguments, see Leonhard Lehmann, “Franziskanische Mission als Friedenmission: Ein Vergliech der fru¨hen Quellen,” Zeitschrift fu¨r Missionswissenschaft und Religionswissenschaft 92 (2008): 238–71. Pacifico Sello argues that Francis’s mission of peace was to obtain free access to the holy places in Jerusalem for Christian pilgrims, “Francesco e il Sultano: L’Incontro,” Studi

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francescani 108 (2011): 493–507, as does Isaac Va´zquez Janeiro, “I Francescani e il dialogo con gli Ebrei e i Saraceni nei secoli XIII–XV,” Antonianum 65 (1990): 533–49. 9. See William J. Short for a discussion of this first rule and attempts to reconstruct it: briefly, “The Rule and Life of the Friars Minor,” in Robson, Cambridge Companion to Francis of Assisi, 50–67, and more extensively “The Rule of the Lesser Brothers: The Earlier Rule, Fragments, Later Rule, the Rule for Hermitages,” in The Writings of Francis of Assisi, ed. Michael W. Blastic, Jay Hammond, and Wayne Hellman (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 2011), 17–139. 10. Francis of Assisi, “Regola non bollata,” in Scripta, ed. Carlo Paolazzi (Grottaferrata [Rome]: Editiones Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 2009), 266; translated in “The Earlier Rule,” in Armstrong, Hellmann, and Short, Saint, 74. 11. Francis of Assisi, “Regola non bollata,” 266; translated in “Earlier Rule,” 74. 12. Matt. 10:28. Francis of Assisi, “Regola non bollata,” 268; translated in “Earlier Rule,” 74–75. 13. Francis of Assisi, “Regola non bollata,” 266; translated in “Earlier Rule,” 74. 14. Michael F. Cusato sees the second path as dependent on the first, rather than being a complete alternative. “From Conversion of Heart to the Conversion of Souls: Franciscan Mission and Missiology in the Early Thirteenth Century,” in From La Florida to La California: Franciscan Evangelization in the Spanish Borderlands, ed. Timothy J. Johnson and Gert Melville (Berkeley, CA: Academy of American Franciscan History, 2013), 1–22. 15. Francis of Assisi, “Regola non bollata,” 276; translated in “Earlier Rule,” 79. 16. Bernard Vollot, “Hugh of Digne and the Rule of 1216,” Greyfriars Review 15 (2000): 35–85, esp. 47. 17. The Worcester Fragment, which contained variant readings of the Regula non bullata as well as Francis’s “Testament,” linked martyrdom to the more traditional motivation of love for God, reminding the friars that “for love of Him, they must endure persecution and death from enemies, both visible and invisible.” “Fragmenta di un’altra redazione della Regola non bollata,” in Scripta, ed. Carlo Paolazzi (Grottaferrata [Rome]: Editiones Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 2009), 298; translated in “Worcester Fragment,” in Armstrong, Hellmann, and Short, Saint, 89. 18. Bonaventure, “Expositio super regulam fratrum minorum,” in Opera Omnia (Quaracchi: Ex Typographia Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1898), 8:431; translated in E. Randolph Daniel, “The Desire for Martyrdom: A Leitmotiv of St. Bonaventure,” Franciscan Studies 32 (1972): 74–87, esp. 74. 19. Vollot, “Hugh of Digne and the Rule of 1216,” 35–85. 20. Hugh of Digne made it clear that he used the earlier rules of the order to explicate the official rule: Hugh of Digne, Hugh of Digne’s Commentary, ed. and tr. David Flood (Grottaferrata [Rome]: Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 1979), 92. He used the same opening line of “sending you like sheep among wolves” (a quote from Luke 10:3) that is the opening line of the chapter in the Regula non bullata (191), as well as discussing the two paths (192). David Flood points out that his historical understanding of the rule was unusual; other commentators (the Four Masters, Bonaventure) tend to treat the rule “as purely juridical text and explicate it as law” (70). 21. Hugh of Digne, Hugh of Digne’s Commentary, 192. 22. Hugh of Digne, Hugh of Digne’s Commentary, 192. See also Damien Ruiz, “Le manuscript CL. I. 18 (258) de L’Archivio Generale des Fre`res Mineurs Conventuels a` Rome,” Franciscana 6 (2004): 73–94.

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23. Hugh of Digne, Hugh of Digne’s Commentary, 191. 24. Speculum Perfectionis seu S. Francisci Assiensis Legenda Antiquissima, ed. Paul Sabatier, Collection de documents pour l’histoire religieuse et litte´raire du Moyen aˆge, 1 (Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1898), 4: 48, p. 84; translation adapted from “An Old Legend (Legenda Vetus),” in Francis of Assisi: The Early Documents, vol. 3, The Prophet, ed. Regis Armstrong, J. Wayne Hellman, and William J. Short (New York: New City Press, 2001),119. 25. “For by your patience you will possess your souls; whoever perseveres to the end will be saved” (Luke 21:29; Matt. 10:22, 24:13). This, of course, applies to both potential converts and the friars themselves. 26. Matt. 10:24. 27. The Bardi Dossal may present the first depiction of one of Francis’s journeys. It shows him preaching to a group of Muslims with the sultan seated on a throne in the background. The Dossal is dated to between 1230 and 1270. Tolan points out that the depiction does not show the violence that Thomas argued Francis was subjected to, and it emphasizes the eagerness with which the Muslims heard the saint. Tolan, Saint Francis and the Sultan: The Curious History of a Christian-Muslim Encounter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 93–108. 28. Thomas de Celano, “Vita prima,” 42; “Life,” 229. 29. In the Scripta Leonis, Francis is quoted as having praised Roland, Oliver, and Charlemagne as martyrs. Scripta Leonis, Rufini et Angeli sociorum S. Francisci, ed. and tr. Rosalind B. Brooke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), chap. 72, pp. 214–15. See Vauchez for a discussion of Francis’s progression from aspiring to secular knightly values to seeking to be a “knight of Christ.” Andre´ Vauchez, Francis of Assisi: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Saint, tr. Michael F. Cusato (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 28–29. 30. Thomas de Celano, “Vita prima,” 43; “Life,” 229. 31. Thomas de Celano, “Vita prima,” 43; “Life,” 231. 32. Thomas did not give the name of his companion in the Vita prima, but in his book on the miracles of Saint Francis, he named him as Bernard. See “Tractatus de miraculis,” in Menesto` and Brufani, Fontes Franciscani, 670; and “The Treatise on the Miracles of Saint Francis,” in Francis of Assisi: The Early Documents, vol. 2, The Founder, ed. Regis Armstrong, J. Wayne Hellman, and William J. Short (New York: New City Press, 2000), 416. 33. Gal. 2:11. 34. The passage caused considerable problems for early theologians and exegetes. Clement of Alexandria, for example, argued that Paul must have been writing about some other Cephas (Peter). For this and other responses, see Margaret M. Mitchell, “Peter’s ‘Hypocrisy’ and Paul’s: Two ‘Hypocrites’ at the Foundation of Earliest Christianity,” New Testament Studies 58 (2012): 213–34. 35. Thomas was writing not only in response to Francis’s own journeys to the Middle East, but also to the Moroccan martyrs, whom he never explicitly mentioned. Thomas’s account of Francis’s Moroccan misadventure might have been as much a swipe at the martyred friars as it was a critique of Francis himself. 36. Thomas de Celano, “Vita prima,” 44; “Life,” 231. 37. Thomas of Celano, “Vita prima,” 43–44; “Life,” 231. 38. Thomas of Celano, “Vita prima,” 44; “Life,” 231. 39. Matt. 10:9–10; Luke 9:2; Mark 6:12; Thomas of Celano, “Vita prima,” 19; “Life,” 201. 40. Thomas of Celano, “Vita prima,” 54; “Life,” 245. 41. Thomas of Celano, “Vita prima,” 13; “Life,” 191.

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42. Thomas of Celano, “Vita prima,” 14; “Life,” 193. 43. Thomas of Celano, “Vita prima,” 15; “Life,” 194. 44. Thomas of Celano, “Vita prima,” 30; “Life,” 217. 45. Thomas of Celano, “Vita prima,” 32; “Life,” 219. 46. Thomas of Celano, “Vita prima,” 43; “Life,” 230. 47. Thomas of Celano, “Vita prima,” 44; “Life,” 231. 48. See Carolyn Muessig for the long prehistory of the stigmata; it had long been discussed and envisioned before Francis. “Signs of Salvation: The Evolution of Stigmatic Spirituality Before Francis of Asssi,” Church History 82 (2013): 40–68. Giles Constable points out examples that may predate Francis: “The Ideal of the Imitation of Christ,” in Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 145–248, esp. 201–3. Yet the claim by Franciscans that Francis had received the stigmata was not universally accepted: Andre´ Vauchez, “The Stigmata of Saint Francis and Its Medieval Detractors,” Greyfriars Review 13 (1999): 61–89. 49. From the perspective of Thomas, as Chiara Frugoni has shown. Francesco e l’invenzione delle stimmate: Una storia per parole e immagini fino a Bonventura e Giotto (Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1993), 137–201. For further discussion, see Jacques Dalarun, “The Great Secret of Francis,” in The Stigmata of Francis of Assisi: New Studies, New Perspectives (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 2006), 9–26. 50. Thomas of Celano, “Vita prima,” 71; “Life,” 262. 51. Thomas of Celano, “Vita prima,” 71; “Life,” 263. 52. See Dalarun for the vagueness of date and place, and for the origin of the imagery of the seraph: “Great Secret,” 14, 21–23. 53. Thomas of Celano, “Vita prima,” 72; “Life,” 264. 54. Chiara Frugoni has shown the ways in which the understanding and depiction of the stigmata shifted over the course of the thirteenth century, until Bonaventure and Giotto produced an authoritative description and image. Thomas of Celano described the stigmata as emerging from within Francis, and the nails themselves appearing in Francis’s flesh, while Bonaventure depicted the wounds as inflicted on Francis by the seraph. Francesco e l’invenzione delle stimmate, 137–201. 55. Thomas of Celano, “Vita prima,” 88; “Life,” 280. 56. Luke 22:42. 57. Thomas of Celano, “Vita prima,” 83; “Life,” 275. Thomas’s notion that Francis’s suffering while dying in his last years was another kind of martyrdom, however, was not picked up by other Franciscans who adapted his vita. It is interesting to contrast the description of Clare of Assisi’s suffering at the end of her life: “When a kind man, Brother Raynaldo, encouraged her to be patient in the long martyrdom of so many illnesses, she responded with a very unrestrained voice: “After I once came to know the grace of my Lord Jesus Christ through his servant Francis, no pain has been bothersome, no penance too severe, no weakness, dearly beloved brother, has been hard.” Giovanni Boccali, O.F.M. (ed.), Legenda Latina Sanctae Clarae Virginis Assisiensis (Assisi: Edizioni Porziuncola, 2001), 192–94; translation adapted in “The Legend of Saint Clare,” in Clare of Assisi: Early Documents, ed. Regis J. Armstrong, O.F.M., Cap. (New York: Paulist Press, 1988), 228. 58. Thomas de Celano, “Legenda ad Usum Chori,” in Menesto` and Brufani, Fontes Franciscani, 432; translation in Thomas of Celano, “The Legend for the Use of the Choir,” in Armstrong, Hellmann, and Short, Saint, 322.

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59. Iulianus de Spira, “Officium S. Francisci,” in Menesto` and Brufani, Fontes Franciscani, 1117; translated in Julian of Speyer, “The Divine Office of St. Francis,” in Armstrong, Hellmann, and Short, Saint, 339. 60. Iulianus de Spira, “Officium S. Francisci,” 1078; translation, Julian of Speyer, “Divine Office,” 409. 61. Iulianus de Spira, “Officium S. Francisci,” 1078; translation, Julian of Speyer, “Divine Office,” 410. 62. Julian also included Francis’s desire for martyrdom in the vita of the saint that he wrote around 1235, and here he followed Thomas’s vita prima. Julian in some ways did not know how to deal with the contradictory nature of martyrdom. The friar wrote that while traveling to Morocco, Francis “rushed on so impetuously that, intoxicated by the Spirit, he left his traveling companion behind.” Despite the goading of this divine spirit, the Lord “afflicted him with serious ailments so that he returned to Italy.” In his final attempt, his journey to Egypt, Julian explicitly linked his failure to achieve martyrdom to the stigmata, which Thomas had just hinted at: “But in all these things the blessed man did not find his desire fulfilled: for the Lord had wonderfully reserved for him the privilege of a unique grace: bearing the emblems of Christ’s own wounds.” Iulianus de Spira, “Vita Sancti Francisci,” in Menesto` and Brufani, Fontes Franciscani, 1057–58; translated in Julian of Speyer, “Life of Saint Francis,” in Armstrong, Hellmann, and Short, Saint, 395. 63. Johannes Schlageter, “Die Chronica des Bruders Jordan von Giano. Einfu¨hring und kritische Edition nach den bisher bekannten Handschriften,” Archivium Franciscanum Historicum (2011): 36. For the older edition, see Jordan of Giano, Chronica fratris Jordani, ed. Heinrich Boehmer (Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1908), 7. 64. Le´on de Kerval (ed.), Sancti Antonii de Padua: Vitae duae quarum altera hucusque inedita (Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1904), 25–33. 65. From the testimony of Sora Cecilia concerning the canonization of Clare: “Anche dise che la predicta madonna Chiara era tanto fervore de spiritu, che voluntieri voleva sostenere el martirio per amore del Signore: et questo lo demonstro quando, havendo inteso che a Marrochio erano state martiric¸ati certi Frati, epsa diceva che ce volvea andrae; unde per questo epsa testimonia pianse: et questo fo prima che cosi infirmasse.” Zeffirino Lazzeri (ed.), “Il processo di canonizzazione di S. Chiara d’Assisi,” Archivium Franciscanum Historicum 13 (1920): 465. These martyrs could also be the seven who were reputed to have died in Ceuta in 1227, but as the martyrs of 1220 were in general better known, Clare was more likely inspired by them. The Dominican Margaret of Hungary (1242–70) and the Franciscan tertiary Chiara di Montefalco (c. 1268–1308) also desired martyrdom. See Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, 351. 66. Thomas de Papia, Dialogus de gestis sanctorum fratrum minorum, ed. Ferdinand Delorme (Quaracchi: Ex Typographia Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1923), 9–10. This continues to be true throughout the thirteenth century; William of Tripoli, writing about 1271, still mentioned the Moroccan martyrs as those who inspired Anthony, rather than lauding them on their own accomplishments. Wilhelm von Tripolis, Notitia de Machometo, ed. and tr. Peter Engels (Wu¨rzburg: Echter, [1992]), 206. 67. “Tractatus de miraculis B. Francisci,” in Analecta Franciscana (Quaracchi: Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1926), 10:272; new edition in Menesto` and Brufani, Fontes Franciscani, 644, translated in Thomas of Celano, “The Treatise on the Miracles of Saint Francis,” in Armstrong, Hellmann, and Short, Founder, 400. The martyrs were also mentioned in the Dicta of Giles of Assisi, which date to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth centuries; Giles thought that the

214

Notes to Pages 61–66

leaders of the church were negligent in not canonizing them. “Dicta Beati Aegidii Assisiensis,” chap. 25, p. 75. 68. Bernard of Bessa, “Liber de laudibus beati Francisci,” in Analecta Franciscana (Quarrachi: Collegi S. Bonaventurae, 1898), 3:669. 69. This can be seen in the earliest references to the martyrs of 1220, which often give the martyrs the names that later came to be given to the martyrs of Ceuta of 1227 (Leo, Ugo, and Dompnus). Isabelle Heullant-Donat briefly made this suggestion in “Martyrdom and Identity in the Franciscan Order (Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries),” Franciscan Studies 70 (2012): 446n38. 70. Leo´n Amoro´s Paya´, “Los Santos Martires Franciscanos B. Juan de Perusa y B. Pedro de Saxoferrato en la Historia de Teruel,” Teruel 15–16 (1956): 18–19. Ibn ‘Ida¯rı¯ al-Marra¯kusˇ¯ı (fourteenth century) mentioned that Zayd converted to Christianity, but did not mention the martyrs. Al-Baya¯n al-mugrib fi ijtis.a¯r ajba¯r muluk al-Andalus wa al-Maghrib, in Coleccio´n de Cro´nicas A´rabes de la Reconquista, tr. Ambrosio Huici Miranda (Tetua´n: Editora Marroqui, 1953), 1:321. Also, Tomas Jordan wrote a history of the convent of Zaragossa in the late fourteenth century and mentioned them. See Agustin Sales, Memorias historicas del antiguo santuario del Santo Sepulcro de Valencia (Valencia: En la Oficina de J. E. Dolz, 1746), 74–83. 71. Salimbene de Adam, Cronica, ed. Giuseppe Scalia, Corpus Christianorum: Continuatio Mediaevalis, 125 (Turholt: Brepols, 1998), 1:485 (463:9); for more, see G. A. Loud, “The Case of the Missing Martyrs: Frederick II’s War with the Church, 1239–1250,” in Martyrs and Martyrologies, ed. Diana Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 141–83. 72. Leonhard Lemmens, Dialogus Sanctorum Fratrum Minorum (Rome: Typis Sallustianis, 1902), 96; Thomas of Eccleston, “Liber de adventu Fratrum Minorum in Angliam,” in Analecta Fransciscana (Quaracchi: Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1885), 1:223–24. 73. “Sacrum commercium sancti Francisci cum Domina Paupertate,” 1705; translated in “The Sacred Exchange Between Saint Francis and Lady Poverty,” in Armstrong, Hellmann, and Short, Saint, 529. 74. “Sacrum commercium,” 1700. 75. “Sacrum commercium,” 1717; translated in “Sacred Exchange,” 540. 76. “Sacrum commercium,” 1718; translated in “Sacred Exchange,” 541. 77. “Sacrum commercium,” 1732; translated in “Sacred Exchange,” 554. 78. Desbonnets, “Legenda trium Sociorum,” 38–144, esp. chap. 14, p. 133; translation adapted from The Legend of Saint Francis by the Three Companions, tr. E. G. Salter (London: J. M. Dent, 1905), 91. 79. Desbonnets, “Legenda trium Sociorum,” chap. 11, p. 121; translated in Legend of Saint Francis, 69. 80. Thomas de Celano, “Vita secunda S. Francisci Assisiensis,” in Analecta Franciscana (Quarrachi: Ex Typographia Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1926–41, 10:149, translation adapted from Thomas de Celano, “The Remembrance of the Desire of a Soul,” in Armstrong, Hellmann, and Short, Founder, 265. 81. Thomas de Celano, “Vita secunda,” 144; translated in “Remembrance,” 259. 82. Thomas de Celano, “Vita secunda,” 250; translated in “Remembrance,” 381. 83. Bonaventure, “Legenda Maior S. Francisci,” in Analecta Franciscana (Quaracchi: Ex Typographia Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1926–41), 10:574; translated in Bonaventure, “The Major Legend of Saint Francis,” in Armstrong Hellmann, and Short, Founder, 554–55. 84. Bonaventure, “Legenda Maior,” 598; translated in “Major Legend,” 599. 85. Bonaventure, “Legenda Maior,” 599; translated in “Major Legend,” 599.

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86. Bonaventure here is quoting the Office of Saint Martin of Tours. Bonaventure, “Legenda Maior,” 601; translated in “Major Legend,” 604. 87. Bonaventure, “Legenda Maior,” 574; translated in “Major Legend,” 554–55. 88. Bonaventure, “Legenda Minor S. Francisci,” in Analecta Franciscana (Quaracchi: Ex Typographia Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1926–41), 10:665, translated in Bonaventure, “The Minor Legend of Saint Francis,” in Armstrong, Hellmann, and Short, Founder, 706–7. 89. Ubertino da Casale, “The Tree of the Crucified Life of Jesus,” in Armstrong, Hellmann, and Short, Prophet, 175. 90. Stanislaus of Krakow (d. 1079) was the only other martyr. The saints were Edmund Rich of Canterbury (d. 1240); William, bishop of St. Brieuc (d. 1234); and Margaret of Scotland (d. 1093). Donald Prudlo, The Martyred Inquisitor: The Life and Cult of Peter of Verona (1252) (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 77–78. 91. Bartolomeo da Trento, Liber epilogorum in gesta sanctorum, ed. Emore Paoli (Florence: SISMEL, Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2001), 210. 92. Jordan of Saxony, “Libellus de initiis Ordinis Praedicatorum,” ed. H. C. Scheeben and A. Walz, in Monumenta Historiae Sancti Patris Nostri Dominici (Rome: Institutum Historicum FF. Praedicatorum 1935), 16:25–88, sec. 34. 93. Prudlo, Martyred Inquisitor, 118, 121–24; Fra Angelico’s painting is in the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Strossmayer Gallery of Old Masters. 94. John Clyn, The Annals of Ireland, ed. and tr. Bernadette Williams (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), 143.

chapter 3 1. Simon’s account of his journey survived only within the pages of the Speculum historiale. For more, see Jean Richard, Au-dela` de la Perse et de l’Arme´nie l’Orient latin et la de´couverte de l’Asie inte´rieure: Quelques textes ine´galement connus aux origines de l’alliance entre Francs et Mongols (1145–1262) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005). 2. A third set of envoys was sent to the Mongols fighting against the Mamluks. Peter Jackson, “Franciscans as Papal and Royal Envoys to the Tartars (1245–1255),” in Robson, Cambridge Companion to Francis of Assisi, 225. 3. Salimbene de Adam, Cronica, 305; The Chronicle of Salimbene de Adam, tr. Joseph L. Baird (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1986), 203. 4. See, for example, Thomas of Eccleston’s account of the Franciscans in England, “De adventu fratrum minorum in Angliam,” in Monumenta Franciscana, ed. J. S. Brewer, Rerum Britannicarum Medii Aevi Scriptores (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1858), 1:3–72. For a discussion of Franciscans in Germany, see below. 5. Mendicant engagement in the Mongol world has stimulated an enormous amount of scholarship. Including the other material cited here, see Jean Richard, “The Missions to the North of the Black Sea (Thirteenth to Fifteenth Centuries),” in The Spiritual Expansion of Medieval Latin Christendom: The Asian Missions, ed. James D. Ryan, Expansion of Latin Europe, 1000–1500, 11 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Variorum, 2013), 343–56. See also the work of James D. Ryan cited throughout this chapter, as well as E. Randolph Daniel, “Franciscan Missions,” in Robson, Cambridge Companion to Francis of Assisi, 240–57; and Pamela Drost Beattie, “Dreams of Missions and Monsters in the East,” Scintilla 8 (1991): 1–24.

