A number of Franciscan missionaries journeyed to Khanbaliq and Zaiton in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Three wrote letters to the leaders and brothers of their orders, the originals of which do not survive but were copied into a Franciscan chronicle c. 1335–36: John of Monte Corvino (letters dated 1305 and 1306), Peregrine of Castello (letter dated 1318), and Andrew of Perugia (letter dated 1326).58 Unfortunately they wrote relatively little about the countries and cultures of the East in these brief epistles, telling mainly of successes or failures in conversion of local populations. The same is true of the letter or letters of Jordan Catala of Sévérac, a Dominican writing from India around 1321.59 Jordan traveled to the Indian subcontinent with a group of Franciscan missionaries in 1320, returning to Avignon by 1329. His Franciscan companions were killed in Thana near Bombay (Mumbai) in 1321, and it appears that in 1324 he handed their remains to Odoric of Pordenone, who took them to the Catholic archdiocese in Khanbaliq. The Spanish Franciscan Pascal of Vittoria also wrote briefly from Almaliq about his experiences among the Saracens in 1338.60 A related letter from “Friar Menentillus” claims to relate views of a Franciscan missionary who had traveled to India with the Dominican Nicholas of Pistoia.61 Yule and Wyngaert deduced that this traveler, named “Friar John the Cordelier” (i.e., the Franciscan) by Pietro of Abano, must have been John of Monte Corvino, writing from his time in India, c. 1292–93.62 However, given its unclear provenance and its difference in content and tone from Monte Corvino’s two signed letters, this attribution is not certain. The letter reads less as a firsthand account of personal experience in the East than as a general description of eastern regions and peoples.
Although the missionary epistles survive only as copies and were subjected to revision by their earliest scribes, they seem to have circulated among Franciscan and curial circles in the early to mid-fourteenth century.63 Jordan Catala of Sévérac’s Mirabilia descripta was read in similar contexts but survives in only one manuscript.64 More an account of natural wonders than an ethnography, its occasionally breathless tone is quite different from the author’s mournful letters. “Mirabile” is his frequent refrain: “Everything indeed is a marvel in this India,” he says of India the Greater, which to him is all of south and southeast Asia.65 A work called “Le livre de l’estat du grant caan” (The Book of the Estate of the Great Caan [Khân]), composed in the late 1320s or early 1330s, had apparently wider impact. It celebrates achievements of Franciscan missionaries in Cathay, naming John of Monte Corvino, Andrew of Perugia, and Peter of Florence, and offers a highly favorable account of Cathay and the potential for the whole population’s conversion to Roman Christianity. A Latin version (“De statu, conditione ac regimine magni canis”), copied in 1346, has only recently been discovered and edited; previously only six manuscript copies of John le Long’s 1351 French translation were known.66 Christine Gadrat, who discovered the Latin manuscript, shows the traditional ascription to the “Archbishop of Soltaniah” (Sultaniyeh in Persia) is based on a mistranscription of Saltensis, from which historians derived Soltaniensis. Rather, it was presented by the Archbishop of Salerno (Salernitanum) by the command of Pope John XXII, and the Latin text of the 1346 copy, possibly made in German lands, is probably translated from an Italian Franciscan original. The traditional attribution to the Dominican John de Cora, who took up the see of Sultaniyeh early in 1330, is therefore discounted. The work was probably not a traveler’s account but instead composed in Europe from written sources. It shows influences from the Divisament, Odoric of Pordenone’s Relatio, Jordan’s Mirabilia, and the letters of Franciscan missionaries to China. Gadrat suggests that the work began to circulate rapidly, especially within circles connected to the curia at a time when the Avignonese papacy was renewing interest in the oriental missions.67
A late contribution to this wave of missionary accounts comes in unusual form from John of Marignolli (c. 1290–after 1362), a Florentine Franciscan intellectual sent as part of a papal delegation of more than thirty people into east and south Asia (1338–53) to investigate the state of oriental Christianity and consider prospects for future missions. He spent perhaps three or four years in Khanbaliq (c. 1342–47), then journeyed to Zaiton from where he embarked for India and Ceylon en route to Europe. While compiling a world history (c. 1356) Marignolli took the opportunity—prompted by speaking of Creation and Eden—to record scattered observations on the East.68 Henry Yule, in a felicitous phrase, describes these as “like unexpected fossils in a mud-bank,” buried as they are in the Bohemian chronicle surviving in one full and one partial manuscript, unedited until 1768.69 This is not a work, then, that had a significant audience or influence upon later texts; however, it is interesting as a distinctive, sometimes fanciful account of eastern places. Marignolli’s reminiscences lose their narrative thread and become rambling and anecdotal as he goes on. He mentions the Terrestrial Paradise, “Adam’s garden,” and the dress and food of Adam and Eve along with other Old Testament allusions. The biblical past and the exotic East are thus intertwined for Marignolli, in a way not uncommon for medieval authors but not usually found in the works of genuine travelers. On the other hand, he demonstrates scrupulous rationality in discussing monstrous peoples.
