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A Catholic Bishop of Medieval India: Friar Jordanus, O.P., 1330
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2024
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Throughout the fourteenth century the great Mongol Tartar Empire dominated Asia. Under its benevolent religious policy Christian missionaries were enabled to penetrate to districts never before reached by preachers of the Gospel. With the exception of some Augustinian Friars, working in Persia and Armenia in the latter years of the century, these missionaries were all members of the Preaching or Minor Friars. Hand in hand the two Orders faced hardship and martyrdom amid the snow-swept peaks of Armenia and the Caucasus, on the barren wastes of Turkestan and in the burning heat of India, in the union and brotherhood of their Saintly Founders.
The word of the Great Khan in Khanbaliq (Peking) was law from the shores of the Yellow Sea to the banks of the Vistula, and from the Himalayas to Siberia. South of the Himalayas, where the Mongol horsemen had not penetrated, lay the Moslem Sultanate of Delhi, whose rulers were of Turki race. They claimed dominion over the whole peninsula, but even after Alaud-din’s conquest of the Deccan in 1330, their effective sovereignty did not extend far beyond the modern Bombay. In the south, among the native rulers of the Malabar Coast, its acknowledgement was confined to the occasional appearance of some Moslem pirate levying toll for himself in the name of his Delhi master. Away beyond the foothills, in the interior of the country, even this ephemeral authority was wanting.
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- Copyright © 1939 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 The major portion of his relics are now in the Cathedral of Ortona, Italy. Early in the third century they were stolen from Mylapore by a Syrian merchant named Khabin, who carried them to Edessa, Mesopotamia. Thence they were removed, before the Moslem menace, to Chios and finally transferred to Ortona in 1258.
2 Jordanus, , Mirabilia Descripta, IV, 31. Google Scholar
3 Letter of Friar Bartholomew. See Moule, Christians in China before 1550, London, 1930, p. 210 sq.
4 St. Thomas of Tolentino was canonised by Pope Pius VII in 1809. Although the other martyrs have not been thus officially honoured, they have been popularly accorded the title of Blessed from earliest times. Blessed Odoric of Pordenone says he conveyed their relics to Zayton (Amoy) for interment in the Franciscan Convent there in 1323.
5 The Letters are given in English by Yule, Cathay and the Way Thither, Vol. III, London, Hakluyt Society, 1914. His Mirabilia, also edited by Yule, was published by the Hakluyt Society, 1863. The other documents are summarised by Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geography, Oxford, 1906, Vol, III.
6 The terrific heat of India seems to have impressed itself forcibly on the minds of medieval travellers. Friar Jordanus returns to it in his Mirabilia, IV, 26: ‘The heat there is perfectly horrible, and more intolerable to strangers than it is possible to say.’ While Marco Polo, who is less suspected of ‘travellers’ tales' than any other early traveller, says: ‘The heat of the sun can scarcely be endured; if you put an egg into any river it will be boiled before you have gone any great distance’ (Bk. III, 25). It is perhaps only fair to say that the second part of the sentence does not appear in all versions of Marco Polo.
7 Mirabilia, IV, 33. Google Scholar
8 Mirabilia, XIV, 12. Google Scholar
9 Mirabilia, XIV, 14. Google Scholar
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