216

Notes to Pages 71–76

6. Significant contributions have been made recently by Brett Whalen and Michael Lower (see below), building on earlier work by James Muldoon, Popes, Lawyers, and Infidels (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), 36–41, and the foundational work by early twentieth-century Spanish scholars: see particularly Atanasio Lo´pez, O.F.M., La Provincia de Espan˜a de los frailes menores (Santiago, Spain: Tip. de del Eco Franciscano, 1915), and Los Obispos in el Africa septentrional desde el siglo XIII: El Cristianismo en el Africa del Norte (Tangiers: Ta´nger Instituto General Franco para la Investigacio´n Hispano-Arabe, 1941). See also Karl-Ernst Lupprian, Die Beziehungen der Pa¨pste zu Islamischen und Mongolischen Herrschern im 13. Jahrhundert anhand ihres Briefwechels (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1981), and Clara Maillard, Les papes et le Maghreb aux XIIIe`me et XIVe`me sie`cles: E´tude des lettres pontificales de 1199 a` 1419 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014). For a broader perspective, see the work of Allen James Fromherz, The Near East: Medieval North Africa, Latin Europe and the Mediterranean in the Second Axial Age (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), though it is not particularly reliable when it comes to the Franciscans. 7. Translatio Sancti Viti martyris, 32. 8. Robin Vose, Dominicans, Muslims and Jews in the Medieval Crown of Aragon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 21. 9. Brett Whalen, “Corresponding with Infidels: Rome, the Almohads, and the Christians of Thirteenth-Century Morocco,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 41, no. 3 (2011): 489. 10. Schlageter, “Die Chronica des Bruders Jordan von Giano,” 35. For the older edition, see Jordan of Giano, Chronica fratris Jordani, 5–6. 11. Schlageter, “Die Chronica des Bruders Jordan von Giano,” 36; Jordan of Giano, Chronica fratris Jordani, 6–7. 12. Schlageter, “Die Chronica des Bruders Jordan von Giano,” 40; Jordan of Giano, Chronica fratris Jordani, 19. ¨ ljeitu¨ (1304– 13. Peter Jackson has pointed out that it was not until Arghun’s successor O 16) that the Ilkhanids turned clearly to support Muslim institutions and require Christians to pay the jizya. “The Mongols and the Faith of the Conquered,” in Ryan, The Spiritual Expansion of Medieval Latin Christendom, 326–27. See also Jackson’s magnum opus, Mongols and the Islamic World: From Conquest to Conversion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). 14. Laetamur quod ecclesia (12 June 1237), in Bullarium Franciscanum, 1:225, 噛236. 15. Tertullian, “Apologeticum,” 171. 16. Barbara Bombi, “Celestine III and the Conversion of the Heathen on the Baltic Frontier,” in Pope Celestine III (1191–1198): Diplomat and Pastor, ed. John Doran and Damian J. Smith (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 145–59, esp. 148. 17. Thomas de Celano, “Vita prima,” 43; translated in Thomas of Celano, “Life,” 230. 18. Benjamin Z. Kedar suggests that the title was widely transliterated from Arabic because its translation into Latin would have been something like dux fidelium, which would be unacceptable from a Christian perspective. “Religion in Catholic-Muslim Correspondence and Treaties,” in Diplomatics in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1000–1500: Aspects of Cross-Cultural Communication, ed. Alexander D. Beihammer, Maria G. Parani, and Christopher D. Schabel (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 409. The title was most commonly used for the Almohad caliph. Allen James Fromherz points out that the first Almohad caliph was named ‘Abd al-Mu’min, which has the same root as the caliphal title; “Miramolinus” might thus also be intended as a dynastic marker for the Almohads specifically. Near East, 18. Jacques de Vitry used Miramummelin of

Notes to Pages 77–79

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the ruler of Marrakesh, and gave a translation of the term (“Historia Iherosolimitana Abbreviata,” in Gesta Dei per Francos, ed. Jacques Bongars [Hanover: Typis Wechelianis, 1611], 2:col. 1061). The Chronica Pisani also used it, and Matthew Paris styled the title as Admiralius Murmelinus. It was applied to other Muslim leaders as well; Mirmuraenus, apparently a version of Miramolinus, referred to Saladin in a letter from the sultan to Frederick I translated into Latin: Hans E. Mayer (ed.), Das Itinerarium peregrinorum (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1962), 288 (Ioseph, filii Iob, suscitatoris progeniorum Mirmuraeni). For more ways in which the Miramolin was denominated, see Martı´n Alvira Cabrer, “La imagen del Miramamolı´n al-Nasir (1199–1213) en las fuentes cristianas del siglo XIII,” Annuario de estudios medievales 26 (1996): 1007. 19. Maribel Fierro, “The Madhı¯ Ibn Tu¯mart and al-Andalus,” tr. Ed McAllister in The Almohad Revolution: Politics and Religion in the Islamic West During the Twelfth–Thirteenth Centuries (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 3:1–20; Derek W. Lomax, “Heresy and Orthodoxy in the Fall of Almohad Spain,” in God and Man in Medieval Spain: Essays in Honour of J. R. L. Highfield, ed. Derek W. Lomax and David Mackenzie (Warminster, UK: Aris & Phillips, 1989), 37–48. 20. Hugh Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal: A Political History of al-Andalus (London: Longman, 1996), 246. 21. See Joseph F. O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 66–74. 22. Innocent ordered that the clergy and people of Rome process through the city on 16 May 1212 in order to pray for victory against the Muslims in Spain. Demetrio Mansilla (ed.), Documentacio´n hasta Inocencio III (965–1216) (Rome: Instituto espan˜ol de estudios eclesiasticos, 1955), 503–4, 噛473. 23. James D. Ryan cautions against using the preponderance of papal evidence as proof that the popes directed the missions. “To Baptize Khans or to Convert Peoples?: Missionary Aims in Central Asia in the Fourteenth Century,” in Christianizing Peoples and Converting Individuals, ed. Guyda Armstrong and Ian N. Wood (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), 248. 24. Hussein Fancy, “The Last Almohads: Universal Sovereignty Between North Africa and the Crown of Aragon,” Medieval Encounters 19 (2013): 102–36. For more on Christian and Muslim mercenaries in the Mediterranean, see also Hussein Fancy, The Mercenary Mediterranean: Sovereignty, Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); and Robert I. Burns, “Renegades, Adventurers, and Sharp Businessmen: The Thirteenth-Century Spaniard in the Cause of Islam,” Catholic Historical Review 58 (1972): 352–53. 25. The letter is often quoted because of the argument that Gregory makes that “most certainly you and we ought to love each other in this way more than other races of men, because we believe and confess one God, albeit in different ways, whom each day we praise and reverence as the creator of all ages and the governor of this world.” Translation from Bernard Hamilton, “Knowing the Enemy: Western Understanding of Islam,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, ser. 3, 7 (1997): 373, original text in M. L. de Mas-Latrie (ed.), Traite´s de paix et de commerce et documents divers concernant les relations des Chre´tiens avec les Arabes de l’Afrique septentrionale au moyen aˆge (Paris: Henri Plon, 1866; repr., New York: Burt Franklin, [1964]), 2:7–8. 26. Inter cetera que (4 June 1192), Fidel Fita, “Noticias,” in Boletı´n de la Real Academia de la Historia 11 (1887): 455–56; Iben Fonnesberg-Schmidt, The Popes and the Baltic Crusades, 1147–1254 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 75.

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27. John Flannery, “The Trinitarian Order and the Ransom of Captives,” Al-Masaq 23, no. 2 (2011): 135–44; Maillard, Les papes, 53–54. 28. For Honorius III’s engagement with the Latin East based on papal archives, see Pierre-Vincent Claverie, Honorius III et l’Orient (1216–1227) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013). 29. Ne si secus (25 March 1221), in Regesta Honorii Papae III, ed. Pietro Pressutti (Rome: Ex Typographia Vaticana, 1888), 1:523–24, 噛3209. 30. Simon Barton, “Traitors to the Faith?: Christian Mercenaries in al-Andalus and the Maghreb,” in Medieval Spain: Culture, Conflict, and Coexistence, ed. Roger Collins and Anthony Goodman (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 23–45; Simon Barton, “From Mercenary to Crusader: The Career of A´lvar Pe´rez de Castro (d. 1239) Re-Examined,” in Church, State, Vellum, and Stone: Essays on Medieval Spain in Honor of John Williams, ed. Therese Martin and Julie A. Harris (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 111–29. 31. Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris, ed. Luis Sanchez Belda (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientı´ficas, 1950), 104–6, 81–83. 32. Franc¸ois Cle´ment, “Reverter et son fils, deux officiers catalans au service des sultans de Marrakesh,” Medieval Encounters 9 (2003): 79–106. 33. For more on the Almohad army, see Victoria Aguilar, “Instituciones militares: El eje´rcito,” in El Retroceso territorial de al-Andalus: Almora´vides y Almohades siglos XI al XIII, ed. Marı´a Jesu´s Viguera Molı´ns (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1997), 187–208, esp. 197–98. 34. Alejandro Garcı´a Sanjua´n, “Mercenarios cristianos al servicio de los musulmanes en el norte de A´frica durante el siglo XIII,” in La Penı´nsula Ibe´rica entre el Mediterra´neo y el Atla´ntico: Siglos XIII–XV; Ca´diz, 1–4 de abril de 2003, ed. Manuel Gonza´lez Jime´nez and Isabel Montes Romero-Camacho (Ca´diz: Diputacio´n de Ca´diz, Servicio de Publicaciones; [Madrid]: Sociedad Espan˜ola de Estudios Medievales, 2006), 435–47. See also Burns, “Renegades, Adventurers, and Sharp Businessmen.” 35. Olivia Remie Constable, Housing the Stranger: Lodging, Trade, and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); David Nirenberg, “Christian Merchants in the Almohad Cities,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 2 (2010): 251–57. 36. Pope Honorius first wrote to Al-Mustans.ir in 1219. This letter accompanied a Hospitaller, and sought to protect the rights of Christians in the Almohad Empire, particularly mercenaries. Expedire tibi (5 September 1219), in La documentacio´n pontificia de Honorius III (1216–1227), ed. Demetrio Mansilla (Rome: Instituto espan˜ol de historia eclesiastica, 1965), 185–86, 噛243. 37. Vinee domini custodes (10 June 1225), in Mansilla, La documentacio´n pontificia de Honorius III, 416–17, 噛562. Dominic and Martin are identified only in the superscription. Dominic is identified as a prior of the Dominican order, while Martin is simply identified as a friar, leading some to identify him as a Franciscan. Manuel P. Castellanos, Apostolado sera´fico en Marruecos o´ sea Historia de las misiones franciscanas en aquel imperio desde el siglo XIII hasta neustros dı´as (Madrid: Libreria de D. Gregorio del Amo; Santiago: Biblioteca de “El Eco Franciscano,” 1896), 100. 38. Nimia sumus orribilitate (13 May 1223), in Regesta Honorii Papae III, ed. Pietro Pressutti (Rome: Ex Typographia Vaticana, 1888), 2:134, 噛4532; a full transcription of the bull with translation into French and English is available at http://www.cn-telma.fr/relmin/extrait268735/. 39. Ex parte vestra (17 March 1226), in Bullarium Franciscanum, 1:26, 噛25. 40. Diplomatarium Danicum, ed. Niels Skyum-Nielsen (Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgarrds Forlag, 1957), I. Raekke, 5. Bind (1211–1223), nr. 192, pp. 243–44; Fonnesberg-Schmidt,

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Popes and the Baltic Crusades, 164. On the other hand, Innocent III had seen the possibility of martyrdom as a strong disincentive for clergy in newly Christianized Finland. 41. The Dominicans did claim that one of their number died during this time, but very little was made of his death, and he was not acclaimed a martyr, even by his own order. See citation given in Maillard, Les papes, 74. 42. While we cannot be certain, this Dominic is assumably the same as the first one. Ea que nuper (8 November 1225), in Mansilla, La documentacio´n de Honorius III, 444–45, 噛590 (rector); Konrad Eubel (ed.), Bullarii Franciscani Epitome sive Summa Bullarum in eiusdem Bullarii quattuor prioribus tomis relatarum (Quaracchi: Typis Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1908), 3, 噛24 (27 October 1225). Vose suggests that the tone of the bull indicates surprise on Honorius’s part, implying that someone else elevated Dominic, probably Ximenez, archbishop of Toledo. Vose, Dominicans, Muslims and Jews, 202–3. Honorius also issued it four months later (7 October 1225) to the Franciscans. Bullarium Franciscanum, 1:24, 噛23. 43. Ea que nuper (8 November 1225), in Mansilla, La documentacio´n de Honorius III, 444–45, 噛590. 44. Urgente officii nostri (20 February 1226), in Bullarium Franciscanum, 1:24–25, 噛24. Lucy K. Pick, Cooperation and Coexistence: Archbishop Rodrigo and the Muslims and Jews of Medieval Spain (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 52–63; Vose, Dominicans, Muslims and Jews, 200–203. The area is defined as the “regnum Miramolini.” Where Dominic, Martin, and others were within the Almohad Empire is not clear. The most common geographic term used in the bulls (when one was used at all) was “Marochium”—a name that applied to both the city of Marrakesh and the kingdom over which the city ruled. In a letter the year before to the archbishop of Toledo, however, Honorius asked that he give aid to any Dominicans or Franciscans who were on their way to the kingdom of the Miramolin, “whether in Africa or in Barbaria,” to convert infidels (Bullarium Franciscanum, 1:24–25, 噛25). It appears that Dominic eventually ended up as bishop, by 1228, of the Andalusian city of Baeza, which had fallen under Christian domination around 1226, as part of the long-term consequences of the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (according to Lo´pez, La Provincia, 74–75). Later tradition suggests that he was martyred, but no medieval evidence supports this (Lo´pez, La Provincia, 80). It is unclear whether the Dominic of Baeza is the same as the Dominic sent to the lands of the Miramolin; it is even possible that Baeza, so recently under Almohad rule, is part of the “lands of the Miramolin” referred to. The references to the lands of the Miramolin and terra Marochium may have referred to Almohad lands in al-Andalus that were recently conquered. It is possible that the friars may have remained in al-Andalus, and not ventured to North Africa at all, but the use of “Marochium” and the issues that the bulls engaged suggest that they were in Morocco itself. 45. Whalen, “Corresponding with Infidels,” 487–513. 46. He may have been as young as ten. Roger Le Tourneau, The Almohad Movement in North Africa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 89. 47. This is according to the fourteenth-century chronicler Ibn ‘Ida¯rı¯ al-Marra¯kusˇi. AlBaya¯n al-mughrib, 1:318–20. However, Ibn ‘Ida¯rı¯ was writing under the succeeding Marinid dynasty, and may have been inclined to cast the Almohads in a bad light. 48. Al-’A¯dil had crossed over to Morocco to claim power in the Almohad center, but was murdered in a palace coup. Al-Ma’mu¯n moved against his nephew Yah.ya¯, who had claimed the caliphate in Marrakesh. 49. Ibn Abi Zar’, Rawd al-Qirtas, tr. Ambrosio Huici Miranda (Valencia: Anubar, 1964), 2:486.

220

Notes to Pages 84–87

50. Joseph F. O’Callaghan, A History of Medieval Spain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 339. For the assumption that it did, see Lo´pez, Los Obispos, 401. For the church, see Lo´pez, La Provincia, 65–66. The treaty between Alfonso III of Aragon and ‘Abd al-Wa¯h.id in 1287 was part of a plan to reestablish the son of the last Almohad caliph in Tunis; part of the alliance mandated that the churches in the funduqs of Tunis would be allowed to ring their bells. Hussein Fancy, “Last Almohads,” 121. 51. In aliis litteris (27 May 1233), in Bullarium Franciscanum, 1:106, 噛106. 52. Referred to in the letter only by the initial “A.” He is identified in a bull of 1246, Cum sicut intelleximus (19 December 1246), in Bullarium Franciscanum, 1:444, 噛178. Later Franciscan historians imagined a great role of this first Franciscan bishop. By the seventeenth century, his relics were believed to be preserved in the Franciscan convent of Zaragoza. Lo´pez, La Provincia, 32. 53. Vinee domini custodes (10 June 1225), in Mansilla, La documentacio´n pontificia de Honorius III, 416–17, 噛562. 54. Mark 12:9, Matt. 21:40. 55. Fonnesberg-Schmidt, Popes and the Baltic Crusades, 162. 56. The correspondence is not word for word. The bull reads, “Cum messis multa sit, operarii vero pauci,” while both gospels say, “messis quidem multa operarii autem pauci.” Cum messis multa (24 March 1233), in Bullarium Franciscanum, 1:100, 噛97. 57. Thomas cited a me´lange of gospel quotations, including Matt. 10:9–10, Luke 9:2, and Mark 6:12. Thomas of Celano, “Vita prima,” 19; “Life,” 201. 58. Kienzle claims that “the scriptural image of the vineyard serves as a unifying motif for the various phases of Cistercian activity in Occitania and for the many texts that relate to it.” Beverly Mayne Kienzle, Cistercians, Heresy, and the Crusade in Occitania, 1145–1229: Preaching in the Lord’s Vineyard (Woodbridge, UK: York Medieval Press, 2001), 8–9; Brenda Bolton, “Philip Augustus and John: Two Sons in Innocent III’s Vineyard?,” in The Church and Sovereignty c. 590–1918: Essays in Honour of Michael Wilks, ed. Diana Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 113–34, esp. 113; for an example, see Othmar Hageneder et al. (eds.), Die Register Innocenz ¨ sterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1997), 7:225–27, 噛139. III (Vienna: Verlag der O 59. “Ad hoc periculum de terra Ecclesiae submovendum, magnus ille Pater familias mane saeculi usque ad nostrum vespere non cessat mittere operarios in vineam suam, qui spinas et vepres in eis succrescentes, mox ut oriri coeperint, radicitus amputare festinent. Hoc est enim, quod Jeremiae dicitur, in persona omnium cultorum vineae Domini: Ecce constitui te hodie super gentes et regna, ut evellas, et destruas, et disperdas, et aedifices, et plantes (Jer. I).” Patrologia Latina 212: 712C. 60. Kienzle, Cistercians, 78. 61. For the text of the letter, see PL 216, col. 823. It is also reprinted with some discussion in Alberto Melloni, “Vineam Domini—10 April 1213: New Efforts and Traditional Topoi— Summoning Lateran IV,” in Pope Innocent III and His World, ed. Brenda Bolton and John C. Moore (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1999), 63–71. 62. Nicholas R. Havely, “The Blood of the Apostles: Dante, the Franciscans and Pope John XXII,” Italian Studies 52 (2013): 38–50. 63. Cum messis multa (8 April 1233), in Bullarium Franciscanum, 1:100–101, 噛97. 64. Cum hora undecima (11 June 1239), in Bullarium Franciscanum, 1:269–70, 噛296. 65. James D. Ryan, “Conversion or the Crown of Martyrdom: Conflicting Goals for Fourteenth-Century Missionaries in Central Asia?,” in Medieval Cultures in Contact, ed. Richard Gyug (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 23.

Notes to Pages 87–89

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66. Brett Whalen, Dominion of God: Christendom and Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 164. 67. Matt. 28:16–20. 68. The bull was issued to Dominicans in this iteration. Augustin Theiner (ed.), Vetera monumenta historica Hungariam sacram illustrantia (Rome: Typis Vaticana, 1859), 1:223–24. Felicitas Schmeider noted that the Mongols disappear from the bulls in 1307, as bishoprics are established in their territories. “Cum hora undecima: The Incorporation of Asia into the orbis Christianus,” in Christianizing Peoples and Converting Individuals, ed. Guyda Armstrong and Ian N. Wood (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), 264. 69. Kedar, Crusade and Mission. 70. Francis of Assisi, “Regola non bollata,” 266; translated in “Earlier Rule,” 74. 71. Bullarium Franciscanum, 1:435, 437–39, 441–42—噛噛165, 169, 170, 173; Lupprian, Die Beziehungen der Pa¨pste, 176–78. Another reference to Lope in a letter of 1246 is in Lupprian, Die Beziehungen der Pa¨pste, 204–5. See Maillard, Les papes, 105nn333, 336, for other unpublished bulls. Ludwig Vones suggests that he transferred his seat to Ceuta at some point, but gives no citation. “Mission et frontie`re dans l’espace Me´diterrane´en: Tentatives d’une socie´te´ guerrie`re de la foi,” in Christianizing Peoples and Converting Individuals, ed. Guyda Armstrong and Ian N. Wood (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), 210. It is presumably Lope whom the Almohad caliph Murtad.a¯ referred to in his letter to Innnocent IV in 1250 as bringing the letter; he did not remain in Morocco. E. Tisserant and G. Wiet, “Une lettre de l’Almohade Murtad.a¯ au Pape Innocent IV,” Hespe´ris 6 ([1926]): 27–53. Lope may also have had some lower clergy associated with him in Marrakesh, such as the archdeacon Garcia Pe´rez, but there is no evidence for his presence in Marrakesh itself. Peter Linehan, The Spanish Church and the Papacy in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 123. See also Maillard for discussion of Murtad.a¯’s letter: Les papes, 108–9. Many scholars have added Fr. Blanco to the list of bishops of Marrakesh in the thirteenth century; this is based on a claim by the eighteenth-century collector of papal bulls related to the Franciscans, Giovanni Giacinto Sbaraglia, in a footnote to a bull issued by Innocent IV to his nuncio, Fr. Blanco. Sbaraglia noted that he was made bishop in 1257, and appeared in a letter by Nicholas IV in 1290, which I have not been able to locate. Bullarium Franciscanum, 1:419, 噛140. See Maillard, Les papes, 132. In 1311 a Franciscan bishop named Francisco was again resident in Fez (though he may have been bishop of Marrakesh). See Mariano Gual de Torrella, “Milicias christianas en Berberia,” Boletin de la Sociedad Arqueologica Luliana 34 (1973): 54–63. The Dominican Alfonso Buenhombre was bishop of Marrakesh in 1343, though it is not clear whether he was resident in Morocco. In 1375 a bishop was sent to the Marinids: Maillard, Les papes, 111. See John V. Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 253–54. There were still Dominicans in the Maghreb (Tunis) in 1260 (Maillard, Les papes, 125), and Ramon Marti writing there in 1257, though no bishop was ever established there in the medieval period. 72. La documentacio´n pontificia de Inocencio IV, ed. Augusto Quintana Prieto (Rome: Instituto Espan˜ol de historia eclesiastica, 1987), 244–46, 噛332; Michael Lower, “The Papacy and Christian Mercenaries of Thirteenth-Century North Africa,” Speculum 89 (2014): 621. 73. Lower, “Papacy,” 623. 74. Ex parte tua (9 March 1247), in Bullarium Franciscanum, 1:449, 噛184. Bull 噛182 seems to be referring to the same case. 75. The enthusiasm that Innocent had for al-Sa’ı¯d can be seen in the bill Gaudemus in domino, in which the pope praised the caliph for following in the footsteps of his predecessors

222

Notes to Pages 89–91

and Catholic rulers (!). M. L. de Las Matrie, Traite´s de paix et de commerce et documents divers concernant les relations des Chre´tiens avec les Arabes de l’Afrique septentrionale au moyen aˆge (Paris: Henri Plon, 1866; reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, [1964]), 1:14–15, 噛15; Maillard, Les papes, 98–99. 76. Constitutus in praesentia (17 March 1250), in Bullarium Franciscanum, 1:573, 噛366. For reconstructions of his itinerary, see Maillard, Les papes, 107n347. This is the last letter addressed to an Almohad caliph by a pope (Maillard, Les papes, 110). 77. The bull carissimus in Christo (4 October 1252) was issued in support of a Castilian war directed against “the Saracens of Africa.” Bullarium Franciscanum, 1:628–29, 噛噛185, 186. This did not necessarily mean the Almohads exclusively, but certainly encompassed them. 78. Ad regimen universalis (13 May 1255), in Bullarium Franciscanum, Romanorum Pontificum Constitutiones, Epistolas, ac Diplomata continens, ed. Joannes Hyacinthus Sbaralea (Rome: Typis Sacrae Congregationis de Propaganda Fide, 1761, 2:46–47, 噛57. There are fourteen letters associated with Lope and the crusade; see Maillard, Les papes, 102n316. 79. Cum per strenuitatem (27 November 1255), in Bullarium Franciscanum, 2:89, 噛124. (See also the bull of 18 March 1255; Maillard, Les papes, 114.) For more on Lope and the crusade, see Olga Cecilia Me´ndez Gonza´lez, “Lope Ferna´ndez, Bishop of Morocco: His Diplomatic Role in the Planning of an Anglo-Castilian Crusade into Northern Africa,” in ThirteenthCentury England XIV: Proceedings of the Aberystwyth and Lampeter Conference, 2011, ed. Janet Burton Phillipp Schofield and Bjo¨rn Weiler (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2013), 101–13; and Joseph F. O’Callaghan, The Gibraltar Crusade: Castile and the Battle for the Strait (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 16. Maillard points out that the letters of Alexander IV (1254–61) on Morocco no longer mention conversion, and focus largely on crusade. Maillard, Les papes, 114. 80. Historians have suggested that Lawrence of Portugal, who had been the third papal legate sent to the Mongols in 1245 alongside Giovanni da Pian del Carpine and Simon de St. Quentin, became the bishop of Ceuta, but the evidence is fragmentary, and again there is no evidence that he was ever in residence. Girolamo Golubovich (ed.), Bio-Biblioteca Bibliografica della Terra Santa e dell’Oriente francescano (Quaracchi: Collegio di S. Bonaventura, 1906), 2:319–24; Castellanos, Apostolado, 167. 81. Cunctis ecclesiis prelatorum (10 January 1312), Regestum Clementis papae V: Ex Vaticanis archetypis sanctissimi domini nostri Leonis XIII pontificis maximi iussu et munificentia (Rome: Ex Typographia Vaticana, 1887), Annus VII, pp. 12–13, no. 7659. 82. The closest we have are the questions from a group of Franciscans and Dominicans in Tunis sent to the pope in 1234. They generally deal with the appropriate response to a number of issues they were confronting, such as Christians trading with Muslims, slavery, commuting vows, heresy, and religiously mixed families. The friars did not ask any questions about martyrdom and generally seemed to face few threats. Raymundiana seu documenta quae pertinent ad S. Raymundi de Pennaforti: Vitam et Scripta, ed. Franciscus Balme, Ceslaus Paban, and Joachim Collomb, Monumenta Ordinis Fratrum Praedicatorum Historica, 4 (2) (Rome: In Domo Generalita; Stuttgart: Jos. Roth, 1901), 29–38. An internet edition and translation have also recently been produced by John Tolan, which uses a newly discovered manuscript absent in earlier editions, “Ramon de Penyafort’s Responses to Questions Concerning Relations Between Chrsitians and Saracens: Critical Edition and Translation, 2012, hal-00761257,” accessed online, http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/76/12/57/PDF/Penyafort.pdf. For more on the letter in terms of trade, see John V. Tolan, “Taking Gratian to Africa: Raymond de Penyafort’s Legal Advice to the Dominicans and Franciscans in Tunis (1234),” in A Faithful