By far the most important work on the distant East to derive from missionary experience is Odoric of Pordenone’s Relatio.70 Odoric (c. 1286–1331), also a Franciscan, had already spent around twenty years doing missionary work in Russia, Turkey, and Persia when with James of Ireland he took the seaward route to China via India and southeast Asia around 1318, collecting the remains of the martyred Franciscans in Thana in 1324 and reaching John of Monte Corvino’s archbishopric in Khanbaliq in 1325. After three years he returned via a land route across the center of the Asian continent, intending to visit Pope John XXII at Avignon to request more missionaries, but fell ill at Pisa and returned to die in his home monastery of Udine. The Relatio avows that his motives were those of a missionary—“I crossed the sea and visited the countries of the unbelievers in order to win some harvest of souls”—but that detail is thought to have been added by Odoric’s posthumous promoters, and his book is unlike those of other missionaries in important respects.71 For one, Odoric did not write it himself. A version was apparently dictated to a fellow friar, William di Solagna, in 1330 and reworked by various subsequent scribes. It appears to have been influenced in part by Marco Polo’s book. For another, it enjoyed significant popularity in its day. The other missionary works exist in only one or two manuscripts, while Odoric’s book survives in around 117 manuscripts (ten of which postdate c. 1500) in Latin (approximately sixty), Italian, French, and German copies.72 “Sir John Mandeville” plundered the book for his fictional travels.
The process of the book’s production remains mysterious. No doubt it was truly informed by Odoric’s own experiences, but its mélange of eyewitness impressions, ethnography, hagiography, biblical geography, and oriental mirabilia produce a shifting and uncertain narrative. The Latin authors responsible for its earliest manifestations, who were probably involved in ultimately unsuccessful efforts to see Odoric canonized, are among a large number of copyists and later translators who adapted and transformed the text according to reader interest. The existence of vernacular versions indicates a significant lay as well as ecclesiastical readership, but this may have varied from one location to another. Marianne O’Doherty argues on the basis of manuscript comparisons that English copies are mostly in Latin and their readers mostly educated scholarly and/or monastic men, whereas Italian copies are more often vernacular, often part of miscellanies, and aimed at lay audiences. If manuscript survival rates are an accurate guide, English readers treated the book, along with others such as Carpini’s Historia, Polo’s’s Divisament, and The Letter of Prester John with which it was sometimes bound, as a serious work for scholars interested in the geography, ethnography, religions, and natural history of the Indies, while Italian readers were often more dubious about its authority but entertained by its accounts of diverse lands and mirabilia.73
To turn away from missionaries and double back a little in time, we come to Hetoum of Armenia’s La flor des estoires de la terre d’Orient (1307).74 Dictated first in French to scribe Nicholas Falcon during Hetoum’s stay at the papal court in Poitiers