The mission left Avignon in December 1338; picked up the Tatar envoys
at Naples; stayed nearly two months in Constantinople (Pera, May 1 – June
24, 1339); and
sailed across the
Black Sea to Kaffa, whence they travelled to the court
of Mahommed Uzbeg, khan of the Golden Horde, at Sarai on the Volga. The
khan entertained them hospitably during the winter of 1339
– 1340 and then sent them across the steppes to Armalec,
Almalig or Almaligh (Kulja), the northern seat of the house of Chaghatai,
in what is now the province of Ili. “There,” says Marignolli, “we built
a church, bought a piece of ground... sung masses, and baptized several
persons, notwithstanding that only the year before the bishop and six other
minor friars had there undergone glorious martyrdom for Christ’s salvation.”
Quitting Almaligh in 1341, they seem to have reached
Peking (by way of Kamul or Hami) in May or June 1342. They were well received
by the reigning khan, the last of the Mongol
dynasty in China. An entry in the Chinese annals fixes
the year of Marignolli’s presentation by its mention of the arrival of
the great horses from the kingdom of Fulang (Farang or
Europe), one of which was 11 ft. 6 in. in length, and
6 ft. 8 in. high, and black all over.
Marignolli stayed at Peking or Cambalec three or four
years, after which he travelled through eastern China to Zayton or Amoy
Harbour, quitting China apparently in December 1347, and reaching Columbum
(Kaulam or Quilon in Malabar) in Easter week of 1348.
At this place he found a church of the Latin communion,
probably founded by Jordanus of Severac, who had been appointed bishop
of Columbum by Pope John XXII. in 1330. Here
Marignolli remained sixteen months, after which he proceeded on what seems
a most devious voyage.
First he visited the shrine of St Thomas near the modern
Madras, and then proceeded to what he calls the kingdom of Saba, and identifies
with the Sheba of Scripture, but which seems from various particulars to
have been Java. Taking ship a.gain for Malabar on his way to Europe, he
encountered great storms. They found shelter in the little port of Pertly
or Pervilis (Beruwala or Berberyn) in the south-west of Ceylon; but
here the legate fell into the hands of “a certain tyrant Coya Jaan (Khoja
Jahan), a eunuch and an accursed Saracen,” who professed to treat him with
all deference, but detained him four months, and plundered all the gifts
and Eastern rarities that he was carrying home. This detention in Seyllan
enables Marignolli to give a variety of curious particulars regarding
Adam’s Peak, Buddhist monasticism, the aboriginal races of Ceylon, and
other marvels. After this we have only fragmentary notices, showing that
his route to Europe lay by Ormuz, the ruins of
Babel, Bagdad, Mosul, Aleppo and thence to Damascus and
Jerusalem. In 1353 he arrived at Avignon, and delivered a letter from the
great khan to Pope Innocent VI. In the following year the emperor Charles
IV., on a visit to Italy, made Marignolli one of his chaplains. Soon after,
the pope made him bishop of Bisignano; but he seems to have been in no
hurry to reside there.
He appears to have accompanied the emperor to Prague in
1354 – 1355; in 1356 he is found acting as envoy to the Pope from Florence;
and in 1357 he is at Bologna. We know not when he died. The last trace
of Marignolli is a letter addressed to him, which was found in the 18th
century among the records in the Chapter Library at Prague. The writer
is an unnamed bishop
of Armagh, easily identified with Richard Fitz Ralph,
a strenuous foe of the Franciscans, who had broken lances in controversy
with Ockham and Burley. The letter implies that some intention had been
intimated from Avignon of sending Marignolli to Ireland in connexion with
matters then in debate – a project which stirs Fitz Ralph’s wrath.
The fragmentary notes of Marignolli’s Eastern travels
often contain vivid remembrance and graphic description, but combined with
an incontinent vanity, and an incoherent lapse from one thing to another.
They have no claim to be called a narrative, and it is with no small pains
that anything like a narrative can be pieced out of them. Indeed the mode
in which they were elicited curiously illustrates how little medieval travellers
thought of publication
[start vol. 17, p.718] The
emperor Charles, instead of urging his chaplain to write a history of his
vast journeys, set him to the repugnant task of recasting the annals of
Bohemia; and he consoled himself by salting the insipid stuff by interpolations,
à propos de bottes, of his recollections of Asiatic travel.
Nobody seems to have noticed the work till 1768, when the chronicle was published in vol. ii. of the Monumenta hist. Bohemiae nusquam antehac edita by Father Gelasius Dobner. But, though Marignolli was thus at last in type, no one seems to have read him till 1820, when an interesting paper on his travels was published by J. G. Meinert. Professor Friedrich Kunstmann of Munich also devoted to the subject one of his admirable series of papers on the ecclesiastical travellers of the middle ages.
See Fondles
rerum bohemicarum, iii. 492 – 604 (1882, best text); G. Dobner’s
Monumenta hist. boh., vol. ii. (Prague, 1768); J. G. Meinert, in
Abhandl. der k. böhm. Gesellsch. der Wissenschaften, vol. vii.;
F. Kunstmann, in Historisch-politische Blätter von Phillips und
Görres, xxxviii. 701 – 719, 793 – 813 (Munich, 1859); Luke Wadding,
Annales minorum, A.D. 1338, vii. 210-219 (ed. of 1733, &c.);
Sbaralea, Supplementum et castigatio ad scriptores trium ordinum S.
Francisci a Waddingo, p. 436 (Rome, 1806); John of Winterthur, in Eccard,
Corpus historicum medii aevi, vol. i., 1852; Mosheim, Historia
Tartarorum ecclesiastica, part i., p.115; Henry Yule, Cathay and
the Way Thither, ii. 309 – 394 (Hak. Soc., 1866); C. Raymond Beazley,
Dawn of Modern Geography, iii. 142, 180 – 181, 184 – 185, 215, 231,
236, 288 – 309 (1906).
(H. Y.; C. R. B.)