Notes to Pages 91–96

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Sea: The Religious Cultures of the Mediterranean, 1200–1700, ed. Adnan A. Husain and K. E. Fleming (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007), 47–63. 83. Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, Storia dei Mongoli, ed. Paolo Daffina` et al. (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’alto Medioevo, 1989), 228. 84. Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, Storia dei Mongoli, 227–28; translated in Christopher Dawson (ed.), The Mongol Mission, tr. A Nun of Stanbrook Abbey (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1955), 3. 85. Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, Storia dei Mongoli, 237–38; translated in Dawson, Mongol Mission, 10. 86. Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, Storia dei Mongoli, 310; translated in Dawson, Mongol Mission, 56. 87. Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, Storia dei Mongoli, 308; translated in Dawson, Mongol Mission, 54. 88. Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, Storia dei Mongoli, 236; translated in Dawson, Mongol Mission, 9. 89. Marianus de Florentia [Mariano da Firenze], Compendium chronicorum Ordinis FF Minorum (Quaracchi: Typis Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1911), 49–50, original pagination 465– 66. See also Golubovich (ed.), Biblioteca Bio-Bibliografica, 1:429; and Jean Richard, Papaute´ et les missions d’Orient au Moyen Aˆge (Rome: E´cole franc¸aise de Rome, 1977), 107. 90. William of Rubruck sought to ally himself with Muslims as monotheists in a religious debate at the Mongol court with tuins, who were probably Buddhist monks. William of Rubruck [Guglielmo di Rubruk], Viaggio in Mongolia (Itinerarium), ed. Paolo Chiesa ([Rome]: Fondazione Lorenzo Valla, 2011), 246.

chapter 4 1. One wonders if this difference may be because of the difference in sources. If a passio of the spiritual martyrs existed, it might well have ascribed to them a saintly desire for martyrdom. Sancia of Naples expressed her willingness to die for the rule as the spirituals did in a letter to the Franciscans, but this is not necessarily the desire to be martyred. Her declaration was originally made in 1329, but she included it in a letter written to a general meeting of the Franciscans in 1334: Chronica XXIV generalium ordinis minorum, 511; Ronald G. Musto, “Queen Sancia of Naples (1286–1345) and the Spiritual Franciscans,” in Women of the Medieval World: Essays in Honor of John H. Mundy, ed. Julius Kirshner and Suzanne F. Wemple (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 203. 2. For a discussion of the Marseilles martyrs and the beguines who venerated and followed them, see Louisa A. Burnham, So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke: The Beguin Heretics of Languedoc (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). 3. Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature, tr. Patrick Creagh (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1986), 67. 4. Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100–1450 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 54. 5. Of course, the five martyrs of Morocco, contemporaries of Francis himself, were well known, but no passio survives dating from before the appearance of the accounts of the martyrs of Tana in the 1320s. See below for a discussion of this first passio.

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Notes to Pages 97–100

6. See, in comparison, Guy Geltner’s work on medieval antifraternalism, and friars’ claims of persecution by their fellow Christians. The Making of Medieval Antifraternalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 7. Michael Goodich enumerates a long list of such thirteenth- and fourteenth-century martyrs in the appendix of his book Vita Perfecta. See, for example, Margaret of Louvain, a maid raped and murdered, (2 September) Acta Sanctorum, Sept. 1: 582–92, Caesarius Heisterbacensis [Caesar of Heisterbach], “Margareta habitans Lovanii (BHL 5320),” accessed online, http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver⳱Z39.88-2004&res_dat⳱xri:acta-us& rft_dat⳱xri:acta:ft:all:Z400021721; “Dignissimae cujusdam virginis,” accessed online at http:// gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver⳱Z39.88-2004&res_dat⳱xri:acta-us&rft_dat⳱xri: acta:ft:all:Z400021723; Jean-Claude Schmitt, The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children Since the Thirteenth Century, tr. Martin Thom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Editions de la maison des sciences de l’homme, 1983). 8. Daniel E. Randolph, “The Desire for Martyrdom: A Leitmotiv of St. Bonventure,” Franciscan Studies 32 (1972): 74–87. 9. David Burr, Spiritual Franciscans: From Protest to Persecution in the Century After Saint Francis (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 11–34. John Fleming, in contrast, suggests that we can see distinct spiritual and conventual groups in 1260 or even earlier. An Introduction to the Franciscan Literature of the Middle Ages (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1977), 43. 10. “Regula Bullata,” in Menesto` and Brufani, Fontes Franciscani, 171; “The Later Rule,” in Armstrong, Hellmann, and Short, Saint, 100. For an exploration of what this might mean, see Jacques Dalarun, “D’un testament a` l’autre,” in Institution und Charisma: Festschrift fu¨r Gert Melville zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Franz J. Felten, Annette Kehnel, and Stefan Weinfurter (Cologne: Bo¨hlau Verlag, 2009), 503–11; reprinted in Jacques Dalarun, Franc¸ois d’Assisi en questions (Paris: CNRS E´ditions, 2016), 17–28. 11. For the vow the friars took, see Michael Bihl, “Statuta generalia ordinis edita in capitulis generalibus celebratis Narbonae an. 1260, Assisii an. 1279 atque Parisiis an. 1292,” Archivium Franciscanum Historicum 34 (1941): 40. 12. David Burr, “The Correctorium Controversy and the Origins of the Usus Pauper Controversy,” Speculum 60 (1985): 331–42. 13. Exiit qui seminat (14 August 1279), in Jules Gay (ed.), Registres de Nicholas III (1277– 1280): Receueil des bulles de ce pape (Paris: Albert Fontemoing, 1898), 1:234, 噛564. 14. Exiit qui seminat (14 August 1279), in Gay, Registres de Nicholas III, 1:234, 噛564; translation from Peter Garnsey, Thinking About Property: From Antiquity to the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 99. 15. Sean Kinsella, “The Poverty of Christ in the Medieval Debates Between the Papacy and the Franciscans,” Laurentianum 36 (1995): 477–509, 494. 16. Burr, Spiritual Franciscans, 51. 17. For more, see the many books and articles by David Burr, including “The Persecution of Peter Olivi,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 66 (1976): 3–98; and Olivi and Franciscan Poverty: The Origins of the Usus Poverty Debate (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989). For the continued importance of Peter Olivi even after his teachings were condemned, see David Burr, “Raymond De´jean, Franciscan Renegade,” Franciscan Studies 57 (1999): 57–78. 18. For this debate, see Gerald Fussenegger (ed.), “Relatio commissionis in concilio Viennensi institutae ad decretalem ‘Exivi de paradiso’ praeparandam,” Archivium Franciscanum Historicum 50 (1957): 145–77.

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19. Patrick Nold’s work reminds us that “John’s reform of the Franciscan order was fitful, piecemeal and unplanned.” “Pope John XXII, the Franciscan Order and Its Rule,” in Robson, Cambridge Companion to Francis of Assisi, 258–72, 258. 20. For a succinct summary with appropriate caution, see Nold, “Pope John XXII, the Franciscan Order and Its Rule.” 21. William Chester Jordan, Unceasing Strife, Unending Fear: Jacques de The´rines and the Freedom of the Church in the Age of the Last Capetians (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 89. 22. Their words were recorded in the letters of the Franciscan inquisitor Michel le Moine, which were in turn preserved in the collection of E´tienne Baluze (ed.), Miscellanea novo ordine digesta et non paucis ineditis monumentis opportunisque animadversionibus aucta (Lucca: Vincentium Junctimium, 1761), 2:272; translation from Burr, Spiritual Franciscans, 214. 23. For what follows, there is an extensive bibliography. The broad narrative of events from 1321 onward generally is dependent on the Chronica of Nicolaus Minorita, who was a supporter of Michael of Cesena. Nicolaus Minorita, Chronica, ed. David Flood and Gedeon Ga´l (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 1996). See also Patrick Nold’s critique of using it in a purely documentary way: Pope John XXII and His Franciscan Cardinal (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 1–24. 24. Nold, Pope John XXII and His Franciscan Cardinal, 2. 25. For the Littera capituli generis and the subsequent Declaratio magistrorum, see Nicolaus Minorita, Chronica, 67–82. 26. This account has been published as an appendix to the trial of the Franciscan Michele da Calci for heresy in Florence in 1388. Francesco Flora, Storia di Fra Michele Minorita (Florence: Felice le Monnier, 1942), 96–97; translation in Nold, Pope John XXII and His Franciscan Cardinal, 13. 27. Flora, Storia di Fra Michele Minorita, 99; translation adapted from Nold, Pope John XXII and His Franciscan Cardinal, 14. For recent scholarship on Jerome, see Thomas Tanase, “Fre`re Je´roˆme de Catalogne, premier e´veˆque de Caffa, et l’Orient franciscain,” in Espaces et re´seaux en Me´diterrane´e, VIe-XVIe sie`cle, ed. Damien Coulon, Christophe Picard, and Dominique Vale´rian (Paris: E´ditions Bouche`ne, 2007), 2:127–66. 28. The account did not include the list, unfortunately. Flora, Storia di Fra Michele Minorita, 99; translation in Nold, Pope John XXII and His Franciscan Cardinal, 14. 29. The first report of the Tana martyrs came from Jordan Catala de Se´ve´rac in a letter dated 12 October 1321. It is very unlikely that it could have reached Avignon before the issue of Quia nonnunquam on 25 March 1322. For a detailed discussion of the chronology of the letters of Jordan Catala de Se´ve´rac and Bartholomew the custos and their arrival in Europe, see A. C. Moule, “Cathay and the Way Thither: Some Notes on ‘Letters and Reports of Missionary Friars,’ ” New China Review 3 (1921): 221–22. 30. The most widespread sources of information came from antiquity: the fourth-century Roman grammaticus Caius Julius Solinus’s geographic compilation, the Polyhistor, which was widely read throughout the Middle Ages. See Paul Dover, “Reading ‘Pliny’s Ape’ in the Renaissance: The Polyhistor of Caius Julius Solinus in the First Century of Print,” in Encyclopaedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. Jason Ko¨nig and Greg Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 414–44. 31. Philip Almond, “The Buddha of Christendom: A Review of the Legend of Barlaam and Josaphat,” Religious Studies 23 (1987): 391–406.

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32. Edgar C. Polome´, “The Vision of India in Medieval Encyclopedias,” in Interpreting Texts from the Middle Ages: The Ring of Words in Medieval Literature, ed. Ulrich Goebel and David Lee (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1994), 257–80. 33. Burns, “Christian-Islamic Confrontation in the West,” 1386–1424. 34. “India” in medieval geographic terms was applied to an enormous swath of Asia and sometimes even Africa. Marco Polo included Japan and Zanzibar as part of his description of “Indie” while Ethiopia was named as “middle India.” Marco Polo, The Description of the World, ed. A. C. Moule and Paul Pelliot (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1938), 2:xcix–xc. Of course, there is no one authoritative text for Polo’s account; multiple versions circulated. This edition is based on a manuscript in the library of the Cathedral of Toledo. The connection between India and Ethiopia derives in part from the association of southern locations with the heat of the sun and eastern locations with the origin of the sun. See Akbari, Idols in the East, 109. See also James D. Ryan, “European Travellers Before Columbus: The Fourteenth Century’s Discovery of India,” Catholic Historical Review 79 (1993): 648–70; and Marianne O’Doherty, The Indies and the Medieval West (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 33–39. 35. James D. Ryan, “Conversion vs. Baptism: European Missionaries in Asia in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” in Varieties of Religious Conversion in the Middle Ages, ed. James Muldoon (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), 146–67; John Larner, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 116–32. See, for example, the list of way stations from Ayas to Tabriz in the early fourteenth-century guide for merchants in Francesco Balducci Pegolotti, Pratica della Mercatura, ed. A. Evans (Cambridge: Medieval Academy of America, 1936), 28–29. 36. For a broader discussion of travel narratives to the “East,” see Kim M. Phillips, Before Orientalism: Asian Peoples and Cultures in European Travel Writing, 1245–1510 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). 37. See also Richard, Papaute´, 114; and Schmieder, “Cum hora undecima,” 259–65. 38. Cum hora undecima (11 June 1239), in Bullarium Franciscanum, 1:269, 噛296. 39. Cum hora undecima (21 March 1245), in Bullarium Franciscanum, 1:360, 噛80. 40. He did discuss at length the shrine of the apostle Saint Thomas “in a little town” in greater India, which suggests he may have visited it. Marco Polo, Description, 2:lxxix. 41. Marco Polo, Description, 2:lxxi; translation in Description, 1:402–3. 42. S. D. Goitein and Mordechai Akiva Friedman, India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza (‘India Book’) (Leiden: Brill; Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute, 2008). 43. Paris, Bibliotheque nationale, ms. Lat. 5006, fols. 170v–171v; Girolamo Golubovich, Biblioteca Bio-Bibliografica della Terra Santa (Quaracchi: Collegio di S. Bonaventura, 1923), 4:303. 44. Christine Gadrat, Une image de l’Orient au XIVe sie`cle: Les “Mirabilia Descripta” de Jordan Catala de Se´ve´rac (Paris: E´cole des chartes, 2005), 310: “meis peccatis.” 45. For a full discussion of Jordan and an edition of the letter, see Christine Gadrat, Une image de l’Orient. See also Gadrat, “Des nouvelles d’Orient: Les lettres des missionaires et leur diffusion en Occident (XIIIe–XIVe sie`cles),” in Passages: De´placements des hommes, circulation des textes et identite´s dans l’Occident me´die´val, ed. Joe¨lle Ducos and Patrick Henriet (Toulouse: Framespa, 2013), 159–72, for the chain of transmission of Jordan’s letter. 46. The address at the top of the letter with Bartholomew’s name was omitted in the version of the letter preserved in BL Nero A IX, but appears in the Paris (BN Lat. 5006, fol. 181v) and Assisi (Bibl. Comunale 341) manuscripts. Bartholomew also provided information to

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the friars who wrote in Crimea in 1323. See Gadrat, “Des nouvelles d’Orient,” for a chart showing the transmission of Bartholomew’s texts. 47. In BN Lat 5006, fol. 181v, he says he got it “ab illo homine qui ivit cum praedictibus fratribus,” a description which may be of Jordan or of whoever carried the letter from Jordan to Tabriz. This sentence is omitted from the version in BL Nero A IX. But there is a problem with the date of Bartholomew’s letter; it would mean that he wrote his letter just weeks after the death of the martyrs, on 7 April 1321, and six months before Jordan’s letter was written, never mind that it arrived in Tabriz. Thus, A. C. Moule has argued that Bartholomew’s letter should be dated one year later, to Ascension Day (May 14), 1322. “Cathay and the Way Thither,” 216–28, esp. 222. 48. Gadrat, Une image de l’Orient, 315. 49. Jordan also wrote an account of his travels in the East, referred to by the somewhat inaccurate name of the Mirabilia descripta, which has survived to the present day in only one manuscript (BL Additional 19513, fols. 3–12). His account, though sharing much in common with other stories of trips to the East such as the famous account by Marco Polo, was not widely read, nor did it contain an account of the martyrs, which Jordan evidently understood as a separate subject from the “marvels” of the East. The Chronica XXIV preserved a different letter which some scholars have taken to be a second letter composed by Jordan, but, as Christine Gadrat has argued, the parts that did not replicate the first letter strike a quite different tone than others of Jordan’s writings. Yet we cannot dismiss the possibility that this letter preserved some part of a second letter composed by Jordan. Gadrat, Une image de L’Orient, 115–18. 50. The martyrdom of the four friars was briefly mentioned with few details in another letter by the missionary friar Andrea di Perugia in 1326; Andrea was not certain that his confre`res had heard the news. “Epistola,” in Wyngaert, Sinica Franciscana, 1:376. In addition, many manuscripts of the Chronica XXIV generalium ordinis minorum contained appendices that preserved a variety of different material, much of it related to the martyrs. This is presented as a collection of fragments from different sources, gathered together by Peter de Turris, vicar of the East (Chronica XXIV, 597). See the following chapter for more on the Chronica XXIV. 51. For more on the manuscript, see A Catalogue of the Manuscripts Preserved in the Library of the University of Cambridge (Cambridge: University Press, 1858), 3:407–11. I would like to thank Cecilia Gaposchkin for viewing the manuscript on my behalf, and for sharing her codicological experiences in thinking about it. 52. The manuscript is dated May 29, 1321, but I follow the argument made by A. C. Moule that it must be a year later. Please see note 47 for further discussion. 53. Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, ms. D. Ii. III. 7., fol. 146v; Michael Bihl and A. C. Moule, “De duabus epistolis fratrum minorum Tartariae Aquilonaris an. 1323,” Archivium Fratrum Historicum 16 (1923): 105. A. C. Moule provided an English translation that I have consulted here and below: “Fourteenth-Century Missionary Letters,” The East and the West 19 (1921): 357–66. 54. CUL, ms. D. Ii. III. 7., fol. 146v; Bihl and Moule, “De duabus epistolis,” 104. 55. “Quorum martirium et miracula plurima in oriente tum catholici quam infideles multi puplice contestantur.” CUL, ms. D. Ii. III. 7., fol. 146v; Bihl and Moule, “De duabus epistolis,” 106. 56. “Plures autem quam centum principes, barrones et milienarii ac eorum familia et liberorum innumerum wulgum sunt infra paucos annos per fratres ad fidem mostram renati.” CUL, ms. D. Ii. III. 7., fol. 146v; Bihl and Moule, “De duabus epistolis,” 106.

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Notes to Pages 110–113

57. “Et que omnes viros spirituales magis animare debent quam terrere duximus inscribenda, quomodo videlicet quot tam nostrorum quam aliorum vitam finierint tormentis horridis a saracenis, a paganis.” CUL, ms. D. Ii. III. 7., fol. 147r; Bihl and Moule, “De duabus epistolis,” 107. 58. “Set hec exprimimus ut elephantum more mororum sanguine in pannis viso animemini ad agressum et in adiutorium nostrum citium accessum, vos filii beati Francissi, eiusdem exemplo qui se coram soldano pro fide presentauit ac igni se exposuit, licet dictus tirannus, nescimus quo spiritu, illud non permisit.” CUL, ms. D. Ii. III. 7., fol. 147r; Bihl and Moule, “De duabus epistolis,” 108. 59. “Animet eciam et cogitet pocius quam retrahat victus nostri penuria, vestitus vilitas, tenuitas, hispiditas, duricia et inopia.” CUL, ms. D. Ii. III. 7., fol. 147r; Bihl and Moule, “De duabus epistolis,” 108. 60. Bullarium Franciscanum, Romanorum Pontificum Constitutiones, Epistolas, ac Diplomata continens, ed. Konrad Eubel (Rome: Typis Sacrae Congregationis de Propaganda Fide, 1898), 5:82, 噛195. 61. Armando Carlini (ed.), “Constitutiones generales ordinis fratrum minorum anno 1316 Assisii conditae,” Archivium Franciscanum Historicum 4 (1911): 278–79. 62. The best edition of Odorico’s Relatio was published in Wyngaert, Sinica Franciscana. There are many different versions of the Relatio, in Latin and in other languages. One of the most common divisions is between the texts produced by Guglielmo da Solanga, written in 1330 shortly before Odorico’s death, and the one by Henry of Glatz, which was assembled in 1340. Wyngaert’s edition follows the version of Guglielmo da Solanga, which was the most widespread version. See Paolo Chiesa, “Per un riordino della tradizione manoscritta della Relatio di Odorico da Pordenone,” Filiologia mediolatina: Rivista della Fondazione Ezio Franceschini 6–7 (1999): 311–50, esp. 324. 63. Paschalis de Victoria [Pascal de Vittoria], “Epistola,” in Sinica Franciscana, ed. Anastasius van den Wyngaert (Quaracchi: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1929), 1:503. 64. Odorico di Pordenone, “Relatio,” in Wyngaert, Sinica Franciscana, 1:413; translation in Yule, Travels, 63–64. 65. Odorico di Pordenone, “Relatio,” 422; translation in Yule, Travels, 77. 66. Odorico di Pordenone, “Relatio,” 433; translation in Yule, Travels, 90. 67. Angelo Tartuferi and Francesco D’Arelli (eds.), L’Arte di Francesco: Capolavori d’arte italiana e terre d’Asia dal XIII al XV secolo (Florence: Giunti, 2015), 364. 68. The city appeared as a Christian center in Nestorian sources as early as the seventh century; at the end of his life, Jordan Catala was made a bishop of the community there. 69. Odorico di Pordenone, “Relatio,” 1:424. 70. As much as possible, I retain the original spelling of the text for Islamic terms, places, and peoples, to convey that I am discussing medieval Christian depictions of them, rather than their objective reality—thus cadi rather than qa¯d.¯ı, Machomet instead of Muhammad, and so on. For more on the origin of the court of the qa¯d.¯ı and their role in towns with religiously mixed populations, see Mathieu Tillier, L’Invention du Cadi: La justice des Musulmans, des Juifs et des Chre´tiens aux premiers sie`cles de l’Islam (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2017). 71. “Alexandrian” at this time became a term referring to those engaged in illicit trade with the Muslim world, associated with the Egyptian port of Alexandria. Jose´ Trenchs Odena, “De Alexandrinis: El comercio prohibido con los Musulmanes y el Papado de Avin˜o´n durante la primera mitad del siglo XIV,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 10 (1980): 237–320. I thank Hussein Fancy for this reference.

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72. Bartholomew’s letter had the cadi ask whether they believed that “Machomet was a prophet of God.” BL Nero A IX, fol. 99v; transcription available in Gadrat, Une image de l’Orient, 314. 73. Odorico di Pordenone, “Relatio,” 426; translation in Yule, Travels, 81. Bartholomew did not record this hesitation to answer the question. 74. Odorico di Pordenone, “Relatio,” 429; translation in Yule, Travels, 84. Under Muslim law, it was not blasphemy, for there was nothing divine about Muhammad. Rather, it was simply a crime to insult the prophet. Christians often imagined Muslims to be analogues of Christians, with Muhammad as an Islamic equivalent to Christ. 75. Their survival is not just a miracle, but a demonstration of Odorico’s way of conceiving the geography of the world. India is in the east, the realm of the sun, and the heat is a consequence of this. For more such conceptions, see Akbari, Idols in the East, 68–72. Bartholomew did not include this miracle either. 76. Bartholomew recorded the same explanation of Jacopo’s protection from the fire. 77. Odorico di Pordenone, “Relatio,” 430; translation in Yule, Travels, 86. 78. Odorico di Pordenone, “Relatio,” 430; translation in Yule, Travels, 86. 79. Odorico di Pordenone, “Relatio,” 431; translation in Yule, Travels, 88. 80. Odorico di Pordenone, “Relatio,” 434. Not all the manuscripts describe the priests as “Saracen.” 81. Odorico di Pordenone, “Relatio,” 432–33; translation in Yule, Travels, 89. 82. CUL, ms. D. Ii. III. 7., fol. 146r; Bihl and Moule, “De duabus epistolis,” 105. 83. Odorico di Pordenone, “Relatio,” 423; translation in Yule, Travels, 77. 84. Odorico di Pordenone, “Relatio,” 430. The only indication to the contrary is the claim of the people that “they do not know which law they should follow.” Islam and Christianity were generally both considered as a “lex,” but paganism was not, suggesting that the people were being drawn from one lex to another—or that paganism was being abandoned, but they did not know whether to convert to Islam or Christianity. 85. Translation also happens in the other direction as well—the four friars become “rabbans”—“that is to say men of a religious Order.” Odorico di Pordenone, “Relatio,” 424. Bartholomew offered a similar translation: the madianus was a campus justicie. The melic did not appear in his letter. Gadrat, Une Image de l’Orient, 314. 86. Odorico di Pordenone, “Relatio,” 442; translation in Yule, Travels, 101. 87. Odorico di Pordenone, “Relatio,” 444; translation in Yule, Travels, 103. 88. Odorico di Pordenone, “Relatio,” 444; translation in Yule, Travels, 104. 89. O. M. Starza, The Jagannatha Temple at Puri: Its Architecture, Art and Cult (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993), 17. As one nineteenth-century commentator lamented that, as “hard as it to lose one’s pet horror, this one must be given up. . . . The Juggernaut is the most humane of all Oriental dieties.” “The Juggernaut Myth Exploded,” Buchanan’s Journal of Man 2 (October 1888): 274. 90. Odorico di Pordenone, “Relatio,” 431; translation in Yule, Travels, 87. The cadi used as an additional motivation the notion that “Machomet ordered in the Alchoran that if anyone shall kill a Christian, it will be the same merit as going to Meccha.” One wonders if this was also intended to be a correspondence to the popular understanding of crusading. 91. “Id est ecclesias,” “sacerdotes” (some manuscripts add “sarracenos”), Odorico di Pordenone, “Relatio,” 435. 92. Tolan, Saint Francis and the Sultan, 162–70.

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93. Odorico di Pordenone, “Relatio,” 420; translation in Yule, Travels, 73. The geographic location of Huz is unclear. It may be a reference to the region around Mosul, or perhaps the region of Khuzistan in southwest Iran. For a brief discussion, see Henry Yule, Cathay and the Way Thither (London: Hakluyt Society, 1866), 1:53n2. 94. Odorico di Pordenone, “Relatio,” 418; translation in Yule, Travels, 69. 95. Odorico di Pordenone, “Relatio,” 437; translation in Yule, Travels, 94. Curiously, prayers by Odorico and his comrade, first to God and then to the Virgin Mary, did not work either. They finally cast one of the martyrs’ bones into the sea (as the captain threatened to do with the whole lot), which brought the desired wind—but at the cost of a precious relic. 96. Odorico di Pordenone, “Relatio,” 439. 97. Marianne O’Doherty, “The Viaggio in Inghilterra of a Viaggio in Oriente: Odorico da Pordenone’s Itinerarium from Italy to England,” Italian Studies 64 (2009): 198–220. 98. See, for example, Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Urbinatus Latinus ms. 1013, fols. 5r–28v. 99. Giordano Brunettin argues that Odorico was sympathetic to spiritual ideals, and suggests that he can be linked to refuges in Friuli for those fleeing persecution, and that the reason Odorico spent so much of his religious life overseas was in part because he feared arrest and persecution for his spiritual allegiances, just as Angelo Clareno became a missionary in Armenia following his incarceration. Giordano Brunettin, “Odorico da Pordenone e il Francescanesimo in Friuli: Una modesta proposta d’interpretazione,” Memorie storiche forogiuliesi 82 (2003): 11–45. Nevertheless, this argument is largely speculative, and little evidence can be marshaled to tie Odorico convincingly to the spirituals. Andrea Tilatti, “Oderico da Pordenone: Vita e Miracula,” Il Santo 44 (2004): 313–474, 330. Nor, however, can this suggestion be disproved, although Odorico’s visit to Avignon strongly suggests that at least at the end of his life Odorico was not strongly attached to the spiritual party. 100. Tommaso returned to western Europe in 1292 as an envoy of King Het‘um II of Armenian Cilica. He even received a bull from the pope, urging the kings of France and England to receive him, but this was as an ambassador of the Armenian king, not as a spiritual, and the bull was issued by Nicholas IV, who was himself a Franciscan, so it should not be read as a sign of his complete rehabilitation. Pia mater ecclesia (23 January 1292), in Bullarium Franciscanum, Romanorum Pontificum Constitutiones, Epistolas, ac Diplomata continens, ed. Joannes Hyacinthus Sbaralea (Rome: Typis Sacrae Congregationis de Propaganda Fide, 1768), 4:315, 噛592. 101. BN Lat. 5006, fol. 172r. Of course, becoming a missionary in the East was not necessarily an escape from being investigated for heresy as a spiritual Franciscan: the Dominican bishop of Tabriz in 1333 began an inquisition into the two Franciscan convents in town, accusing them of being spirituals, and preaching against Pope John XXII. See Golubovich, Biblioteca Bio-Bibliografica, 3:436–52. 102. Angelo Clareno mentions him as a colleague in both his Chronicle and his letter to Pope John XXII, “Epistola excusatoria ad papam de falso impositis et fratrum calumniis,” in Archiv fu¨r Litteratur- und Kirchen-Geschichte des Mittelalters, ed. P. Heinrich Denifle and Franz Ehrle (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1885), 524; Angelo Clareno, Liber Chronicarum, 530–32. 103. The melic in addressing the emperor did speak of “our” law—but was that the collective of the Muslims in Tana, and did it include the emperor in Delhi? It is not apparent from the text. Odorico may have known that the “Emperor Doldali” was in fact a Turkish ruler, but it is unlikely that many of his readers did. Odorico di Pordenone, “Relatio,” 435. In

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1321 the sultanate of Delhi had just come under the control of Giyath al-Din Tughluq, who was engaged in military campaigns in southern India around this time. On his return to Delhi, he severely punished those who had rebelled against him in his absence. See Catherine B. Asher and Cynthia Talbot, India Before Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 41–42; and Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 161. 104. Fla´vio Gonc¸alves, “A Representac¸a˜o Artı´stica dos “Ma´rtires de Marrocos”: Os mais antigos exemplos portugueses,” Museu: Revista de arte, arqueologia, tradic¸o˜es, ser. 2, 6 (1963): 20–50; Ju¨rgen Werinhard Einhorn, “Unter den Fuß gebracht: Todesleiden und Triumph der franziskanischen Ma¨rtyrer von Marokko 1220,” in Europa und die Welt in der Geschichte: Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Dieter Berg, ed. Raphaela Averkorn et al. (Bochum: Dr. Dieter Winkler, 2004), 456. 105. Other examples include the painting by Taddeo Gaddi of the cabinet panels in the sacristy of Santa Croce in Florence. All of them date to between 1300 and 1340—the same period as the written passiones. This extended into the fifteenth century: Doris Carl, “Franziskaner Ma¨rtyrkult als Kreuzzugspropaganda an der Kanzel von Benedetto da Maiano in Santa Croce in Florenz,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 39 (1995): 69–91; Christophe Chabloz, “Les Cinque Martiri francescani del Marocco a` San Lorenzo Maggiore de Naples: Tentative de de´cryptage d’un choix inconographique inhabituel,” Zeitschrift fu¨r Kunstgeschichte 71 (2008): 321–34. 106. S. Maureen Burke, “The ‘Martyrdom of the Franciscans’ by Ambrogio Lorenzetti,” Zeitschrift fu¨r Kunstgeschichte 65, no. 4 (2002): 460–92. 107. Max Seidel, “Gli affeschi di Ambrogio Lorenzetti nel Chiostro di San Francesco a Siena: Ricostruzione e datazione,” Prospettiva 18 (1979): 10–20. 108. Diana Norman, Painting in Late Medieval and Renaissance Siena, 1260–1555 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 108. 109. Burke, “ ‘Martyrdom of the Franciscans,’ ” 490. 110. Anna Ini, “Gli spirituali in Toscana,” in Eretici e ribelli del XIII e XIV sec.: Saggi sullo spiritualismo Francescano in Toscana, ed. Domenica Maselli (Pistoia: Tellini, 1974), 233–52.

chapter 5 1. The Compendium principally survives in two manuscripts. The first was begun before 1321 and was written under Paolino’s direction. It is now in Venice at the Bibilioteca Marciana: ms. Zanetti Lat. 399⳱1610. The second is now at the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris, and was written after 1329; BN Latin 3949. Isabelle Heullant-Donat, “Entrer dans l’histoire: Paolino da Venezia et les prologues de ses chroniques universelles,” Me´langes de l’E´cole franc¸aise de Rome 105 (1993): 381–442, esp. 396. 2. He composed an earlier work, Notabilium ystoriarum epithoma, which ended in 1313, and thus did not include the martyrs. 3. Alberto Ghinato, Fr. Paolino da Venezia O.F.M., vescovo di Pozzuoli (Ⳮ1344) (Rome: Scuola Tipografica “Don Luigi Guanella,” [1951]), 105–8. 4. Ghinato, Paolino da Venezia, 93. 5. For the portrayal of the conflict in the Historia satyrica, see David Anderson, “Fra Paolino’s ‘De providentia et fortuna,’ ” Das Mittelalter 1 (1996): 61. He also condemned Angelo

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Clareno as a heretic in the Historia satyrica; see Bert Roest, Reading the Book of History: Intellectual Contexts and Educational Functions of Franciscan Historiography, 1226–ca. 1350 (Groningen: Regenboog, 1996), 273. 6. Heullant-Donat, “Entrer dans l’histoire,” 424. 7. “Iste venetus bergolus non intellexit quit esset monarce officium.” Claude Cazale´Be´rard, “Boccaccio’s Working Notebooks,” in Boccaccio: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Victoria Kirkham, Michael Sherberg, and Janet Levarie Smarr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 313; Federico Botano, “The Making of L’Abreujamen de las estorias (Egerton MS. 1500),” Electronic British Library Journal (2013): Article 16, accessed online at http:// www.bl.uk/eblj/2013articles/pdf/ebljarticle162013.pdf. More broadly, see Aldo Maria Costantini, “Studio sullo Zibaldone Magliabechiano III: La Polemica con Fra Paolino da Venezia,” Studi sul Boccaccio 10 (1977–78): 265. 8. He read the manuscript of the Compendium now in the Bibliotheque nationale, and annotations survive in his handwriting. Paris, Bibliotheque nationale, Lat. 4939, fol. 116r. He also transcribed sections of the Compendium into his notebook, referred to as the Zibaldone Magliabechiano. Isabelle Heullant-Donat, “Boccaccio, lecteur de Paolino da Venezia: Lectures discursives et critiques,” in Gli zibaldoni di Boccaccio: Memoria, scrittura, riscrittura; Atti del seminario internazionale di Firenze-Certaldo, 26–28 aprile 1996, ed. Michelangelo Picone and Claude Cazale´ Be´rard (Florence: F. Cesati, 1998), 40. 9. Heullant-Donat, “Boccaccio,” 48. 10. Anderson, “Fra Paolino’s ‘De providentia et fortuna,’ ” 63. 11. For further description, see Roest, Reading the Book of History, 245–80. 12. Isabelle Heullant-Donat explains the title as derived from satyra or satura, meaning “mixture” or “variety”: “L’Encyclope´disme sous le pontificat de Jean XXII, entre savoir et propagande: L’example de Paolino da Venezia,” in La Vie culturelle, intellectuelle et scientifique a` la cour des papes d’Avignon, ed. Jacqueline Hamesse (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 260. Earlier scholars were somewhat puzzled by the title. See Ghinato, Paolino da Venezia, 70n64. See also Roest, Reading the Book of History, 245–80. 13. Compendium: Paris, BN Lat 4939, fol. 116v; Historica satyrica: Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV), ms. Latin 1960, fol. 263v. 14. Bonaventure introduced a trial by fire to his hagiography of Francis. For a discussion of the significance of this, see Tolan, Saint Francis and the Sultan, 126–34. 15. Bonaventure, “Legenda Maior,” 601. In the frequent depiction of this episode in Franciscan art, the fire is visually present, even though it is textually absent. See Tolan, Saint Francis and the Sultan, 135–46. 16. BAV, Lat. 1960, 263v. 17. See Roest for the ways in which Paolino structures his historical narrative to remove conflicts he did not want to acknowledge. Reading the Book of History, 269–74. 18. BAV, Lat. 1960, fol. 106v; translation in Roest, Reading the Book of History, 267. 19. BAV, Lat. 1960, fol. 106v; translation in Roest, Reading the Book of History, 268. 20. For comparison, see the sermons of Bertrand de la Tour, a conventual who led the order after Michael of Cesena fled. John A. Zaleski, “Reconciling Poverty and Obedience in the 1320s: The Sanctoral Sermons of Bertrand de la Tour, O.F.M.” (BA thesis, Dartmouth College, 2009). 21. For more on Elemosina, see most prominently the work of Isabelle Heullant-Donat, “Livres et e´crits de me´moire du premier XIVe sie`cle: Le cas des autographes de fra Elemosina,” in Libro, scrittura, documento della civilta` monastica e conventuale nel basso Medioevo (secoli

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XIII–XV); Atti del convegno di studio, Fermo (17–19 Set.), ed. G. Avarucci, R. M. Borraccini Verducci, and G. Borri (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 1999), 239–63. Franc¸ois Fossier argues that the author is best identified as Fra Elemosina di Maestro Leonardo, who in 1328 was vicar of the Franciscan convent in Gualdo. Franc¸ois Fossier, “Les chroniques de Fra Paolo da Gualdo et de Fra Elemosina: Premie`res tentatives historiographiques en Ombrie,” Me´langes de l’E´cole franc¸aise de Rome. Moyen-aˆge, Temps modernes 89 (1977): 432. 22. He wrote one for the convent in Assisi and one for Gualdo; the manuscript intended for Gualdo ended up in Paris, while the Assisi manuscript remained in that city. According to Girolamo Golobovich, the Assisi manuscript was written in 1335, and ends with the election of Benedict XII. The Paris manuscript was written at the end of 1336. Golubovich is cited by Franc¸ois Fossier, in “Les chroniques de Fra Paolo da Gualdo et de Fra Elemosin,” 426. 23. Paris, Bibliotheque nationale (BN), ms. Lat. 5006, fol. 17v. 24. BN Lat. 5006, fol. 27r. “Qui deus mundum renovavit, per fidem christianam.” 25. For one aspect of this focus, see Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken, “Der ‘Oriens Christianus’ in der Chronik des Johannes Elemosina OFM,” in XVIII. Deutscher Orientalistentag vom 1. bis 5. Oktober 1972 in Lu¨beck. Vortra¨ge, ed. Wolfgang Voigt (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1974), 63–75. 26. BN Lat. 5006, fol. 30v. 27. BN Lat. 5006, fol. 38v. 28. BN Lat. 5006, fol. 71v. 29. BN Lat. 5006, fol. 79v. 30. BN Lat. 5006, fol. 80r. 31. BN Lat. 5006, fol. 19r. 32. BN Lat. 5006, fol. 30r. 33. BN Lat. 5006, fol. 75v. These martyrs were first described by Gregory the Great in the Dialogues. 34. BN Lat. 5006, fol. 118v. Elemosina seems to have conflated John the archbishop and martyr, who traditionally died in the sixth century at the hands of the Goth, with the scribe of his passio, who lived in the tenth century after the town had been destroyed by Muslims. 35. BN Lat. 5006, fol. 80v. 36. BN Lat. 5006, fols. 93r–94v. 37. BN Lat. 5006, fol. 86r. 38. BN Lat. 5006, fol. 164r. 39. BN Lat. 5006, fol. 170v. 40. “Yn Asya, Affrica et Europha, postea de nova testamento, ystorie de ortu et profectu religionis Christiane, et sancte ecclesie, et conversione Romani imperii ad domini ihesum christum, et pontificum romanorum, et imperatorum perducte usque ad annos domini m ccc xxxi” (all rubricated). BN Lat. 5006, fol. 5r. 41. BN Lat. 5006, fol. 187r. 42. BN Lat. 5006, fol. 187r. Elemosina numbered the wars the Romans had waged against the faithful. The first was waged against the nursling church, killing Jesus himself and under Vespasian, annihilating Jerusalem. The early Christians were the victims of the second war, providing the church with its first set of martyrs. The third was the persecution by the Arians in the fourth century (BN Lat 5006, fol. 187r), and the fourth was waged by the Saracens, whom Elemosina noted, had their origin in the Roman Empire; their depredations provided the church with a fresh crop of martyrs (BN Lat 5006, fol. 187v). The last war is yet to come. 43. Flood, BN Lat. 5006, fol. 185r; Benedict XII, fol. 188v.

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44. Somewhat anticlimactically, the final section of his chronicle was “de insula vulcani.” BN Lat. 5006, fol. 189r. 45. BN Lat. 5006, fol. 182r. This text is only a rough approximation of Odorico’s account, but is clearly based on it, most closely on the version recently published by Francesca Maggioni, “La redazione C9 della Relatio di Odorico da Pordenone,” available online at http://ecodicibus .sismelfirenze.it/uploads/5/3/536/odorico_maggioni.pdf. The four martyrs were also mentioned in the letter of Andrea di Perugia, which Elemosina also copied. BN Lat. 5006, fols. 185r–185v. 46. BN Lat. 5006, fol. 186v. This is presumably the same Stephen mentioned in the letter of Pascal de Vittoria. “Epistola,” 503. 47. BN Lat. 5006, fols. 173r–174r. The seventeenth-century Irish Franciscan scholar Luke Wadding misidentified the source as Odorico; the editors of the third edition suggest that it was the Franciscan Elemosina, rather than Odorico di Pordenone. Luke Wadding, Annales minorum seu trium ordinum a S. Francisco institutorum, 3rd ed. (Rome: Typis Rochi Bernabo`, 1733), 6:94. 48. BN Lat. 5006, fol. 173r. 49. For more on this text, see below. 50. BN Lat. 5006, fol. 173v. Monaldo was specifically described as “martyred,” and the other two were described in the language of martyrdom, but without the use of the word. 51. The text refers to both the “soldanus” as well as the “kalippus,” though a meeting with the figurehead Abbasid caliph in Cairo seems unlikely. 52. “Et cum fama hec devote sanctorum fratrum martirum ab Oriente in Occidentem transmissa resonaret, ubique corda fratrum ad fervorem sanctis Spiritus renovavit; et in romana Ecclesia nuntiata, summus pontifex lacrimas devotionis effudit. Et cum rogaret dominus papa ut istos martires canonizaret, quidam aliorum ordinum fratres etiam suos offerebant sanctos ad canonizandum, supersedit papa in negotio super his maturius deliberandum.” Assisi, Biblioteca communale, 341; transcribed in Gadrat, Une image de l’Orient, 113n168. Like Paolino, Elemosina was anxious to dispel any associations the story of the martyrs might have with the spiritual movement. 53. We have no evidence for this; there was a petition for canonization of the Moroccan martyrs in 1316, but it went nowhere, not even receiving attention from Franciscan chroniclers. Letter of Jaime II of Aragon to John XXII about the martyrs, 12 July 1321, in Acta Aragonensia, ed. Heinrich Finke (Berlin: Dr. Walther Rothschild, 1908), 2:754–55. Tommaso di Tolentino was eventually beatified, but not until 1894. 54. For more on the Nero accounts, see Christopher MacEvitt, “Victory by Desire: Crusade and Martyrdom in the Fourteenth Century,” in Center and Periphery: Studies on Power in the Middle Ages in Honor of William Chester Jordan, ed. Katherine J. Jensen, Guy Geltner, and Anne Lester (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 223–35. 55. Oxford, Bodleian ms. Lat. Misc. c. 75 (olim Phillipps ms. 3119), copies some of the material in Nero A IX, notably Thomas of Eccleston (fols. 71r–80v) and the martyrdom of the Tana martyrs (fol. 81). It also has some texts associated with Giovanni da Pian del Carpine (fols. 81v–85v). A brief description is given in Annette Kehnel, “Poets, Preachers and Friars Revisited: Fourteenth-Century Multilingual Franciscan Manuscripts,” in The Beginnings of Standardization: Language and Culture in Fourteenth Century England, ed. Ursula Schaefer (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2006), 91–114, esp. 110. 56. The construction of the manuscript also gives us few hints about the intentions of its creators. Folios 84–95 belong to a single quire, which spans the end of “de beato Francisco”

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and the passio of the Moroccan martyrs. A. G. Little (ed.), De Adventu Fratrum Minorum in Angliam (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1951), xiv. 57. An edition of the text is given in Analecta Franciscana (Quaracchi: Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1898), 3:641–45, under the title “Instrumentum de stigmatibus beati Francisci,” edited from two Vatican manuscripts and an edition in the Acta Sanctorum. Noel Muscat has translated this version in Chronicle of the Twenty-Four Ministers-General of the Order of Friars Minor (Malta: TAU Franciscan Communications, 2010), 877–83, which I have consulted in preparing my translations. It is available online at http://i-tau.com/franstudies/texts/chronica_final.pdf. 58. A. G. Little has argued that the “Lamport Fragment” of Thomas of Eccleston was originally a part of Nero A IX, though written in a different hand. “The Lamport Fragment of Eccleston and Its Connexions,” English Historical Review 49 (1934): 299–302. 59. For a commentary and edition of the text, see Michael Robson, “A Franciscan Contribution to the De gestis Britonum (1205–1279), and Its Continuation to 1299,” Archivium Franciscanum Historicum 107 (2014): 265–314. 60. The site of the friary is now a housing estate, and no part of the convent remains visible. For what we know about the library, see M. R. James, “The Library of the Grey Friars of Hereford,” Collectanea Franciscana 1 (1914): 114–23, 154–55. 61. Little, “Lamport Fragment,” 301. 62. “Proxima die ante festum exaltationis sancte crucis venit ad me unus angelus Domini dicens mihi ex parte Dei, quod me ad patientiam, et ad recipiendum quod in me vellet Deus facere, prepararem.” BL, Nero A IX, fol. 92v. Thomas of Celano, the first source for the stigmata, identified it as a seraph; Bonaventure identified the seraph as Christ. 63. “Ego respondi me paratum esse et pati et suscipere, quicquid Deus dignaretur inferre.” BL, Nero A IX, fol. 92v. 64. It is possible that the passio was produced as part of a petition to have the martyrs sainted; Jaime II of Aragon submitted such a petition around 1321, about the time the Nero manuscript was written. A vita or a passio was often composed for a saint or a martyr to accompany the request for canonization, but we do not know if such a passio was created at the time of this submission. Finke, Acta Aragonensia, 2:754. 65. The account in Nero A IX claims to be from an eyewitness: toward the end of the account, the putative author asserts: “I learned their life and habits, from the time when they were entering the land of the Saracens up to the happy consummation of their martyrdom” (BL, Nero A IX, 96r). Nevertheless, the author did not identify himself in any way, and the text betrays a fourteenth-century tone. If it was composed in the thirteenth century, the text was heavily edited in the fourteenth. It is unlikely that the martyrs’ story which inspired Anthony of Padua and Clare of Assisi was in this form; the account betrays few thirteenthcentury characteristics. The author was seemingly unconstrained by any preexisting authoritative text that hewed closer to traditional martyrological tropes. If he were a witness, who could he be? Obviously not one of the friars. Nor does the account suggest that the friars had any servants or other company. More likely, then, the author would have been a member of the household of the infante Pedro of Portugal. This supposition gains some support from the account. The narrative is fulsome in its praise of the infante: he was “the famous man” (BL, Nero A IX, 96r) and was the first to recognize the martyr’s first miracle. Furthermore, the preservation of the account only in Hereford, rather than at Coimbra, where Pedro deposited the relics of the martyrs, also renders the claimed authorship unlikely. For more on Pedro, see Isidro de las Cagigas, Los mude´jares (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientı´ficas, Instituto de Estudios Africanos, 19489), 2:346.

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Notes to Pages 138–140

66. Schlageter, “Die Chronica des Bruders Jordan von Giano,” 36. In the older edition, Jordan of Giano, Chronica fratris Jordani, ed. Heinrich Boehmer (Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1908), 7. 67. See Isabelle Heullant-Donat, “La perception des premiers martyrs franciscains a` l’inte´reur de l’Ordre au XIIIe sie`cle,” in Religion et mentalite´s au Moyen Aˆge: Me´langes en l’honneur d’Herve´ Martin, ed. Sophie Cassagnes-Broquet, Amaury Chauou, Daniel Pichot et al. (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2003), 211–20. 68. From the testimony of Sora Cecilia da Spello concerning the canonization of Clare, see Lazzeri, “Il processo di canonizzazione di S. Chiara d’Assisi,” 465. 69. BL, Nero A IX, fol. 94r. 70. Thomas de Papia, Dialogus de gestis sanctorum fratrum minorum, 9–10. See Chapter 2 for further context. 71. “Hii tempore domini Innocenci pape tercii sub doctrina beati Francisci ordinis fratrum minorum fundatoris ad imitanda saluatoris nostri vestigia eruditi, tanto caritatis incendio sic in brevi sunt inflammati, ut totis proximo visceribus ad martirium anhelarent.” BL, Nero A IX, fol. 94v. 72. The events happened “in the time of Innocent III,” which was at least four years earlier than the traditional date of 1220. A number of reasons argue against the martyrs dying in the pontificate of Innocent III. First, Anthony of Padua was moved to become a Franciscan in large part by the story and miracles of the friars when they first returned to Hispania. Given his estimated year of birth as c. 1195, this would make him no more than eleven years old, and already a canon of Saint Vincent for some time. This error in dating is further evidence of the text’s late composition. 73. “Ingressi vero Sibiliam ad templum Machometi mortem non timentes perrexerunt, ut nacta occasione aliquod verbum fidei ibidem proponentes doctrinam Machometi infidelibus dissuaderent.” BL, Nero A IX, 94v. Seville was still under Almohad rule, so there was no “king” in the city. 74. “Venimus annunciare tibi fidem domini nostri Jesu Christi, ut relicto vilissimo servo diaboli Machometo credas domino Deo, creatori tuo, et tandem nobiscum habeas vitam sempiternam.” BL, Nero A IX, fol. 94v. 75. “Eya fratres, hoc est quod desideravimus; constantes simus in domino.” BL, Nero A IX, fols. 94v–95r. 76. This account interestingly never referred to the king of Morocco as the Miramolin. 77. “Aborayda dixit: ‘A quo hoc didicistis?’ Frater Octunus sacerdos respondit: ‘Per plures sanctissimos testes, videlicuet per Abraham, Ysaax et Jacob et alios patriarchas, postea, per prophetas, deinde per adventum domini nostri Jesu Christi, exhinc per apostolos et tandem per martires gloriosos et sanctos modernos.’ ” BL, Nero A IX, fol. 95v. 78. “Nullus est fides, nisi fides domini nostri Jesu Christi, quam tibi predicamus.” BL, Nero A IX, fol. 95v. 79. BL, Nero A IX, fol. 96r. 80. “Videns princeps ipsos mortis imperium cum alacritate magna suscipere, pietate commotus promisit eis vitam et omnem mundi substanciam, si abrenenciare vellent Christo et credere Machometo.” BL, Nero A IX, fol. 95r. 81. BL, Nero A IX, fol. 96r. 82. MacEvitt, “Martyrdom and the Muslim World Through Franciscan Eyes.” 83. “Pecunia, inquiunt, tua tecum sit in perdicionem.” BL, Nero A IX, fol. 95r.

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84. “Ibant autem discalciati et secundum formam habitus aliis dissimiles.” BL, Nero A IX, fol. 94v. 85. Betrandus de Turre, “Processus contra spirituales Aquitaniae (1315),” ed. Livarius Oliger, Archivium Franciscanum Historicum 16 (1923): 342. 86. Quorundam exigit (7 October 1317), in Bullarium Franciscanum, Romanorum Pontificum Constitutiones, Epistolas, ac Diplomata continens, ed. Konrad Eubel (Rome: Typis Sacrae Congregationis de Propaganda Fide, 1898), 5:128, 噛289. See also Burr, Spiritual Franciscans, 196, 199. 87. Carlini, “Constitutiones generales ordinis fratrum,” 278–79. See also Burr, Spiritual Franciscans, 170. 88. Gadrat, “Des nouvelles d’Orient,” 163. 89. There is a short account of their martyrdom in another letter of 1323 from Bartholomew, the custos of Tabriz, seemingly the same Bartholomew who wrote the letter giving the account of the martyrs of Tana. Bihl and Moule, “De duabus epistolis,” 89–112. See Chapter 4 for further discussion. 90. “Et quis, inquiunt, fuit iste Macometus qui vos decepit, asserens se esse prophetam? Que scripta, que miracula, que vita, attestantur eius?” BL, Nero A IX, fols. 96v–97r. 91. “Et nos per ista fide prepati sumus mori et offerrimus nos sponte et voluntarios ad martirium et mortem.” BL, Nero A IX, fol. 97r. 92. “Recedatis quam citius potestis et eatis pro factis vestris, quia non sunt hic talia verba recitanda.” BL, Nero A IX, fol. 97r. 93. “Dicitur communiter et manifeste ab omnibus Armenis de Arziga quod ea nocte qua sepelierunt predictas reliquias et membra, visa sunt omnibus qui voluerunt videre luminaria et splendores de celo super locum ubi sacre reliquie condebantur.” BL, Nero A IX, fol. 98r. 94. “Et illi responderunt, ‘Potens est Christus, filius Dei, si voleruit cecum hunc illumare,’ et facta oratione et signo crucis super oculos eius. Statim cepit fluere aquam ab oculis eius deinde sanguis.” BL, Nero A IX, fol. 98r. 95. “Infidelibus autem confusio augebatur. Et nullusque infideles inventus est qui sic non poterat ita nec auderet dicere malum.” BL, Nero A IX, fol. 98v. 96. The text claims that Coktoganus, his mother Thodothelia, his wife Kerley, and his three sons were baptized. This is probably a reference to Toqto’a Khan, who was actually married to the Byzantine princess Maria Palailogina. There is no evidence that he became a Christian. For a transcription, see Golubovich, Biblioteca Bio-Bibliografica, 2:72. 97. Oxford, Bodleian Library, ms. Lat. Misc. c. 75, fols. 56r–121r. 98. This text has been printed: “Impugnacio fratrum Minorum per fratres Predicatores apud Oxoniam,” in appendix C of The Grey Friars in Oxford, by Andrew G. Little (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892), 320–35. 99. Michele Faloci Pulignani, “Memorabilia de sanctis fratribus minoribus,” Miscellanea Francescana di Storia 15 (1914): 65–69. The text survives only as the last two folios of a manuscript (BAV Latin ms. 5417) which was a copy of the martyrology of Usard. Isabelle HeullantDonat has identified this work as Elemosina’s: “A` propos de la memoire hagiographique franciscaine aux XIIIe et XIVe sie`cles: L’auteur retrouve´ des Memorialia de sanctis fratribus minoribus,” in Religion et socie´te´ urbaine au Moyen Aˆge: E´tudes offerts a Jean-Louis Biget, ed. Patrick Boucheron and Jacques Chiffoleau (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2000), 511–29. Heullant-Donat corrects the title from “memorabilia” to “memoralia.” 100. Faloci Pulignani, “Memorabilia de sanctis fratribus minoribus,” 67. 101. Faloci Pulignani, “Memorabilia de sanctis fratribus minoribus,” 68.

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Notes to Pages 147–152

102. Faloci Pulignani, “Memorabilia de sanctis fratribus minoribus,” 69. 103. Faloci Pulignani, “Memorabilia de sanctis fratribus minoribus,” 67; Heullant-Donat, “Martyrdom and Identity in the Franciscan Order,” 446n38. Even in the fifteenth century, this same mistake is being made; see Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, ms. Clm 3702, fol. 278v, where again Leo, Hugo, and Dompnus were listed as the martyrs who inspired Anthony of Padua, and whose relics were brought back to Spain by the infante Pedro. 104. Leonhard Lemmens, Fragmenta minora: Catalogus sanctorum fratrum minorum (Rome: Typis Sallustianis, 1903). 105. Lemmens, Fragmenta minora, 1–2. 106. One manuscript of the text included the five martyrs of Morocco as being members of the province of Saint James. Lemmens, Fragmenta minora, 43. 107. Odorico di Pordenone was also listed as a pious evangelist, though his connection with the martyrs of Tana was not mentioned. Lemmens, Fragmenta minora, 17. 108. Lemmens, Fragmenta minora, 25. 109. Lemmens, Fragmenta minora, 28. See Wadding, Annales minorum, 6:364–65, for John’s bull in praise of the martyrs. 110. Lemmens, Fragmenta minora, 38. 111. Lemmens, Fragmenta minora, 43.

chapter 6 1. Luke Wadding, Annales minorum seu Trium Ordinum a S. Francisco institutorum, 3rd ed. (Rome: Typis Rochi Bernabo`, 1733), 8:390. See Maria Teresa Dolso for a good summary; “La Chronica XXIV generalium tra storia e agiografia,” Revue Mabillon 24 (2013): 61–98, esp. 65–68. 2. The appendix contains an extended account of the martyrs of Morocco (579–96) and the martyrs of Tana (597–613), as well as shorter accounts of the martyrs of Armenia (597), the martyrs of Ceuta (613–16). Maria Teresa Dolso, “I manoscritti della Chronica XXIV Generalium Ordinis Minorum,” Franciscana 6 (2004): 185–261. 3. Maria Teresa Dolso, La “Chronica XXIV Generalium”: Il difficile percorso dell’unita` (Padua: Centro Studi Antoniani, 2003), 17–18. 4. Two other late fourteenth-century texts held significant material about the martyrs: the anonymous “De sacris beatorum fratrum tumulis” (another catalogue of Franciscan holy men) and Bartolomeo da Pisa’s massive De conformitate vitae beati Francisci ad vitam Domini Iesu, vol. 4 of Analecta Franciscana (Quaracchi: Ex Typographia Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1906). In addition to many of those commemorated in the Chronica, the “De sacris” included Antonio de Rosatis, who died “among the Saracens,” and Benvencassa Tudertinus, who “performed miracles among the Tartars and Saracens,” both of whom did not appear in the Chronica. In addition, it included an entry for Vitale, the sixth member of the expedition to Morocco in 1220. According to the Chronica, he fell ill and remained in Aragon. But according to the “De sacris,” he recovered and became a martyr in Seville. “De sacris beatorum fratrum tumulis,” in Da Francesco ai “Catalogi Sanctorum”: Livelli istituzionali e immagini agiografiche nell’Ordine francescano, by Roberto Paciocco (Assisi: Edizioni Porziuncola, 1990), 133–58. 5. Bert Roest, “Observant Reform in Religious Orders,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 4, Christianity in Western Europe, c. 1100–c. 1500, ed. Miri Rubin and Walter Simons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 446–57; James D. Mixson, Poverty’s

Notes to Pages 152–154

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Proprietors: Ownership and Mortal Sin at the Origins of the Observant Movement (Leiden: Brill, 2009). 6. For example, a community of Clareni, followers of Angelo Clareno, survived in the community of S. Liberato in the March of Ancona until 1473, when they were joined to the observant Franciscans. See Mario Sensi, Storie di Bizzoche tra Umbria e Marche (Rome: Edizione di storia e letteratura, 1995), 317; and Giacinto Pagnani, San Liberato e il suo convento (Falconara Marittima: Edizioni Biblioteca Francescana, 1962), 40–43, 137–41. 7. Bert Roest explained that Observants were initially more interested in devotional works than historiography; it was only in the second and third generations that chronicles began to emerge. “Later Medieval Institutional History,” in Historiography in the Middle Ages, ed. Deborah Mauskopf Deliyannis (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 277–315; see 283. 8. See Decima Douie, The Nature and the Effect of the Heresy of the Fraticelli (Manchester: University Press, 1932), 210. For Fraticelli groups in Umbria, see Giovanna Casagrande, “Presenza di Fraticelli nell’area di Bettona,” Archivium Franciscanum Historicum 74 (1981): 320–27. By 1374 the Observants were preaching against the Fraticelli in Perugia. 9. Bullarium Franciscanum, 6:506, 噛69. 10. Franz Ehrle, “Die Spiritualen, ihr Verha¨ltniss zum Franziskanerorden und su den Fraticellen,” in Archiv fu¨r Litteratur- und Kirchen-geschichte des Mittelalters, ed. P. Heinrich Deinfle, O.P., and Franz Ehrle, S.J. (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herde’sche Verlagshandlung, 1888), 4:87; Douie, Heresy of the Fraticelli, 210. In contrast, Michael Robson says Giovanni did not seek distinctive habits. Franciscans in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2009), 184. 11. Bullarium Franciscanum, 6:245, 噛558 (13 December 1350). The convents listed were Carceri (near Assisi), Monteluce (it is unclear if this is the one near Perugia or the one near Spoleto), Eremiti (near Todi), and Iani (Giano, near Spoleto). Brugliano was not mentioned. According to the Chronica XXIV, Guiral Ot expelled the Fraticelli from the hermitage of Carcere, and installed friars of “austere life” in their place. Chronica XXIV generalium ministrorum ordinis fratrum minorum, in Analecta Franciscana (Quaracchi: Ex Typographia Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1898), 3:530. 12. Chronica XXIV, 547. Arnaud was uncharacteristically critical; he was clearly opposed to Gentile and his movement. 13. Robson, Franciscans, 181. See Sedes apostolica (13 August 1355), Bullarium Franciscanum, 6:291–92, 噛683, for the revocation of privileges of the four convents listed above. 14. Mario Sensi, Dal movimento eremitico alla regolare osservanza francescana: L’opera di fra Paoluccio Trinci (Rome: Santa Maria degli Angeli, 1992). 15. Bartolomeo da Pisa, De conformitate vitae beati Francisci, 4:510, where Brugliano was named “Pisquia” or “Pistia.” Giovanni also appeared in the anonymous “De sacris beatorum fratrum tumulis,” as someone who performed miracles while living and after his death. The single sentence entry does not connect him to the birth of the Observant movement, or to any other figures, such as Gentile or Paoluccio. The text is edited in Paciocco, Da Francesco ai “Catalogi sanctorum,” 137. Pistia was being referred to as Brugliano by the fifteenth century: see Giacomo Oddi, La Franceschina; and Mario Sensi, Le Osservanze francescane nell’Italia centrale (Secoli XIV-XV) (Rome: Collegio San Lorenzo da Brindisi, Istituto storico dei cappuccini, 1985), 19–73. 16. See, for example, the chronicles of Mariano da Firenze and Bernardino da Aquila. Full citation given in Duncan Nimmo, Reform and Division in the Franciscan Order: From

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Notes to Pages 154–160

Saint Francis to the Foundation of the Capuchins (Rome: Capuchin Historical Institute, 1995), 365. 17. Nimmo, Reform and Division, 373–74. 18. Marianus de Florentia [Mariano da Firenze], Compendium, 72. 19. Curiously misdated to 1325 by Arnaud. Chronica XXIV, 480. 20. Chronica XXIV, 481. 21. It is difficult to be sure whether he relied directly on Angelo. He never mentioned him in the Chronica, which is unsurprising given his controversial reputation. He clearly took material either from Angelo or the Actus beati Francisci. See Dolso, La “Chronica,” 95. 22. Angelo Clareno, Liber Chronicarum, 744–46; translation in Angelo Clareno, Chronicle or History of the Seven Tribulations, 213. 23. Chronica XXIV, 482. 24. Angelo attributed the tribulations to both the devil and the broader allure of all things of the flesh. See, for example, the vision the anonymous priest had of demons complaining about Francis to Lucifer, and how they planned to undermine him; Angelo Clareno, Liber Chronicarum, 218–20. Arnaud gave a story similar in some ways but quite different in its conclusions; Chronica XXIV, 27–29. 25. Chronica XXIV, 482. 26. Chronica XXIV, 486. 27. Perfectos or perfectorum only shows up in five of the manuscripts, including one of the earliest manuscripts, preserved in Assisi. For a description, see Dolso, “I manoscritti,” 196–99. 28. Chronica XXIV, 486. 29. Dolso, La “Chronica,” 27. 30. Michel de Dmitrewski, “Fr. Bernard De´licieux OFM: Sa lutte contre l’Inquisition de Carcassonne et d’Albi; Son process 1297–1319,” Archivium Franciscanum Historicum 17 (1924): 335; Arnaud later mentioned that Berengar was his own predecessor as the minister of Aquitaine, and he died in Paris in 1329, while attending the general chapter in that city. Chronica XXIV, 489. 31. Chronica XXIV, 500. 32. Chronica XXIV, 502. 33. Chiesa, “Per un riordino della tradizione manoscritta della Relatio,” 311–50, esp. 346–47. 34. Chronica XXIV, 1. 35. Arnaud mentioned the stigmata in a discussion a man named Bartholomew had with a demon about Francis, Chronica XXIV, 28, and included it in a single sentence as a chronological event, with no description. Chronica XXIV, 30. It also was mentioned in the vita of Brother Leo, Chronica XXIV, 65, 68. 36. Chronica XXIV, 7. 37. Chronica XXIV, 2. He also cited Bernard of Bessa. Chronica XXIV, 7. 38. Jean de Brienne does show up in Bernard of Bessa, “Liber de laudibus,” 680–81, but in a section on the three orders, not in connection with the early years of the first order. Later Franciscan chroniclers insert Jean chronologically when he entered the order and died in 1237, not in 1210. See Marianus de Florentia [Mariano di Firenze], Compendium, 28, 34. For more on Jean de Brienne and his ties to the Franciscans, see Guy Perry, John of Brienne: King of Jerusalem, Emperor of Constantinople, c. 1175–1237 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 180–88.

Notes to Pages 160–167

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39. For a discussion of why Arnaud would have thought that Jean was buried in Assisi, see Perry, John of Brienne, 180–88. 40. “Redeundo igitur ad propositum,” Chronica XXIV, 5. 41. Chronica XXIV, 5; Bernard of Bessa, “Liber de laudibus,” 681. 42. For a parallel, see the life of Gonsalvo Sancho, who was a courageous warrior before he became a friar. Chronica XXIV, 549. 43. Chronica XXIV, 15. 44. Chronica XXIV, 9. 45. Chronica XXIV, 11. 46. Chronica XXIV, 16. 47. There are few verbal phrases in common between the two texts, but the general narrative is similar, and both texts include the miracle story of the knight who could not approach the relics as a result of having sex with his concubine. 48. Chronica XXIV, 16. 49. BL, Nero A IX, fol. 95r. 50. Chronica XXIV, 19. 51. Chronica XXIV, 17. 52. Chronica XXIV, 18. 53. Chronica XXIV, 13. 54. Chronica XXIV, 14. 55. Chronica XXIV, 22. 56. Chronica XXIV, 23–27. 57. Arnaud did not recount, for example, Bonaventure’s story of the proposed trial by fire. The Actus beati Francisci, which Arnaud clearly used, has an extended description, Paul Sabatier (ed.), Actus beati Francisci et sociorum ejus, Collection d’E´tudes et de Documents, 4 (Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1902), 89–92. 58. Glassberger, Chronica, 14. He gave Francis’s journey to Egypt a much fuller description than he did the Moroccan martyrs. Chronica, 15. 59. This section was taken from “the history of Portugal.” Chronica XXIV, 581. 60. Chronica XXIV, 23; Tolan, Saint Francis and the Sultan, 162–70; Sabatier, Actus beati Francisci et sociorum ejus, 91–92. 61. Chronica XXIV, 23. 62. Chronica XXIV, 581; McMichael, “Francis and the Encounter with the Sultan,” 135. 63. This can be seen in that the earliest references to the martyrs of 1220 often give the martyrs the names that later came to be given to the martyrs of Ceuta of 1227 (Leo, Ugo, and Dompnus). Heullant-Donat briefly made this suggestion in “Martyrdom and Identity in the Franciscan Order, 446n38. For a consideration of the prehistory of Franciscan evangelization in Morocco, see Maya Soifer, “You Say That the Messiah Has Come . . . : The Ceuta Disputation (1179) and Its Place in the Christian Anti-Jewish Polemics of the High Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval History 31 (2005): 287–307. 64. For other later material related to the martyrs of Ceuta, see Francesco Russo, “Le Fonti della Passione dei SS. Martiri di Ceuta: I Lettera di Fra Mariano da Genova a Frate Elia,” Miscellanea Francescana 34 (1934): 113–17, 350–56, and further developments from those documents: Ippolito Fortino, I Martiri di Ceuta: Alle origini del francescanesimo in Calabria (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2006). 65. Chronica XXIV, 32–33. 66. Chronica XXIV, 33.

242

Notes to Pages 168–174

67. MacEvitt, “Martyrdom and the Muslim World Through Franciscan Eyes,” 1–23. 68. Chronica XXIV, 615. 69. Golubovich, Biblioteca Bio-Bibliografia della Terra Santa (Quaracchi: Collegio di S. Bonaventura, 1923, 4:272–304. 70. The cause of Alisoldanus’s death was vague: the Chronica did not specify who killed him, only that it was done crudeliter and that everything belonging to him was burned. Chronica XXIV, 532. See also James D. Ryan, “Preaching Christianity Along the Silk Route: Missionary Outposts in the Tartar ‘Middle Kingdom’ in the Fourteenth Century,” Journal of Early Modern History 2, no. 4 (1998): 350–73; and “Conversion or the Crown of Martyrdom,” 19–38. 71. Chronica XXIV, 534. 72. Chronica XXIV, 535. 73. Chronica XXIV, 548. 74. Chronica XXIV, 559. 75. Chronica XXIV, 572. 76. Chronica XXIV, 540–43. 77. Chronica XXIV, 515–24. 78. Chronica XXIV, 417–18. 79. Chronica XXIV, 416. 80. This is during the reign of Qala¯wu¯n, but it is not clear to whom “Melcassa” was intended to refer. 81. Chronica XXIV, 416. 82. Following this catalogue of martyrs is the longer passio of Philip de Anisio, who was martyred in Ashdod in southern Palestine. His martyrdom was particularly featured because it was the fulfillment of a prophecy by Anthony of Padua, who met his mother while Philip was still in the womb. He predicted both that he would join the Franciscan order and that he would be martyred and “lead many to the palm of the martyr” (Chronica XXIV, 416). When the castle of Ashdod was captured by the Saracens, they threatened their Christian captives with death unless they converted to Islam. Philip chose to be killed last, so that he might comfort all the others. Arnaud actually included the account in his chronicle twice; once in a section on the life and miracles of Saint Anthony in the early part of the chronicle (Chronica XXIV, 134–35), and again as the short passio when the prophecy came true (416–17). 83. Isabelle Heullant-Donat, “The´orie et pratique du martyre volontaire chez les franciscains au milieu du XIVe sie`cle: L’exemple de Livinus, the´ologien et martyr,” in Arbor Ramosa: Studi per Antonio Rigon da allievi, amici, colleghi, ed. L. Bertazzo, D. Gallo, R. Michetti, and A. Tilatti (Padua: Centro di Studi Antoniani, 2011), 265–78. 84. Chronica XXIV, 541. 85. Chronica XXIV, 541. 86. Chronica XXIV, 541. 87. Chronica XXIV, 542. 88. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II, Q. 124; translation at http://www.new advent.org/summa/3124.htm. For Aquinas, martyrdom was the highest form of courage, one of the four cardinal (as opposed to theological) virtues. 89. Chronica XXIV, 541. 90. Chronica XXIV, 417. 91. See also the nameless friars starved to death by Nestorians. Chronica XXIV, 559. 92. Chronica XXIV, 418. 93. Arnaud dates it as “around 1322.”

Notes to Pages 174–181

243

94. Chronica XXIV, 480. 95. Vox sanguinis innocentis (20 September 1321), in Wadding, Annales minorum, 6:364. 96. See Prudlo, Martyred Inquisitor, 79–84. 97. Chronica XXIV, 261. Otherwise, Arnaud only mentioned friars in Morocco in one other story, involving anonymous friars, serving as emissaries of the king of Morocco, who meet a lion that abandons his ferocious nature and follows them like a dog. Arnaud assured his readers that the king was allied with Christians, but gave no dates or names that would give the story any specificity. It was recounted during the end of the term of office of Haymo of Faversham (d. 1243), but did not necessarily happen then. Chronica XXIV, 256. 98. Chronica XXIV, 266. 99. Chronica XXIV, 535–36. 100. Chronica XXIV, 372. 101. Chronica XXIV, 546. 102. Chronica XXIV, 456. The Franciscan editors of the Chronica were certain that the friar was Giovanni di Montecorvino. Arnaud did mention the conversion of the Mongol emissaries to the Council of Lyons as well, but again Franciscans were not involved in their conversion. Chronica XXIV, 355. 103. Arnaud also recorded the martyrdom of Stephen of Hungary in Saray in 1334, in which Stephen converted to Islam and then returned to Christianity and was therefore executed according to Islamic law, which Arnaud saw as governing the town. Chronica XXIV, 515–24. 104. Stefano Brufani, “I Dicta di Egidio d’Assisi nella tradizione francescana,” in Frate Egidio d’Assisi: Atti dell’Incontro di studio in occasione del 750 anniversario della morte (1262–2012), Perugia 30 guigno 2012 (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, 2014), 33–45. 105. Others argue that Leo’s “life” is genuine; the “Short Life” survives in a number of different versions. Rosalind Brooke gives a good overview of the editions that have been published: “The Life of Blessed Brother Giles,” in Scripta Leonis, Rufini et Angeli sociorum S. Francisci, ed. and tr. Rosalind B. Brooke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 307–17. Two earlier editions were based on a single manuscript. “Vita beati Aegidii Assisiatis,” in Documenta Antiqua Franciscana: Pars I, Scripta Fratris Leonis, ed. Leonhard Lemmens, O.F.M. (Quaracchi: Typographia Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1901), 37–72. 106. Brooke, “Life of Blessed Brother Giles,” 346. 107. Maria Teresa Dolso, “Le Vitae di Egidio d’Assisi nella Chronica XXIV generalium e nel De conformitate di Bartolomeo da Pisa,” in Frate Egidio d’Assisi: Atti dell’Incontro di studio in occasione del 750 anniversario della morte (1262–2012), Perugia 30 guigno 2012 (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, 2014), 47–78. 108. Chronica XXIV, 78. 109. Chronica XXIV, 78. 110. Chronica XXIV, 60. 111. Chronica XXIV, 40–41. 112. Chronica XXIV, 46–47. 113. Chronica XXIV, 386–87.

epilogue 1. Frazier, Possible Lives; Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

244

Notes to Pages 182–186

2. Norman Housley, Crusading and the Ottoman Threat, 1453–1505 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 135–73. 3. Clare Lappin, “The Mirror of the Observance: Image, Ideal and Identity in Observant Franciscan Literature, c.1415–1528” (PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 2000), 20. 4. Lappin, “Mirror of Observance,” 62. 5. Chronica XXIV, xvi. 6. Glassberger, Chronica: the seven martyrs of Ceuta (44), martyrs in Palestine and Egypt (79, 82), Acre (106), Tana (128), Stephen of Hungary in Saray (160), William of England (160), Pascal di Vitoria and his fellow martyrs in Amalech (178–79), Giovanni di Montepulciano (183), Nicolaus and Francis in Cairo (192), James of Florence (196), Guglielmo di Castromaris (198–99), the twelve friars of Mount Zion (202). He mentioned the friars who died during the Inquisition (128) and the five martyrs of Bulgaria (203), but did not explicitly name them as martyrs. 7. Glassberger, Chronica, 14. 8. Glassberger, Chronica, 15. 9. Marianus de Florentia [Mariano da Firenze], Compendium: Pietro d’Arcagnano (60 [629]), the martyrs of Morocco (15 [96]), the seven martyrs of Ceuta (18 [99]), Electus (18 [99]), the martyrs of Valencia (20 [101]), the inquisitorial martyrs of Avinonet (27 [305]), the martyrs in Almalyk (76 [297]), the martyrs of Armenia (66 [635]), India (68–69 [637–38]), Stephen of Hungary in Saray (72 [641]). 10. Bartolomeo da Pisa, De conformitate vitae beati Francisci; Carolly Erickson, “Bartholomew of Pisa, Francis Exalted: De Conformitate,” Mediaeval Studies 34 (1972): 253–74. 11. Giacomo Oddi, La Franceschina, 2:169. 12. Giacomo Oddi, La Franceschina, 2:179. 13. Giacomo Oddi, La Franceschina, 2:184. 14. Pietro d’Arcagnano, 2:211, as well as Pietro and Catalano, who appear in the Chronica. Giacomo Oddi, La Franceschina, 2:217; Stephano and Raimondo in Toulouse, 2:218. Alongside the martyrs were the lives of a few other friars who exemplified patientia, but were not martyred, like brother Electo, who suffered from a debilitating illness (2:218), and an anonymous brother persecuted by a demon (2:218–19.). 15. Giacomo Oddi, La Franceschina, 2:208–9; Bartholomew of Pisa, De Conformitate, 274–75. 16. Giacomo Oddi, La Franceschina, 2:215. Crucifixion was not an uncommon form of execution in the medieval Islamic world. See, for example, Tilman Seidensticker, “Responses to Crucifixion in the Islamic World (1st–7th/7th–13th Centuries),” in Public Violence in Islamic Societies: Power, Discipline and the Construction of the Public Sphere, ed. Maribel Fierro and Christian Lange (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 203–16. 17. Some, however, do: Antonio da Milano does desire martyrdom (212), as do two anonymous friars (214), and Juan de Otteo (215), and of course the five martyrs of Morocco (219), as did two other anonymous friars from Ragusa (226). 18. Antonio da Milano condemns Islam, as did Jeremias and his seven companions (212– 13). Corrado de Alis also explained the Saracens’ “blindness and damnation,” but without specific reference to Muhammad or Islam (213). So did Juan de Otteo (215), and Iohanne da Napoli, and again the five martyrs of Morocco (220). 19. Giacomo Oddi, La Franceschina, 2:209. 20. Giacomo Oddi, La Franceschina, 2:210. 21. Giacomo Oddi, La Franceschina, 2:220.

Notes to Pages 186–191

245

22. Giacomo Oddi, La Franceschina, 2:221. 23. Giacomo Oddi, La Franceschina, 2:222; for miracles in Coimbra, see 224–25. 24. Giacomo Oddi, La Franceschina, 2:223. 25. Frazier, Possible Lives, 48. 26. Frazier, Possible Lives, 58. 27. Antonio, in contrast to the earlier martyrs, did not go to Muslim lands out of a desire for martyrdom: he was captured while traveling. E. Hocodez, “Lettre de Pierre Ranzano au Pape Pie II sur le martyre du B. Antoine de Rivoli,” Analecta Bollandiana 24 (1906): 357–74. 28. “Petrus vulgato cognomina propterea martir appellatus quoniam hoc ipsum gloriosum martiris nomen iam dudum per plura secula antea demortuum; atque ob eius rei abolitionem omnino deletum penitusque extinctum suo quodam proprii corporis martirio mirabiliter ac divinitus renouauit.” Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Urbinatus Latinus ms. 154, fol. 196r; Frazier, Possible Lives, 79. 29. Norman Scott Johnson, “Franciscan Passions: Missions to the Muslims, Desire for Martyrdom and Institutional Identity in the Later Middle Ages” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2010), 448–57. 30. Alberto may have desired martyrdom, but some have argued that this was a creation of sixteenth-century Observant chroniclers like Mariano da Firenze. For more, see Frazier, Possible Lives, 84n129. 31. Isabelle Heullant-Donat, “Les martyrs franciscains de Je´rusalem (1391), entre me´moire et manipulation,” in Chemins d’Outre-mer: E´tudes d’histoire sur la Me´diterrane´e medieval offertes a` Michel Balard, ed. Damien Coulon et al. (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2004), 439–59. 32. “Refutationes argumentorum qui contra huius temporis martyrium fieri solent.” [Tommaso d’Arezzo], Tractatus de martyrio sanctorum (Basel: Jacobus Wolff, [1492]), chap. 11. 33. “Quis modus habendus his qui ignorant linguam eorum infidelium ad quos caritatis et martyrii ardore accedere cupiunt.” [Tommaso d’Arezzo], Tractatus, chap. 17. 34. Wolf, Christian Martyrs. 35. “Accingere gladio et una procedamus ad bellum: quoniam pro victoria coronas promerebimur eternas.” [Tommaso d’Arezzo], Tractatus, chap. 11. 36. Carmina Illustrium Poetarum Italorum (Florence: Typis Regiae Celsitudinis, 1724), 10:311; see an elegant translation by Alison Knowles Frazier, Possible Lives, 81. 37. James D. Ryan, “Missionary Saints of the High Middle Ages: Martyrdom, Popular Veneration, and Canonization,” Catholic Historical Review 90 (2004): 1–28. 38. London, British Library, Add. ms. 40156, fol. 8b. 39. London, British Library, ms. Cotton Vitellius F XII, fol. 330r. 40. Doris Carl, “Franziskanischer Ma¨rtyrerkult als Kreuzzugspropaganda an der Kanzel von Benedetto da Maiano in Santa Croce in Florenz,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 39 (1995): 69–91. Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby believes the martyrs to be the seven of Ceuta. “Visual Rhetoric: Images of Saracens in Florentine Churches,” Annuario de Estudios Medievales 42 (2012): 7–28. 41. Bernard Sannig, Der Cronicken Der Drey Orden (Prague: Johann Nicolaum Hampeli, 1691), vol. 1, t. 2: 7, p. 17; Einhorn, “Unter den Fuß gebracht,” 447–83, esp. 461–62. 42. I cite here the Italian translation of his work. Marco da Lisbona, Delle Croniche de gli Ordini Instituti dal P. S. Francesco (Milan: Girolamo Bordoni, 1605), 1:289–310. 43. Arturus a Monasterius [Arthus du Monstier], Martyrologium francescanum, 2nd ed. (Paris: Edmond Couterot, 1653), 25. 44. Wadding, Annales minorum.

246

Notes to Pages 191–194

45. Pieter Gossey, De Martelie van de H. H. Berardus, Petrus, Otto, Accursius, Adjutus, eerste martelaers der Orden van den H. Seraphinschen Vader Franciscus, 1783. 46. Antonio de Olave, Passio gloriosi martyris beati patris fratris Andree de Spoleto ordinis Minorum regularis obseruantie pro Catholice fidei veritate passi in Affrica ciuitate Fez, [1532]; Pierre de Cenival, “L’eglise chre`tienne de Marrakesh de XIIIe sie`cle,” Hespe´ris 6 (1926): 71; Massimo Donattini, “Three Bolognese Franciscan Missionaries in the New World in the Early Sixteenth Century,” in The New World in Early Modern Italy, 1492–1750, ed. Elizabeth Horodowich and Lia Markey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 63–85, esp. 69–72. 47. “Francisci flores germine / Christum profuse sanguine / Opere imitantur, / Honorio pontifice / Sixtoque nunc opifique / Mirifice venerantur.” Analecta Hymnica Medii Aevi (AH), ed. Clemens Blume and Guido M. Dreves (Leipzig: O. R. Reisland, 1898), 28:148, 噛53. 48. “O victorum purpura / Consolator in tortura, / Rubentis militiae / Robur et athleta!” AH 28:148, 噛53. 49. Response to the Noctural Antiphon: “Ferventes ad martyrium / Minores zelo fide / Venerunt ad palatium / Hispalim virtute spei, . . .” AH 28:151, 噛54. 50. “Mirabilem victoria / Dominus renovavit, / Quando Fratrum familiam / Triumphis decoravit.” Analecta Hymnica Medii Aevi, ed. Guido Maria Dreves (Leipzig: O. R. Reisland, 1904), 45:209, 噛87. 51. Maureen Ahern, “Martyrs and Idols: Performing Ritual Warfare on Early Missionary Frontiers in the Northwest,” in Religion in New Spain, ed. Susan Schroeder and Stafford Poole (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007), 279–98. 52. Ra´mon Gutierrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 128. 53. Gregory, Salvation at Stake. 54. Augustı´n Calvet, Fray Anselmo Turmeda: Heterodoxo espan˜ol (1352–1423–32?) (Barcelona: Casa Editorial Estudio, 1914), 18. See also Roger Boase, “Autobiography of a Convert, Anselm Turmeda (c. 1353–c. 1430),” Al-Masa¯q 9 (1996–97): 45–98.

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index

Substantive references to manuscripts are listed under the “manuscripts” entry, by city, institution, and shelfmark. Aaron (Franciscan martyr), 109, 144 Abd al-Mumin (Almohad caliph), 77, 216 n.18 Abd al-Rah.ma¯n III (Umayyad emir), 40 ‘Abd al-Wa¯h.id al-Rashı¯d (Almohad caliph), 84, 220 n.50 Abu¯’l-H . asan ‘Alı¯, 80 Acre, Muslim conquest of (1291), 20 Acts of Ptolemaeus and Lucius, 30, 202 n.20 Actus beati Francisci et sociorum ejus, 166, 240 n.21, 241 n.57 Adam of Oxford, 62 Ad conditorem (papal bull, 1322), 103, 130 al-’A¯dil (Almohad caliph), 84, 219 n.48 Afonso II of Portugal, 5, 80, 162 afterlife of Franciscan martyrdom narratives, 181–94; in early modern/modern period, 191–94; humanists and, 186–90; Moroccan martyrs, 181, 183, 186, 188, 190–91, 193, 244 n.6; Observant Franciscans and, 182–86 Agnellus (bishop of Fez), 84, 90, 91, 175, 220 n.52 Agnes of Rome, 40 Akbari, Suzanne Conklin, 96 Alarcos, Battle of (1195), 77 Alber, Erasmus, 183 Alberic of Trois-Fontaine, 78 Alberto da Sarteano, 187–88, 245 n.30 Alcuin (Carolingian scholar), 39 Alexander IV (pope), 222 n.79

Alexander of Alexandria, 101 Alexander the Great, 104, 113 Alfonso III of Aragon, 220 n.50 Alfonso VI of Castile, 77 Alfonso VIII of Castile, 77 ‘Ali-Sultan (Alisoldanus; Mongol emperor), 169, 242 n.70 Almalyk (Amalech) martyrs, 122, 169, 244 n.6, 244 n.9 Almohad caliphate: Christian mercenaries in employ of, 80–81, 84, 88, 89; crusades against, 77–78, 89; Franciscan evangelism and, 76–84, 88–89; title of, 76, 216–17 n.18. See also specific caliphs Alphonso of Calabria, 196 n.16 Amalech (Almalyk) martyrs, 122, 169, 244 n.6, 244 n.9 Ambrose of Milan, 32, 36, 37, 203 n.35 Andrea da Spoleto, 191 Andrea di Perugia, 227 n.50 Andrew of Chios, 187 Angelo (companion of Saint Francis), 63–64 Angelo (Franciscan martyr), 133–34 Angelo Clareno, 22, 52, 153, 230 n.99, 230 n.102, 231–32 n.5, 239 n.6; History of the Seven Tribulations/Liber Chronicarum, 120, 151, 155, 184, 240 n.21, 240 n.24 Angelo di Spoleto, 109, 133–34, 144 Anthony of Armenia, 92 Anthony of Egypt, 34, 61, 204 n.46

274

Index

Anthony of Padua: desire for martyrdom, 47, 61, 115; Giles of Assisi compared, 177, 178; Moroccan martyrs inspiring, 47, 61, 74, 78, 138, 164, 191, 213 n.66, 235 n.65, 236 n.72, 238 n.103; Philip de Anisio and, 242 n.82; on pulpit of Santa Croce, Florence, 190; “Sacred Exchange” attributed to, 62; Spanish martyrs and, 161 Antipas (martyr), 201–2 n.15 Antonio de Milano, 244 n.17 Antonio de Rosatis, 238 n.4 Antonio di Rivalto, 187, 245 n.27 apocalypticism, 18, 87, 132–33 Apollonius (martyr), 31, 202 n.20, 202 n.27 apostasy, 185, 194, 243 n.103 Arians, 44, 233 n.42 Armenian martyrs: Mariano da Firenze on, 244 n.9; in Chronica XXIV, 171, 238 n.2; in passiones, 133, 135, 136, 141–43, 144, 237 n.89; Tana martyrs and, 92, 96–97, 109 Arnaud de Sarrant, Chronica XXIV attributed to, 150. See also Chronicle of the TwentyFour Ministers-General Arthus du Monstier, Martyrologium francescanum, 190 Asad (Coptic martyr), 46, 47, 48, 208 n.2 “The Assisi Compilation,” 64 Athanasios of Alexandria, 34 Augustine of Canterbury, 39, 76, 204 n.57 Augustine of Hippo, 31, 37, 49, 69, 201 n.3 Aurispa, Giovanni, 187 authority and martyrdom, 4, 21–22, 202–3 n.33 Avignonet martyrs, 43, 207 n.92, 244 n.9 Bacon, Roger, 17–18 Badoer, Marino (duke of Candia), 127 Bardi Dossal, 211 n.27 Bartholomew (custos of Tabriz): letter on Armenian martyrs, 237 n.89; letter on Tana martyrs, 107–9, 111, 115, 116, 119, 136, 143–44, 225 n.29, 226–27 nn.46–47, 229 n.72; Paolino of Venezia compared, 128, 129 Bartolomeo da Pisa, De conformitate vitae beati Francisci ad vitam Domini Iesu, 154, 183–84, 185, 238 n.4, 239 n.15

Bastiaensen, A. A. R., 30 Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, 39 beguines, 94, 102, 120, 174 Benedetto da Maiano, 190 Benedict XII (pope), 132, 169, 233 n.22 Benedict XVI (pope), 6 Benvencassa Tudentinus, 238 n.4 Berengar Malabosco, 158, 240 n.30 Bernard of Bessa, Liber de laudibus, 61, 160, 240 nn.37–38 Bernard of Clairvaux, 86 Bernardino da Aquila, 239 n.16 Bernardino da Feltre, 199 n.49 Bernardino da Siena, 182, 190, 197 n.24 Bernard of Quintaville, 178–79, 184–85 Bertrand (patriarch of Aquileia), 44 Bertrand de Malac[h]o of Tolosa, 109, 144 Bertrand de la Tour, 131, 232 n.20 Bisbee, Gary, 30, 204 n.47 Blanco (bishop of Marrakesh), 221 n.71 blood libel, 1–3, 6, 7, 16, 44–45, 187, 195 n.4, 199 n.49 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 127, 232 n.8 Bollandists, 30 Bonagratia of Bergamo, 141, 152, 175 Bonaventure: canonization of, 3, 197 n.24; Chronica XXIV and, 159, 166; on desire for martyrdom, 52, 65–67, 97; on Franciscan Rule, 52, 210 n.20; Legenda Maior (vita of Francis of Assisi), 65–67, 129, 232 n.14; on stigmata of Saint Francis, 212 n.54 Boniface (martyr), 36, 38–39, 205 n.65 Boniface VIII (pope), 100, 122, 123, 145 Boniface IX (pope), 124 Brufani, Stefano, 62 Buenhombre, Alfonsos (bishop of Marrakesh), 221 n.71 Bulgarian martyrdoms, 108, 109, 134, 144, 244 n.6 Burke, Maureen, 122 Burns, Robert, 104–5 Burr, David, 98 Caesar of Heisterbach, 224 n.7 Caffa letters of 1323 on Tana martyrs, 107–11, 115, 125 Cairo Geniza, 106 Calvino, Italo, 94–95 Capuchins, 182 Carcano, Michele, 199 n.48

Index Carissimus in Christo (papal bull, 1252), 222 n.77 Carlino de’ Grimaldi, 141 Carolingian martyr cults, 36, 37–39 Cassiodorus, 69 Cathars, 43, 61, 199 n.50 Cathelanus (martyr), 148 Cecilia (martyr), 33 Cecilia da Spello, 236 n.68 Celestine III (pope), 79 Celestine V (pope), 100 Ceuta martyrs: afterlife of Franciscan martyr narratives and, 244 n.9, 244 n.6, 245 n.40; canonization of, 198 n.43; in Chronica XXIV, 167–69, 171, 238 n.2, 241 n.63; desire for martyrdom and, 61–62, 186, 213 n.65, 214 n.69; passiones of, 14, 133, 147 Chabeuil martyrs, 174 Chanson de Roland, 211 n.29 charity, desire for martyrdom interpreted as act of, 65–67 Charlemagne, 211 n.29 Chatalanus (Franciscan martyr), 174 Chiara di Montefalco, 213 n.65 Chronica Pisani, 217 n.18 Chronicle of the Twenty-Four MinistersGeneral of the Franciscan Order (Chronica XXIV), 23–24, 150–80; afterlife of Franciscan martyrdoms and, 181, 182–85, 190, 191; Almalyk (Amalech) martyrs in, 169; Armenian martyrs in, 171, 238 n.2; Arnaud de Sarrant, attribution to, 150; centrality of Islam to martyrdom stories in, 8; on Ceuta martyrs, 167–69, 171, 238 n.2; evangelism in, 164, 174–76, 243 n.97; Francis of Assisi in, 159, 161, 164–66, 178, 240 n.35; on Giles of Assisi and other companions of Francis, 176–79; injunction to attack Islam in, 166–67; Jean de Brienne in, 160–69, 240 n.38; on Moroccan martyrs, 14, 137, 161–67, 170–71, 238 n.2, 238 n.4; Observants, emergence of, 150, 152–55, 239 n.7; on origins of Franciscan order, 159–67; Pascal de Vitoria, martyrdom of, 169–70; passiones retained in, 14; poverty controversy in, 155–58; reuniting of Franciscan order and, 151–52, 156–57, 179–80; schismatics and heretics, martyrdom by, 173–74; separation of Muslims and Christians, martyrdom/evangelism aimed at,

275

167–70; Tana martyrs and, 107, 109, 227 n.49, 238 n.2; on voluntary martyrdom, 170–73 Cistercian order, 76, 79, 86, 220 n.58 Clareni, 239 n.6 Clare of Assisi, 61, 90–91, 138, 179, 212 n.57, 213 n.65, 235 n.65 Clement V (pope), 89, 100–101, 110 Clement VI (pope), 153, 154 Clement of Alexandria, 35, 173, 211 n.34 Cole, Penny, 4 Coletans, 182 Conrad de Hallis, 171 Conrad of Saxony, 171, 173 Constantine I the Great (Roman emperor), 38, 63, 131, 176 Constantinople: Fourth Crusade conquering (1202–4), 18; Ottoman conquest of (1453), 4 conventuals: poverty, spirituals versus conventuals on, 9, 94, 95, 98–104, 119–21, 140–41; reuniting of order and, 156, 179 conversion. See evangelism Coptic Christians, 35, 46, 203 n.42, 207 n.83 Co´rdoban martyrs, 40–42, 172–73, 188–90 Cornaro, Marco (doge of Venice), 185 Cotton, Sir Robert, 135 councils: Florence-Ferrara (1438–45), 188; Lateran IV (1215), 49, 86; Lyons (1274), 19, 243 n.102; Perugia (1322), 155, 158; Trent (1545–63), 193 Cro´nica sera´fica de la Provincia de Cathalun˜a, 194 Cronicken der drey Orden, 190 crucifixion, execution by, 185, 244 n.16 crusades: Second Crusade (1147–49), 88; Fourth Crusade (1202–4), 18; Fifth Crusade (1217–21), 11, 18, 79, 81, 160; Seventh Crusade (1248–52), 18, 19, 44; Eighth Crusade (1270), 18, 19, 200 n.62; against Almohads, 77–78, 89; evangelism and, 77–78, 81, 88, 89; Franciscan involvement in, 8–9; Francis of Assisi and, 11, 47, 48, 53; inclusion of Jean de Brienne in Chronica XXIV and, 160–61; Islam, focus on, 18; Mahdia, siege of (1390), 194; martyrdom reinforcing/challenging ideology of, 8, 22; Observants preaching, 182; Odorico di Pordenone’s cultural translation of Islam and, 229 n.90; Otranto

276

Index

crusades (continued ) conquest and call for, 4–5; Spanish reconquista, 18; vineyard imagery used in calls for, 86 Cum hora undecima (papa bull), 18, 87, 88, 105, 108 Cum inter nonnullos (papal bull, 1323), 103–4, 154 Cum messis multa (papal bull, 1233), 85, 87 Cyprian of Carthage, 34–35 Dante, Paradiso, 86 “De beato Francisco et impressione sacrorum stigmatum,” 135, 136–37, 143 Delahaye, Hippolyte, 30 “De locis fratrum minorum et predicatorum in Tartaria,” 136, 144 Demetrios (Franciscan martyr), 94, 109. See also Tana martyrs Deodat Miquel, 93–94 “De sacris beatorum fratrum tumulis,” 238 n.4 desire for martyrdom, 23, 46–68; Bonaventure, Legenda Maior on, 65–67; Chronica XXIV on voluntary martyrdom, 170–73; of Dominicans, 67–68; Franciscan mysticism and, 67–68; of Franciscans after Francis, 60–63, 213 n.65; of Francis of Assisi, 11, 23, 25, 34, 46–48, 53–60, 78, 90, 177; Giles of Assisi and, 177; Late Antiquity, emergence of voluntary martyrdom in, 34–35, 204 n.46; resistance to, 63–65; Rule of Saint Francis and, 48–53, 62, 64; of spirituals, 223 n.1 De statu Saracenorum, 20 dhimmis, 40 Dolso, Maria Teresa, 151, 157 Dominic (Dominican in Maghreb), 81, 82, 218 n.37, 219 n.42, 219 n.44 Dominican order: apocalypticism and, 18; desire for martyrdom of, 67–68; evangelization/conversion of Muslims and, 19–20, 72, 200 n.59; Franciscan martyrdoms compared to preaching of, 103; humanist promotion of martyrdom as characteristic of, 186–87; observant reform of, 152; Oxford Compilation containing debate between Franciscans and, 145–46; Rule of Saint Augustine used by, 49; Thomas Aquinas on Franciscans versus, 98–99

Dominic de Guzma´n, 20, 49, 68, 200 n.59 Dominic of Baeza (bishop), 219 n.44 Dunderberg, Ismo, 35 Egypt: Coptic Christians in, 35, 46, 203 n.42, 207 n.83; crusades involving, 18–19; Franciscan martyrs in, 171, 244 n.6; Franciscans traveling to Cairo, 133–34; Francis of Assisi traveling to, 11, 47, 48, 52–53, 55, 57, 64–65, 66, 78, 80, 164–66, 183 Eighth Crusade (1270), 18, 19, 200 n.62 Electus (Franciscan martyr), 148, 244 n.9 Elemosina, Johannes: on evangelization, 176; identification of, 232–33 n.21; passiones written by, 130–35, 137, 144, 233 n.22, 233 n.42, 234 n.52, 237 n.99; on Tana martyrs, 97, 123, 132–33, 134 Elliott, Alison, 31 Erik “Plovpennig” of Denmark, 44 eschatology, 18, 87, 132–33 Eugenius IV (pope), 182, 187 Eulogius and Co´rdoban martyrs, 41–42, 172–73, 188–90 Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History, 30, 31, 69, 128, 132 evangelism, 23, 69–92; Almohad caliphate and, 76–84, 88–89; apocalyptic tone of papal bulls regarding, 87; Christians living in Islamic territories and, 80–82, 84, 87–88, 218 n.36; in Chronica XXIV, 164, 174–76, 243 n.97; competing rhetorics regarding, 90–92; conversion ideology, 18–20; crusade and, 77–78, 81, 88, 89; Franciscan commitment to, 18–19, 200 n.59; Franciscan Regula non bullata on, 49–53, 88; in Germany and Hungary, 73–74; ideological purpose of Muslim missions, 70–73; Maghreb, mendicants in, 81–84; martyrdom and, 14–15, 36–40, 90–92, 110, 174–76; mission, concept of, 15, 198 n.45; Mongols, missions to, 69–72, 73, 75, 76, 88, 91, 92, 108, 110, 132, 169–70, 215 n.2, 221 n.68, 223 n.90; Moroccan church, establishment of, 88–90, 221 n.71; Morocco, announcement of mendicant mission to, 75–76; non-Christians, failure to distinguish among, 2, 15–16, 74; papal involvement in, 71–73, 75–76, 78–84, 88–89, 217 n.23; practical ineffectiveness of, 9, 19; separation of Muslims and Christians, aimed at, 5, 8, 13, 17, 51, 87, 90,

Index 167–70, 194; Tunis, mendicant questions sent to pope from, 222 n.82; vineyard language of papal bulls regarding, 84–87 Exiit qui seminat (papal bull, 1279), 99 Exivi de paradiso (papal bull, 1312), 100, 102, 110 Felix (patron of Paulinus of Nola), 204 n.46 Ferdinand of Lisbon. See Anthony of Padua Fidelis of Sigmaringen, 193 Fielding, Henry, 151 Fifth Crusade (1217–21), 11, 18, 79, 81, 160 Flood, David, 210 n.20 Florence-Ferrara, Council of (1438–45), 188 Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, 193 Fourth Crusade (1202–4), 18 Fourth Lateran Council (1215), 49, 86 Fra Angelico, 68 Francesco d’Alexandria, 169 Franciscan martyrdoms, 1–24; canonization of Marrakesh martyrs versus Simon of Trent, 1–4; centrality of Islam to stories of, 7–8, 12, 15–21; early Christian martyrdoms, reflecting narrations of, 26–27; evangelism and, 14–15, 36–40, 90–92, 110, 174–76 (see also evangelism); illness of Saint Francis as type of martyrdom, 54, 58, 212 n.57; Islam, military and spiritual failure of Christianity to overcome, 18, 20–21, 40–42, 95–96; map of locations of, x; mysticism of Franciscans and, 67–68, 97–98; Otranto, Ottoman conquest/Christian recapture of (1480–81), 4–5, 190; papal lack of interest in, 88–90, 92; passiones of, 14–15, 21, 23, 94–95 (see also passiones); pictorial representations of, 94, 121–24, 169, 190; popular interest in, lack of, 3, 7, 47; poverty controversy, countering, 8, 9, 21–24, 93–98, 102–4, 124, 126; reuniting of order through, 151–52, 156–57, 179–80; Rule of Saint Francis discussing, 48–53; by schismatics and heretics, 173–74; separation of Muslims and Christians, aimed at, 5, 8, 13, 17, 51, 87, 90, 167–70, 194; significance of, 8–14; stigmata of Saint Francis as type of martyrdom, 11, 57–58, 67, 68, 212 n.48, 212 n.54; triumphalist martyrdom, turn away from, 5, 8, 23, 25–27, 33–34, 38, 42, 119. See also afterlife of Franciscan martyrdom narratives; desire for martyrdom; specific martyrs

277

Franciscan order: apocalypticism and, 18; association with martyrdom, 9, 11; beguines, 94, 102, 120, 174; Capuchins, 182; Coletans, 182; evangelism, commitment to, 18–19, 200 n.59 (see also evangelism); mysticism of, 67–68, 97–98, 177, 179; origins and development of, 9–10, 159–67; Oxford Compilation containing debate between Dominicans and, 145–46; Poor Clares, 182; Recollectio Villacreciana, 182; reuniting of, 151–52, 156–57, 179–80; Rule of, 48–53, 62, 64, 74, 88, 98–99; Thomas Aquinas on Dominicans versus, 98–99. See also conventuals; Observant Franciscans; poverty, Franciscan; spirituals Francisco (bishop of Fez), 221 n.71 Francisco di San Sepulcro, 144 Francis of Assisi, 9–11; afterlife of Franciscan martyrdoms and, 183, 184, 188; Chronica XXIV and, 159, 161, 164–66, 178, 240 n.35; crusade and, 11, 47, 48, 53; desire for martyrdom of, 11, 23, 25, 34, 46–48, 53–60, 78, 90, 177; in Egypt, 11, 47, 48, 52–53, 55, 57, 64–65, 66, 78, 80, 164–66, 183; feast day of, as holy day of obligation, 196 n.9; Giotto frescoes of, 123–24; on humility and self-sacrifice, 23, 25, 45; imitatio Christi and, 14; liturgical offices of, 59, 60, 213 n.62; as model for later martyrs, 110, 129; Rule of Saint Francis, 48–53, 62, 64, 74, 88, 98–99; sultan, encounter with, 11, 20, 46–48, 50, 52, 55, 57, 66, 118, 166, 184, 209–10 n.8; Tana martyrs compared, 115. See also stigmata of Saint Francis Francis Xavier, 192 Franco de Burgo, 109 Fraticelli, 152, 153 Frazier, Alison Knowles, 181, 186–87 Frederick I (Holy Roman emperor), 217 n.18 Frederick II (Holy Roman emperor), 62, 79, 81 frescoes of Franciscan martyrs, 94, 121–24, 169 funduk, 81 Gaddi, Tadeo, 231 n.105 Gangulf (Carolingian hermit), 208 n.100 Garcia Pe´rez, 221 n.71 Genghis Khan, 70, 105 Gentile, lord of Camerino, 153 Gentile de la Marcha, 185 Gentile da Spoleto, 153, 154, 239 n.12

278

Index

Geoffroi de Cournon, 101 Georgian martyrdoms, 171, 173–74 Germanicus (martyr), 34 Germanus (Franciscan cook), 157–58 Germany, Jordan of Giano evangelizing in, 73–74 Giacomo Oddi di Perugia, La Franceschina, 184–86 Giles of Assisi, 47, 151, 158, 160, 176–79, 197 n.23, 209 nn.4–5, 213–14 n.67 Giotto, 123–24 Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, 69–70, 91, 143, 145, 175, 222 n.80, 234 n.55 Giovanni de Valle, 152–54 Giovanni da Capestrano, 182, 197 n.24 Giovanni di Marignolli, 169, 170 Giovanni di Montecorvino, 71, 106, 120, 125, 132, 243 n.102 Giovanni di Montepulciano, 244 n.6 Giudici, Battista de’ (bishop of Ventimiglia), 1, 3–4 Giyath al-Din Tughluq (sultan of Delhi), 230–31 n.103 Glassberger, Nicolaus, 165, 183, 244 n.6 gnosticism, 204 n.53 Golden Horde, 74, 96, 108, 110 Golobovich, Girolamo, 232 n.22 Gonsalvo Sancho, 241 n.42 Gorkum, martyrs of, 192–93 Gregory, Brad, 181 Gregory I the Great (pope), 36, 41, 204 n.57 Gregory VII (pope), 79 Gregory IX (pope), 18, 53, 75, 84, 105, 167, 217 n.25 Grig, Lucy, 26 Guglielmo da Solanga, 112, 228 n.62 Guglielmo de Castromaris, 12, 14, 183, 198 nn.38–39, 244 n.6 Gui, Bernard, 128 Guilhem Santon, 93–94 Guillaume du Prat, 170 Guirat Ot, 154, 157, 175, 239 n.11 Guyon, Jean, 203 n.38 Haymo of Faversham, 243 n.97 Helena (mother of Constantine), 38, 131, 176 He´linand of Froidmont, 86 Henry II of England, 42–43 heretics and heresy: Arians, 44, 233 n.42; Cathars, 43, 61, 199 n.50; Chronica XXIV

on martyrdom by heretics, 173–74; conflation with Muslims and Jews, 2, 15–16, 74; Franciscan poverty, controversy over, 21–22, 23–24, 93–94, 101–4, 155–56, 174, 230 n.101; Fraticelli, 152, 153; Germany, Franciscan mission to, 73; High Middle Ages, canonization of martyrs killed by heretics in, 43, 61, 199 n.50; inquisitormartyrs, 22, 43, 61, 67, 148, 174, 183; Marseille heretics, 93–94, 101, 121; Nestorians, 113, 114, 116, 228 n.68, 242 n.91 Hermingild (Visigothic king and martyr), 132 Het‘um II (Armenian king), 120, 230 n.100 Heullant-Donat, Isabelle, 62, 147, 232 n.12, 237 n.99 Hilarian (martyr), 131 Hinderbach, Johannes (prince-bishop of Trent), 1, 2, 3 Honorius III (pope), 79, 81–83, 88, 119, 191, 218 n.36, 219 n.42, 219 n.44 Hrabanus Maurus, 206 n.76 Hugh of Digne, 52, 210 n.30 Hugh of Fleury, 69 Hugh of Hartlepool, 136 humanist afterlife of Franciscan martyrdom narratives, 186–90 Humbert of Romans, Opus tripartitum, 19 Hungary, Franciscan mission to, 73, 183 Huxley, Aldous, ix Ibn Abı¯ Zar al-Fa¯sı¯, 84, 196 n.20 Ibn Ida¯rı¯ al-Marra¯kusˇ¯ı, 40, 80, 219 n.47 ¯ Ibn Khaldu¯n, 80–81 Ibn Tu¯mart, 76–77, 84 Ignatios of Antioch, 27, 34, 204 n.47 Ilarione da Verona, 197 n.27 Ilkhanids, 74, 216 n.13 imitatio Christi, 14 India, Franciscan martyrs of. See Tana martyrs indulgences, 88–89 Innocent III (pope), 10, 49, 79, 86, 124, 139, 217 n.22, 219 n.40, 236 n.72 Innocent IV (pope), 88, 89, 105, 221 n.71, 221–22 n.75 innocents, martyrs portrayed as, 3, 6–7, 45, 97 inquisitions and inquisitors, 21, 22, 93, 101, 102, 104, 120, 125, 127, 174, 244 n.6 inquisitor-martyrs, 22, 43, 61, 67, 148, 174, 183

Index Iohanne da Napoli, 244 n.18 Islam: Acre, conquest of (1291), 20; centrality to Franciscan martyrdom stories, 7–8, 12, 15–21, 174; Christians living in Islamic territories, 80–82, 84, 87–88, 218 n.36; Chronica XXIV ’s injunction to attack, 166–67; conflation with Jews and heretics, 2, 15–16, 74; crucifixion, execution by, 185, 244 n.16; as doppelga¨nger for Christianity/ Franciscan order, 117–19, 174; evangelization/conversion of, 18–20 (see also evangelism); Francis of Assisi’s encounter with sultan, 11, 20, 46–48, 50, 52, 55, 57, 66, 118, 209–10 n.8; military and spiritual failure of Christianity to overcome, 18, 20–21, 40–42, 95–96, 104–5; Mongol conversion to, 74, 96, 176; neomartyrdom under, 40–42, 48; non-Muslim killers of martyrs depicted as Saracens, 16, 199 n.50; Otranto, Ottoman conquest/Christian recapture of (1480–81), 4–5, 190; poverty, Franciscan, and, 17; prophet Muhammad, insulting, 3, 40, 113–14, 115, 165–66, 174, 175, 186, 229 n.74; separation of Muslims and Christians, martyrdom/evangelism aimed at, 5, 8, 13, 17, 51, 87, 90, 167–70, 194; western Christian mercenaries and merchants in North Africa, 80–81; worldliness represented for Christians by, 17, 95 Jacopo di Padova, 94, 107, 109, 114, 129. See also Tana martyrs Jacques de Castel (bishop of Soissons), 44 Jacques de Vitry, 9–10, 16, 216–17 n.18 Jacques/Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 12, 44, 208 n.97 Jagannatha, cult of, 117, 229 n.89 Jaime II of Aragon, 197 n.23, 234 n.53, 235 n.64 James (apostle), 131 James of Florence (bishop of Zeitun), 170, 244 n.6 Jean de Brienne, 160–69, 240 n.38 Jean de Joinville, 44 Jerome (saint), 69, 198 n.40 Jerome of Catalonia (bishop of Caffa), 102–3, 125, 126, 130, 151, 187, 193 Jerusalem martyrs, 188, 193 Jews and Judaism: conflation with Muslims and heretics, 2, 15–16, 74; India, Jewish

279

merchants in, 106; martyrological themes in Hellenistic Jewish literature, 28, 201 n.8; Simon of Trent and blood libel accusations against, 1–3, 6, 7, 16, 44–45, 187, 195 n.4, 199 n.49 jizya, 216 n.13 Joachim of Fiore, 18, 130 Johan Barrau, 93–94 John XXII (pope): absolute poverty declared as heresy by, 21, 23, 24, 93–94, 155–56; in Dante’s Paradiso, 86; death of, 132, 154; Jerome of Catalonia and, 102–3, 125, 130, 151; Moroccan martyrs and, 234 n.53; Observants and, 153, 154; Paolino da Venezia and, 127, 129, 130; poverty controversy and, 21–24, 93–94, 102–4, 124, 130, 135, 141, 155–56, 158; Tana Martyrs and, 93–94, 95, 101–4, 108, 120, 121, 123–25, 129, 134, 230 n.101 John of Parma, 62 John of Peckham, 146 John of Phanajo¯it, 46, 47, 48 John of Ragusa, 189 John of Spoleto, 132, 233 n.34 John of Wildeshausen, 19 John the Simple, 158, 160 Jordan, Tomas, 214 n.70 Jordan, William Chester, 101 Jordan Catala de Se´ve´rac: as bishop in India, 228 n.68; letter on Tana martyrs, 14, 106–7, 108, 111, 112, 119, 125, 133, 135–36, 143, 225 n.29; Mirabilia descripta, 227 n.49 Jordan of Giano, 60–61, 73–74, 138 Juan de Otteo, 185, 244 nn.17–18 Judaism. See Jews and Judaism Julian of Speyer, 59, 60, 213 n.62 Julius the Veteran, 31 Juniper (companion of Saint Francis), 178, 184–85 Justin Martyr, Apologies, 30, 202 n.20 al-Ka¯mil (Ayyubid sultan), 11, 46–48, 50, 55, 57, 66, 118, 209–10 n.8 Kedar, Benjamin Z., 88, 200 n.62, 216 n.18 Kienzle, Beverly Mayne, 86, 220 n.58 Kinsella, Sean, 99 Lamport Fragment, 235 n.58 Las Navas de Tolosa, battle of (1212), 48, 77, 78, 83, 219 n.44

280

Index

Lateran Council IV (1215), 49, 86 Lawrence of Portugal, 222 n.80 “Legend of the Three Companions,” 63–65, 66 Leo (companion of Saint Francis), 63–64, 147, 155, 158, 177, 178, 240 n.35, 243 n.105 Leo X (pope), 182 liturgical offices: of Francis of Assisi, 59, 60, 213 n.62; of Martin of Tours, 215 n.86; of Moroccan martyrs, 191 Livinus (Franciscan martyr), 171–73 Livonian martyrs, 175 Lope (Franciscan bishop in Morocco), 88–91, 221 n.71 Lorenzetti, Ambrogio, frescoes of, 121–24 Louis IX of France, 18, 19, 20, 44, 200 n.62 Louis of Toulouse, 95, 122–24 Lower, Michael, 88, 200 n.62 Ludwig IV the Bavarian (Holy Roman emperor), 104, 121 Lyons, Council of (1274), 19, 243 n.102 Lyons, martyrs of, 201 n.8, 202 n.16, 202 n.20 Mahdia, siege of (1390), 194 Mamas of Antioch, 187 Al-Ma’mu¯n (Almohad caliph), 83–84 Mandeville, “Travels” of, 119 Manetti, Giannotto, Adversos Judeos et Gentes, 187 al-Mans.u¯r (Almohad caliph), 77 manuscripts: Assisi, Bibl. Comunale 341, 226 n.46; Cambridge University Library, ms. D. Ii. III. 7., 108; London, British Library, ms. Add. 19513, 227 n.49; —ms. Add. 40156, 190, 245 n.38; —ms. Cotton Nero A IX, 97, 135–37, 162, 163, 176, 226–27 nn.46–47, 234–35 n.56, 235 n.58, 235 n.65; —ms. Cotton Vitellius F XII, 190, 245 n.39; Oxford, Bodleian Library, ms. Lat. Misc. c. 75 (Oxford Compilation), 145–46, 234 n.55; Paris, Bibliotheque nationale (BN), ms. Lat. 3949, 231 n.1; —ms. Lat. 4939, 232 n.8; —ms. Lat. 5006, 226–27 nn.46–47; —ms. nouv. Acq. 16251, 16, 199 n.50; Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV), Latin ms. 5417, 237 n.99; —Urbinatus Latinus ms. 154, 245 n.28 Marco da Lisbona, 190 Marco Polo, 105, 119, 226 n.34, 227 n.49 Margaret of Hungary, 213 n.65

Margaret of Louvain, 44, 224 n.7 Margaret of Scotland, 215 n.90 Mariano da Firenze, 154, 183, 239 n.16, 244 n.9 Maria Palailogina, 237 n.96 Marseille heretics, 93–94, 101, 121 Martin (Dominican in Maghreb), 81, 218 n.37, 219 n.44 Martin of Tours, office of, 215 n.86 martyrdom, 22–23, 25–45; authority and, 4, 21–22, 202–3 n.33; crusade, reinforcing/ challenging ideology of, 8, 22; Dominicans, humanist promotion of martyrdom as characteristic of, 186–87; in early Christianity, 25, 27–32; in early medieval world, 35–42; evangelism and, 14–15, 36–40, 90–92, 110, 174–76; Franciscan association with, 9, 11–12; functions served by stories of, 13–14; in High Middle Ages, 42–45; innocents, martyrs portrayed as, 3, 6–7, 45, 97; Late Antiquity and emergence of institutional church, 32–35; neomartyrdom, in Muslim lands, 40–42; red versus white, 204–5 n.57; significance in Christianity, 11–12, 25–26; spiritualized or internalized, 35; triumphalist versus oppositional accounts of, 5, 8, 23, 25–27, 33–34, 38, 42, 119. See also desire for martyrdom; Franciscan martyrdoms Matthew Paris, 217 n.18 Maximilian (martyr), 31 McMichael, Steven J., 209 n.8 Meditationes vitae Christi, 128 Mehmet II the Conqueror, 4 Mercedarian Order, 44 mercenary soldiers, Christian, in employ of Almohads, 80–81, 84, 88, 89, 218 n.36 merchants, Christian, in Almohad North Africa, 81, 84 Merovingian martyrs, 205 n.63, 205 n.68 Michael of Cesena, 94, 101, 110, 120, 121, 141, 152, 154, 156, 157, 232 n.20 Michael of Chernigov, 91 Michele da Calci, 197 n.31, 225 n.26 Michel le Moine, 93, 101, 225 nn.22–23 Middleton, Paul, 204 n.48 “The Miramolin.” See Almohad caliphate mission, concept of, 15, 198 n.45. See also evangelism Monaldo di Ancona, 133, 134, 234 n.50. See also Armenian martyrs

Index Mongols: conversion of khan John, 175–76; European perceptions of India and, 104, 105; Franciscan missions to, 69–72, 73, 75, 76, 88, 91, 92, 108, 110, 132, 169–70, 215 n.2, 221 n.68, 223 n.90; in frescoes of Franciscan martyrs, 122–23, 124; Giovanni da Pian del Carpine’s travel journal on, 69, 91, 143, 145, 175, 222 n.80; of Golden Horde, 74, 96, 108, 110; Islam, conversion to, 74, 96, 176 Moroccan martyrs: afterlife of Franciscan martyrdom narratives and, 181, 183, 186, 188, 190–91, 193, 244 n.6, 244 n.18; Almohad caliphate, Franciscan efforts to evangelize, 78; Anthony of Padua inspired by, 61, 74, 78, 138, 164, 235 n.65, 236 n.72, 238 n.103; Armenian martyrs and, 141–42; in BL Cotton ms. Nero A IX, 135, 136, 137–41, 162, 163, 235 n.65; canonization of, 1, 6, 181, 190, 191, 193, 234 n.53; in Chronica XXIV, 14, 137, 161–67, 170–71, 238 n.2, 238 n.4; dating of, 139, 236 n.72; desire for martyrdom and, 46–47, 61, 213 n.65, 213–14 n.67, 214 n.69; Elemosino not mentioning, 133; Jerome of Caffa on, 103; Jordan of Giano on, 74; liturgical offices of, 191; miracles attributed to, 5, 163, 196 nn.18–19; names of, 1, 78, 147, 214 n.69, 238 n.103, 241 n.63; Otranto, Ottoman conquest/Christian recapture of (1480–81), and, 4–5, 190; passiones regarding, 14, 126, 135, 136, 137–41; relics of, 61, 140, 162, 186, 190, 191, 238 n.103; reliquary depicting, 121; Simon of Trent versus, 1–4, 6, 7; Tana martyrs’ story compared, 138–41; Thomas of Celano and, 61, 211 n.35 Morocco: church established in, 88–90, 221 n.71; papal announcement of mendicant mission to, 75–76 Muh.ammad al-Na¯s.ir (Almohad caliph), 77 al-Mustans.ir (Almohad caliph), 83–84, 218 n.36 Musurillo, Herbert, 30 mysticism, Franciscan, 67–68, 97–98, 177, 179 Nagasaki martyrs, 192, 193 al-Nas.ir (Almohad caliph), 79, 83 Negroponte, Ottoman conquest of (1470), 4 Nelson, Janet, 36 neomartyrdom under Islam, 40–42, 48 Nestorians, 113, 114, 116, 228 n.68, 242 n.91

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New Mexico martyrs, 192 Nicholas III (pope), 43, 99, 102 Nicholas IV (pope), 221 n.71, 230 n.100 Nicholas V (antipope; Pietro Rinalducci di Corvaro), 121 Nicolaus Minorita, Chronica, 225 n.23 Nimmo, Duncan, 154 Nold, Patrick, 102, 225 n.19 Observant Franciscans: afterlife of martyrdom narratives and, 182–86; emergence of, 150, 152–55, 239 n.7; growth and development of, 182–83 Odorico di Pordenone: in Chronica XXIV, 158; Elemosino and, 132, 133, 234 n.45, 234 n.47; Paolino da Venezia drawing on, 128; Relatio, on Tana martyrs, 97, 111–21, 125, 126, 228 n.62; second scribe of BL Cotton ms. Nero A IX and, 144; spirituals, possible empathy for, 230 n.99 Olaf (Swedish ruler), 38 Olivi, Pierre Jean, 100, 141 Origen, 28–29 Orosius, 69 Orthodox churches. See schismatics Oswald, king of Northumbria, 39, 132 Otranto, Ottoman conquest/Christian recapture of (1480–81), 4–5, 190 Otranto martyrs, 6–7, 196 n.16, 197 n.28 ¨ zbeg (khan of Golden Horde), 96 O Pagano da Lecco, 43 pagans: Christian victory over, 26, 34, 72, 176; greater susceptibility to conversion, 16, 105, 118, 121, 192; Tana martyrs and “pagan” perception of India, 13–14, 105, 113, 115, 118, 229 n.84 Pagels, Elaine, 17 Palazzo, Corradino, 2 Palmerius (Franciscan evangelist), 74 Paolino da Venezia, 97, 123, 126–30, 134, 137; Compendium or Chronologica magna, 127, 128, 231 n.1, 232 n.8; De regimine rectoris, 127; Historia satyrica, 127, 128, 129, 231–32 n.5, 232 n.12; Notabilium ystoriarum epithome, 231 n.2 Paoluccio de Trinci, 153, 154, 155 papacy: language of papal bulls on evangelism, 84–87; martyrdom, lack of interest in, 88–90, 92; mendicant evangelism of

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papacy (continued ) non-Christians, involvement in, 71, 72–73, 75–76, 78–84, 88–89, 217 n.23. See also specific popes Pascal de Vitoria, 111, 169–70, 234 n.46, 244 n.6 passiones, 23, 126–49; afterlife of Franciscan martyrdom narratives and, 181, 183, 187, 189, 190; on Armenian martyrs, 135, 136, 141–43; in BL Cotton ms. Nero A IX, 135–45; early church, emergence of acta and passiones in, 29–32, 201 n.8; of Elemosina, 97, 123, 130–35; evangelism in, 37; Franciscan martyrdom accounts, emergence of, 14–15, 21, 23, 94–95, 133–34; in Late Antiquity, 33–34; of Moroccan martyrs, 14, 126, 135, 136, 137–41; Oxford Compilation (Bodleian Library, ms. Lat. Misc. c. 75), 145–46, 234 n.55; of Paolino da Venezia, 97, 123, 126–30; pictorial tradition of, for Franciscan martyrs, 94, 121–24, 169, 190; Tana martyrs and, 14, 94–95, 96–97, 126 (see also under Tana martyrs). See also specific authors patientia (endurance), as virtue of martyrs, 184–85, 244 n.14 Paul (apostle), 25, 27, 28, 37, 54, 193, 211 n.34 Paulinus of York, 39 Pedro (Portuguese infante), 5, 80, 82, 162, 163–64, 191, 235 n.65, 238 n.103 Pedro de Villacreces, 182 Pelagius (child martyr), 40–41 Perpetua (martyr), 12, 34 Perugia, Council of (1322), 155, 158 Peter (apostle), 37, 54–55, 193, 211 n.34 Peter de Turris, 227 n.50 Peter Martyr, 22, 43, 44, 148, 174, 187, 199 n.50 Peter of Verona, 67–68 Peter Paschasius (bishop of Jaen), 44 Peter the Little (Petrus Parvus), 109 Petros of Capitolias, 40 Philip IV of France, 135 Philip de Anisio, 242 n.82 Piccolomini, Francesco Todeschini (cardinal; later Pius III), 197 n.27 pictorial representations of Franciscan martyrs, 94, 121–24, 169, 190 Pierre Paschal de Valenciennes, 174 Pietro d’Arcagnano, 183, 244 n.9, 244 n.14 Pietro di Siena, 94, 107, 109, 114. See also Tana martyrs

Pietro Rinalducci di Corvaro (antipope Nicholas V), 121 Pionus (martyr), 202 n.24 Pius II (pope), 197 n.27 Pius III (pope; formerly Francesco Todeschini Piccolomini), 197 n.27 Pizzolpasso, Francesco (archbishop of Milan), 189 Polycarp (martyr), 28, 30, 34, 202 n.20 Pons (Franciscan martyr), 109, 144 Pons Roca, 93–94 Poor Clares, 182 poverty, Franciscan: Capuchins on, 182; Chronica XXIV and, 155–58; as critique of Church, 16–17, 102, 124, 199 n.53; Francis of Assisi and, 10; heresy, absolute poverty declared as, 21–24, 93–94, 101–4, 155–56, 230 n.101; Islam contrasted with, 17; martyrdoms countering controversy over, 8, 9, 21–24, 93–98, 102–4, 124, 126; Observants, emergence of, 150, 152–55; Perugia, Council of (1322), settlement of controversy at, 155, 158; rigorists (spirituals) versus conventuals on, 9, 94, 95, 98–104, 119–21, 140–41; “The Sacred Exchange between Saint Francis and Holy Poverty” on, 62–63; Tana martyrs and, 93–104, 129–30; usus pauper, 99–101; vilitas in Franciscan habits, 110–11, 141 Prester John, 104, 119 Pseudo-Methodius, “Revelations,” 119 Ptolemy of Lucca, 128 Pueblo Revolt (1690), 192 Quia nonnunquam (papal bull, 1322), 102 Quintus (martyr), 34, 204 n.49 Quorundam exigit (papal bull, 1317), 93–94, 101, 141 Ramon Marti, 221 n.71 Raymond de Fronsac, 141 Raymond of Carbona, 61 Raymond of Penyafort, 19 Rebillard, E´ric, 30–31 Recollectio Villacreciana, 182 red versus white martyrdom, 204–5 n.57 Reformation, martyrs of, 183, 192–93 Regula bullata, 52, 74, 188 Regula non bullata, 49–53, 62, 64, 74, 88, 168, 188

Index relics: of Moroccan martyrs, 61, 140, 162, 186, 190, 191, 238 n.103; of Tana martyrs, 112, 230 n.95 reliquaries: Moroccan martyrs depicted on, 121; Saint Valerie reliquary, Limoges, 16, 199 n.50 Revelation, martyrdom in book of, 29, 148, 201–2 n.15 Reverter (Catalan noble and Almohad soldier), 80 Riccoldo da Montecroce, 20 rigorists. See spirituals Robert I of Naples, 126, 127 Robert of Artois, 44 Robert of Grosseteste, 145 Rodrigo Ximenez de Rada (archbishop of Toledo), 83 Roest, Bert, 15, 239 n.7 Roger of Provence, 179 “Romance of Muhammad,” 17 Rufinus of Assisi, 63–64, 178, 179 Rule of Saint Augustine, 49 Rule of Saint Francis, 48–53, 62, 64, 74, 88, 98–99 “The Sacred Exchange between Saint Francis and Holy Poverty,” 62–63, 64 Sadoleto, Niccolo`, 196 n.12 al-Sa’ı¯d (Almohad caliph), 89, 221–22 n.75 Saladin, 217 n.18 Salat, Jean, 135 Salimbene de Adam, 62 Sancha (sister of Afonso II of Portugal), 162, 191 Sancia of Naples, 223 n.1 Saracens. See Islam Saturus (martyr), 34 schismatics: Chronica XXIV on martyrdom by, 173–74; Florence-Ferrara, Council of (1438–45), 188 Scillitan Martyrs, 202 n.20 Scripta Leonis, 211 n.29 Second Crusade (1147–49), 88 Sellar, Walter Carruthers, and Robert Julian Yeatman, 1066 and All That, 39 Sello, Pacifico, 209–10 n.8 separation of Muslims and Christians, martyrdom/evangelism aimed at, 5, 8, 13, 17, 51, 87, 90, 167–70, 194 Sergius (martyr), 33

283

Seventh Crusade (1248–52), 18, 19, 44 Sigismund (archduke of Tirol), 3 Simon de Saint Quentin, 69–70, 222 n.80 Simon of Atherton, 44 Simon of Montesarchio, 62 Simon of Trent, 1–3, 6, 7, 16, 44–45, 187, 195 n.4, 199 n.49 Sinai, Monastery of St. Catherine at, 134, 185 Sixtus IV (pope): canonization of Bonaventure, 3, 197 n.24; canonization of Morocco martyrs versus Simon of Trent by, 1–4, 6, 7, 20, 191; feast of Saint Francis made holy day of obligation by, 196 n.9; Otranto conquest/recapture and Otranto martyrs, 4–7, 197 n.27 Sixtus V (pope), 1 Solinus (Caius Julius Solinus), Polyhistor, 225 n.30 Spain: Chronica XXIV on Franciscans sent to, 161–62; Nicolaus Glassberger on Franciscans sent to, 183; Nagasaki martyrs and, 192; reconquista in, 18, 19, 77–78 Speculum perfectionis, 52 spirituals (rigorists): desire for martyrdom, 223 n.1; Odorico di Pordenone’s possible empathy for, 230 n.99; poverty, spirituals versus conventuals on, 9, 94, 95, 98–104, 119–21, 140–41; reuniting of order and, 156, 179; Tana martyrs, spiritual reading of, 119–21, 230 n.99 Stanislaus of Krakow (bishop), 43, 215 n.90 Stephen of Hungary (Franciscan martyr), 171, 173, 194, 243 n.103, 244 n.6, 244 n.9 Stephen of Narbonne, 61, 111, 133, 234 n.46 stigmata of Saint Francis: in Chronica XXIV, 159, 240 n.35; in Giacomo Oddi’s La Franceschina, 184; in passiones, 135, 136–37, 143; as type of martyrdom, 11, 57–58, 67, 68, 212 n.48, 212 n.54 Tana martyrs, 23, 93–125; afterlife of Franciscan martyrdoms and, 244 n.6, 244 n.9; Andrea di Perugia on, 227 n.50; beautification of, 193; in BL Cotton ms. Nero A IX, 97, 135–36, 143–44; Caffa letters of 1323 on, 107–11, 115, 125; Chronica XXIV and, 107, 109, 227 n.49, 238 n.2; cultural translation in Odorico’s account of, 116–19; earliest reports of, 106–7, 125; Elemosina on, 97, 123, 132–33, 134; first Moroccan martyrs passio and, 138–41; frescoes of,

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Tana martyrs (continued ) 121–24; India in European imagination and, 104–6, 226 n.34; Islam, military and spiritual failure of Christianity to overcome, 95–96; Jerome of Caffa on, 103; Marseille heretics compared, 93–94; Odorico di Pordenone, Relatio, 97, 111–21, 125, 126, 228 n.62; in Oxford Compilation (Bodleian Library, ms. Lat. Misc. c. 75), 145, 146, 234 n.55; “pagan” perception of India and, 13–14, 105, 113, 115, 118, 229 n.84; Paolino da Venezia on, 97, 123, 126–30; passiones regarding, 14, 94–95, 96–97, 126; poverty controversy and, 93–104, 129–30; relics of, 112, 230 n.95; spiritual reading of, 119–21, 230 n.99 Tartars. See Mongols Tegu¨der Ahmad, 92 Tertullian, 37, 75, 205–6 n.69 Thadeus of Naples, 20 Thomas (apostle), tomb of (India), 116, 128, 129, 226 n.40 Thomas a` Becket, 42–43, 44 Thomas Aquinas, 98–99, 173, 242 n.88 Thomas de Papia, Dialogus de gestis sanctorum fratrum minorum, 61, 138 Thomas of Celano: Bardi Dossal and, 211 n.27; Chronica XXIV and, 159, 166; Giles of Assisi and, 177; on illness of Saint Francis, 54, 58, 212 n.57; Legend for the Use of the Choir, 59; Moroccan martyrs and, 61, 211 n.35; “Remembrance of the Desire of the Soul” (Vita secunda), 64–65; on stigmata of Saint Francis, 11, 57–58, 212 n.54; “Treatise on the Miracles of Saint Francis,” 61, 211 n.32; Vita prima of Francis of Assisi, 10, 11, 47, 48, 51, 53–60, 63, 64, 65, 66, 85, 198 n.36, 211 n.32 Thomas of Eccleston, 143, 215 n.4, 234 n.55; “De adventu fratrum minorum in Angliam,” 135, 165 Tiberino, Giovanni Mattia, 195 n.4 Tolan, John V., 209 n.8, 211 n.27, 222 n.82 Tommaso de Arezzo, Tractatus de martyrio sanctorum, 187–90 Tommaso di Tolentino, 22–23, 94, 109, 113–14, 120, 129, 134, 193, 230 n.100. See also Tana martyrs Toqto’a Khan, 237 n.96

torture: in afterlife of Franciscan martyrdom narratives, 185, 186, 191; in Chronica XXIV, 170, 174, 175, 178; desire for martyrdom and, 40, 41, 42; historical development of martyrdom narratives and, 28, 31, 33, 37, 203 n.42, 207 n.88; martyrdom declaring ineffectiveness of, 4; in passiones, 139, 140; Simon of Trent and, 1, 3, 7; Tana martyrs and, 96, 107, 110, 114 Trent, Council of (1545–63), 193 triumphalist martyrdom, turn away from, 5, 8, 23, 25–27, 33–34, 38, 42, 119 Turmeda, Anselmo, Libro dels bons amonestaments and Tuh.fat al-Adı¯b fı¯ l-Radd ‘ala¯ Ahl al-S.alı¯b, 194 Ubertino da Casale, 67 upanayana thread, 105 Urraca of Castile, 162, 164, 191 usus pauper, 99–101 Valencia martyrs, 62, 133, 244 n.9 Valerie (saint), reliquary of, Limoges, 16, 199 n.50 Vegio, Maffeo, 189 Venice, Bibilioteca Marciana, ms. Zanetti Lat. 3991610, 231 n.1 Vespasian (Roman emperor), 233 n.42 Victricius of Rouen, 203 n.41 vilitas in Franciscan habits, 110–11, 141 Vincent (saint), martyrdom miniature of, 16, 199 n.50 Vincent of Beauvais, 159; Speculum historiale, 69–70, 71, 128 Vinee domini (papal bull), 84 Vitus (saint), vita of, 38, 72 Voisulus (Franciscan martyr), 171 voluntary martyrdom: Chronica XXIV on, 170–73; Late Antiquity, emergence in, 34–35, 204 n.46; Tommaso de Arezzo on, 187–89. See also desire for martyrdom Vose, Robin, 19, 72, 83, 200 n.62, 219 n.42 Wadding, Luke, 71, 234 n.47; Annales minorum, 71, 191 Wall, John (Franciscan martyr), 193 Whalen, Brett, 73, 87 white versus red martyrdom, 204–5 n.57 William of England, 244 n.6

Index William of Rubruck, 125, 143, 169, 223 n.90 William of St. Amour, 146 William of St. Brieuc (bishop), 215 n.90 William of Tripoli, Notitia de Machometoa, 19–20, 213 n.66 Willibrord, vita of, 39 Wood, Ian, 39 Worcester Fragment, 210 n.17

285

wounds of Christ/martyrs, meditation on, 14 Yeatman, Robert Julian, and Walter Carruthers Sellar, 1066 and All That, 39 Yu¯suf II (Almohad caliph), 47 Zonvenzoni, Raffaele, 3

acknowledgments

This book was born in a footnote, sojourned in its youth as an article, and slowly grew into bookhood in various libraries, universities, and academies, from Bochum and Rome to Hanover and Brooklyn. It has many parents and pedagogues who have helped it grow and develop along the way, and I am entirely in their debt for the assistance and advice I have received. The book was conceived while I was a Rome Prize fellow at the American Academy in Rome, finishing my first book. The library at the E´cole franc¸aise at the Palazzo Farnese was a second home, and I spent much of the year working there, alongside Kevin Uhalde, who listened tolerantly on long runs through the Parco Villa Doria Pamphili to my woes, academic and otherwise. Jackie Maxwell, Pattie Cronin, Lindsey Schneider, Arman Schwartz, Heather Wiebe, Dave King, John Kelly, Tiffany Abernathy, Andrew Norman, Lisa Marie Mignone, Hilary Poriss, Sarah Zwerling, Jay Rubenstein, Marina Rustow, Stephanie Pilat, Aaron Pilat, Gregory Waldrop, and many others shared in my discovery of Rome, and enriched my understanding of Italian art, culture, food, and drink. The first chapters were composed while at the Ka¨te Hamburger Kolleg at Ruhr-Universita¨t Bochum, where I was fortunate to work alongside Sukman Jang, Gesche Linde, Arie Molendijk, Giovanni Tarentino, Jun’ichi Isomae, Christoph Auffarth, Aziz al-Azameh, and not least of all, Svevo D’Onofrio, whose companionship kept the shadows of doubt and defeat far away. Director Volkhard Krech and Marion Steineke created a stimulating environment to think about the dynamics of interreligious interaction, while Nikolas Jaspert was instrumental in getting me to Bochum, and provided valuable engagement with my work. The financial support of several institutions gave me the time, space, and resources to research and write this book. The American Academy of Rome was where this book was born, and the Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies allowed me to return for a second

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visit while I was completing the manuscript. Ka¨te Hamburger Kolleg at Ruhr-Universita¨t Bochum generously granted me a fellowship to work within their project on “Religious Dynamics between Europe and Asia,” and Dartmouth College has been my intellectual home for fifteen years. The book could not have been completed without the ceaseless support of the librarians of Baker-Berry Library at Dartmouth College, for whom no inter-library loan request was too vague or too obscure. Meredyth Morley and Marcia Welsh in the Religion Department office have answered my every absurd request for help with good-natured tolerance. The book was largely completed during a second stint at the American Academy in Rome as the Burkhardt affiliated fellow. It was a particular felicity that my dearest friend Kim Bowes was director at that time, and the return to Rome was immeasurably deepened by the support, advice, and warmth she shared while I finished the manuscript. Her fierce intelligence and friendship have been an inspiration to me over many years. The first draft was completed while writing on the balcony of her house in Giove, overlooking the Tiber Valley. The friendship of Hussein Fancy and Jane Lynch made our time in Rome in even more delightful, and many problems I was facing were parsed over prosecco in the lovely Academy garden. The staff at the American Academy made every day a delight; particular thanks must go to Gabriele Soare, on whom I could rely to mock my Italian as he gave me my morning cappuccino, and to Pina Pasquantonio, who was the heart of the Academy and who will be missed by all who knew her. Lindsay Harris, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor, reintroduced me to a Rome I thought I already knew, and John Lansdowne and Emily Jacir became collaborators and friends. The manuscript has benefited from the advice of many who have read it as it has grown: most prominently, the group brought together by the Dickey Center at Dartmouth College to review the first draft: Neslihan S¸enocak, Thomas Burman, Sean Field, and my colleagues at Dartmouth, Susan Ackerman, Randall Balmer, Cecilia Gaposchkin, and Walter Simons. Their advice helped to turn an inchoate collection of papers into something that looked like a book. Margaret Meserve generously shared with me a chapter from her forthcoming book, which helped me reframe my introduction. And I would like to thank the three anonymous readers, whose suggestions, comments, critiques helped make this a much better book. My editor, Jerry Singerman, has stood by this project through its many ups and downs, and has always given the clearest and most honest advice. For that, he has my thanks. The

Acknowledgments

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editing of Karen Carroll and Erica Ginsburg at the University of Pennsylvania Press saved me from innumerable typos and scribal infelicities. This book would never have reached maturity without the wise counsel of Cecilia Gaposchkin, who read every chapter more than once. Her enduring friendship, shared over glasses of red wine on the porch while our sons played, has shaped the way I thought about this book, but also the way I have thought about medieval history in general. She is due further thanks as the cartographer extraordinaire who furnished the map at the beginning of the book. Dartmouth without Cecilia would be a desert indeed. Kevin Reinhart and Andrea Tarnowski were also invaluable medieval interlocutors, and Sean Field has been an unfailing resource when I was overwhelmed by the challenges of Franciscan history. I must also acknowledge not only the parents of this book, but my own. My father, Michael, has supported me throughout my academic career, and never tires of hearing of the most mundane details of my work. My mother, Annie Laurie, taught me both to read widely and deeply and also how to write. She has read and edited every page of this manuscript, fountain pen poised to catch every typo and circle every awkward phrase. Everything I write is a tribute to her. The errors that remain, both on the page and elsewhere, remain mine alone. But the research and writing of this book have been overshadowed by joys that far surpass the great pleasure of finishing a project—first, meeting and marrying my partner in adventure, Pam, and second, the birth of our son, Evander, whose arrival has delayed all other projects, and enriched them all. This book is dedicated to them.